Introduction

In 1960s, a brand new start in Russian-Chinese machine translation research was made in HIT. As 20 years passed by, increasing focus moved into English-Chinese machine translation field in 1980s. The 1980s also witnessed the high success of Sentence-Based Chinese Pinyin Input System and Chinese Character Handwriting Recognition System in HIT. Over the same period, Speech Recognition and Information Retrieval were carried out as major fields of the research. Through efforts over the last four decades, extensive key technologies and corpus have been acquired; moreover, a high-tech and high quality R&D team has formed. In November, 2004, integrating R&D teams in fields of speech and natural language processing, MOE-Microsoft Key Laboratory of Natural Language Processing and Speech, Harbin Institute of Technology was established.

We aim to focus main interests in Natural Language Processing and Speech Processing fields. The lab led by Professor Sheng LI as director, Professor Xiaolong WANG, Tiejun ZHAO, Jiqing HAN and Ting LIU as deputy director, has 4 affiliated labs: Machine Intelligence and Translation Lab in HIT, Intelligent Technology and Natural Language Processing Lab, Speech Processing Lab and Information Retrieval Lab. In July, 2006, a subsection was settled in Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School. Our lab has 21faculty (7 professors, 6 Ph .D. supervisors), 51 Ph.D. candidates, 95 master candidates at present.

Since 2000, our lab has undertaken up to 40 state-level, ministry-level research projects among which 5 were sponsored by National “863” Program, 17 by National Natural Science Funds( with 1 point item). We have got awards from Ministries for 11 times in the past years, including: the 2nd class Science and Technology Progress Prize for 6 times, 3rd class for 5 times.

We have published many significant papers, including some at IJCAI, Coling/ACL, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Bioinformatics and Science in China etc.