Yufang Hou is a research scientist at IBM. In 2019, she led a team of researchers who worked on the AI challenge of creating knowledge graphs from scientific papers. The team's outstanding efforts resulted in the publication of four articles at several events.

They included the 57th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the 59th annual Association for Computational Linguistics meeting held online in August 2021.

Apart from this, Yufang served as an area chair at EACL 2021, the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She is also a member of the standing review committee of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) and Computational Linguistics (CL). These two journals, published by MIT Press, focus on computational linguistics and natural language processing papers.

Yufang is an accomplished researcher who has made significant contributions in the field of Natural Language Processing. She co-organized the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining, which was held in November 2021, alongside the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Dr. Léa Deleris, Head of Bank BNP Paribas' Risk Artificial Intelligence Research, wrote a letter of recommendation for Yufang to the Women of Color in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) award selection committee. Deleris praised Yufang's work on the Debater project during her time at IBM Research, where she made strides in computational argumentation.

Yufang's Ph.D. supervisor, Katja Markert, attested to her ambition and progress in her thesis on bridging anaphora. Yufang's research on the topic was presented at the 58th annual Association for Computational Linguistics meeting in 2020.

Yufang has mentored several Ph.D. students and contributed to various research papers presented at conferences. She is currently leading the Human Behaviour Change Project funded by the Wellcome Trust in the UK, where she is utilizing advanced techniques to extract data from clinical scientific publications.

Yufang is also working on a project called "Human-AI Collaborative Engine for Adaptive Health and Social Care Operations". Her goal is to provide solutions that can aid policy experts in scaling the production of human-readable and machine-consumable policy rules.

Dr. Ruoyi Zhou, Director of IBM Research Europe-Dublin, considers Yufang to be a top-notch researcher. He says that she possesses strong domain knowledge in healthcare and can apply her technical expertise to tackle some of the most challenging problems that our society faces in the healthcare system.