Iris Hu

Iris (Renfen) Hu Associate Professor

Computational Linguistics

Institute of Chinese Information Processing
College of Chinese Language and Culture
Beijing Normal University

Email: irishu@mail.bnu.edu.cn

Google Scholar Github 中文页面

Bio

Iris(Renfen) received her PhD degree in applied linguistics at Beijing Normal University in 2017. She was a visiting student at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University from 2015 to 2016.
Her research interests include computational linguistics, NLP for educational applications and digital humanities.
She currently serves as reviewers for a series of journals and conferences in linguistics and NLP.
She has published more than 40 papers at top-tier NLP conferences or journals. She also cooperated with industrial companies to develop real-life applications.

Teaching

Python Programming and Data Analysis
Natural Language Processing
Academic Reading and Writing

Selected Publications

Xiaofei Lu and Renfen Hu*. (forthcoming). Sense-aware connective-based indices of cohesion and their relationship to cohesion ratings of English language learners’ written production. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSCI Q1).
Kaijie Mo, Renfen Hu*. An Automatic Detection Model of Register Attributes for Vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese. Applied Linguistics (in Chinese: 语言文字应用), 2023(04).
Shen Li, Renfen Hu, Yuchen Zhu. The Joint Learning of Automatic Punctuation and Name Entity Recognition based on Intelligent Technologies. Digital Humanities (in Chinese: 数字人文), 2023(03).
Zhaoji Wang, Shirui Zhang, Xuetao Zhang, and Renfen Hu*. The Construction and Application of an Ancient Chinese Language Resource on Tongjiazi. CCL 2023 (Best Paper Award).
Yiping Peng, Renfen Hu* and Jifeng Wu. Automatic Analysis and Application of Cohesion Features of Chinese Texts. Applied Linguistics (in Chinese: 语言文字应用), 2023(01).
Renfen Hu, Jifeng Wu and Xiaofei Lu*. Word-combination-based Measures of Phraseological Diversity, Sophistication and Complexity and Their Relationship to L2 Chinese Proficiency and Writing Quality. Language Learning (SSCI Q1), 2022, 72(4).
Xiaofei Lu and Renfen Hu*. Sense-aware lexical sophistication indices and their relationship to second language writing quality. Behavior Research Methods (SSCI Q1), 2022, 54(3).
Lei Shu, Yiluan Guo, Huiping Wang, Xuetao Zhang, and Renfen Hu*. The Construction and Application of Ancient Chinese Corpus with Word Sense Annotation. Journal of Chinese Information Processing (in Chinese: 中文信息学报), 2022, 36(5). (CCL 2021 Best Resource Paper Award).
Nan Hu, Wenqiang Zhang and Renfen Hu*. A Comparative Study of Chinese and Japanese Lexical Meaning Based on the Alignment of Cross-lingual Word Embeddings. Applied Linguistics (in Chinese: 语言文字应用), 2022(02).
Renfen Hu. On the Relationship between Collocation-based Syntactic Complexity and Chinese Second Language Writing. Applied Linguistics (in Chinese: 语言文字应用), 2021(01).
Renfen Hu, Shen Li and Yuchen Zhu. Knowledge Representation and Sentence Segmentation of Ancient Chinese Based on Deep Language Models. Journal of Chinese Information (in Chinese: 中文信息学报), 2021(4).
Yupei Wang and Renfen Hu*. A Prompt-independent and Interpretable Automated Essay Scoring Method for Chinese Second Language Writing. CCL 2021.
Renfen Hu, Shen Li and Shichen Liang. Diachronic Sense Modeling with Deep Contextualized Word Embeddings: An Ecological View. ACL 2019.
Shen Li, Zhe Zhao, Renfen Hu*, Wensi Li, Tao Liu and Xiaoyong Du. Analogical Reasoning on Chinese Morphological and Semantic Relations. ACL 2018.
Yuanyuan Qiu, Hongzheng Li, Shen Li, Yingdi Jiang, Renfen Hu* and Lijiao Yang. Revisiting Correlations between Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluations of Word Embeddings. CCL NLP-NABD 2018 (Best Paper Award).
Hengru Xu, Shen Li, Renfen Hu, Si Li, Sheng Gao. From Random to Supervised: A Novel Dropout Mechanism Integrated with Global Information. CONLL 2018.
Shen Li, Zhe Zhao, Tao Liu, Renfen Hu* and Xiaoyong Du. Initializing Convolutional Filters with Semantic Features for Text Classification. EMNLP 2017.
Renfen Hu. Automatic Generation of Chinese Vocabulary Questions. Journal of Chinese Information (in Chinese: 中文信息学报), 2017(01).
Renfen Hu, Jiayong Chen, Kuang-hua Chen. The Construction of a Chinese Collocational Knowledge Resource and Its Application for Second Language Acquisition. COLING 2016.
Renfen Hu, Qi Zhu and Lijiao Yang. The Construction of a Topic Corpus for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. Journal of Chinese Information (in Chinese: 中文信息学报), 2015(6).
Renfen Hu. Automatic Identification of Chinese Prepositional Phrases for Patent Machine Translation. Applied Linguistics (in Chinese: 语言文字应用), 2015(01).
Renfen Hu and Yuchen Zhu. Automatic Classification of Tang Poetry Themes. Acta Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis (in Chinese: 北京大学学报.自然科学版), 2015(02).
Linnan Bai, Renfen Hu and Zhiying Liu. Recognition of Comparative Sentences Based on Syntactic and Semantic Rule System. Acta Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis (in Chinese: 北京大学学报.自然科学版), 2015(02).
Renfen Hu, Yun Zhu and Yaohong Jin. Semantic Analysis of Chinese Prepositional Phrases for Patent Machine Translation. Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), 2013: 333-342.
Renfen Hu, Bing Cao and Jianyi Du. Research of Phonetic Symbols of Phonograms in Chinese Mandarin. Journal of Chinese Information (in Chinese: 中文信息学报), 2013(3).

