Publications

Selected Awards

CIKM 2020 Test of Time Award for the work on “Joint sentiment/topic model for sentiment analysis“
International Division Champion (Team Sheffield) of the 2020 China Collegiate Artificial Intelligence Innovation Contest (Team Supervisor)
SICSA Supervisor of the Year 2019 Award Honourable Mention (I was one of the five recipients for the whole of Scotland)
Best Paper Award Runner-Up in the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG), Tokyo, 2019.
Best Paper Award in the 22nd International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems (NLDB; 17% acceptance rate for full paper), sponsored by Springer, 2017.
Outstanding Reviwer for ACL 2018.
Principal’s Excellence Fund, University of Aberdeen, 2014.
Merit Award for outstanding individual contribution to the research unit, Knowledge Media Institute, 2012.
Informatics Research Institute (IRI) prize for the best PhD student, University of Exeter, 2009

Secretary and Board member of ACL SIGGEN
Committee Member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee
Documentation Chair for ACL 2025
Publication Chair for ACL 2023
Workshop Chair for AACL-IJCNLP 2022
Programme Co-Chair: The 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG), Tokyo, 2019.
Senior Area Chair: NAACL 2025, ACL 2023, EACL 2023, ACL 2022, EMNLP 2020
Area Chair: NAACL 2024, LREC-COLING 2024, NLPCC 2024, EMNLP 2021, *SEM 2023, NLPCC 2022, INLG 2020 (I lose track of many …)
Senior Program Committee Member: IJCAI 2021
Meta Reviewer: ICASSP 2023, 2024
Associate Editor for Computer Speech and Language (2022 – )
Associate Editor for Neurocomputing (2019 – 2022)
Standing Reviewer for Computational Linguistics (2020 – )
Standing Reviewer for TACL (2021 – 2023)
Lead Guest Editor of the 2nd Special Issue on Natural Language Generation in the Computer Speech and Language Journal (Other Guest Editors: Prof. Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen; Dr. Angela Fan, Facebook AI / LORIA; Dr. Carlo Allocca, Samsung Research).
Lead Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Natural Language Generation in the Computer Speech and Language Journal.