Yufang Hou, Ph.D. has been nominated for a Technical Innovation in Industry Award at the Women of Color STEM Conference. She is a research scientist at IBM's Research Lab in Ireland.

Yufang joined IBM Research in 2015. She was selected to join Project Debater, the first artificial intelligence (AI) system that can debate humans on complex topics.

Together with other colleagues, Yufang developed AI algorithms to identify argument units (evidences) from texts, which is an essential component for Project Debater.

With the experience she gained in Project Debater, she soon became a trailblazer in the area of computational argumentation. In collaboration with leading universities in the field, she published six papers at top-tier AI conferences on various topics related to argumentation mining.

“Yufang is a well-respected young scientist in her field of research. Her passion and enthusiasm for text understanding keep her focusing on designing new algorithms for anaphora resolution, and she serves as a great role model for others,” said Dr. Ruoyi Zhou, Director, IBM Research-Ireland.

Yufang has recently been expanding her natural language processing (NLP) research area into other domains. She led a team of five researchers to work on an IBM AI Challenge called “knowledge base population for scientific literature.” The team not only published two papers at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2019 and the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), but she also released an open-source software package that can extract tables from scientific papers in PDF format.

Another project she led was the Human Behaviour Change Project funded by The Wellcome Trust in the UK. In this project, she applied cutting-edge NLP techniques to extract information from clinical scientific publications to provide valuable insights for healthcare professionals.

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