Note. * denotes corresponding author.

Applications

Chinese Word Vectors over 10,000 stars on Github
- This project provides 100+ Chinese Word Vectors (embeddings) trained with different representations (dense and sparse), context features (word, ngram, character, and more), and corpora.
- Moreover, we provide a Chinese analogical reasoning dataset CA8 and an evaluation toolkit for users to evaluate the quality of their word vectors. Detailed discussions on the properties of word embeddings can be found in our papers:
  Analogical Reasoning on Chinese Morphological and Semantic Relations, ACL 2018.
  Revisiting Correlations between Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluations of Word Embeddings, CCL 2018 Best Paper.
Empower AI to understand ancient Chinese

Sentence segmentation of ancient Chinese texts is a very difficult task even for experts in this area, since it not only relies on the sentence meaning and the contextual information, but also needs to integrate historical and cultural knowledge as a basis.
We train deep language model BERT with a corpus of 3.3 billion characters on multi GPUs, and build sequence labeling models for punctuation with CRF and CNNs. This tool achieves impressive performance that is comparable to ancient Chinese experts.
We also integrate an effective Named Entity Recognition module which currently supports the recognition of person, location, dynasty and book names.

Intelligent Language Testing for L2 Learners

This project addresses a novel testing strategy by combining automatic item generation (AIG) and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) in language assessment for Chinese L2 learners. It is supported by National Social Science Funding and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funding.
Welcome to visit our demo to test your Chinese vocabulary size.

CCA: Chinese Collocation Assistant
CCA is a free online collocation search application to assist Chinese vocabulary learning and teaching.
Garden of Tang Poetry
This website offers semantic search and knowledge visualization of Tang poetry based on a domain knowledge graph.

Note. More open-source projects can be seen at Github.