Yidong Chen（中文版）

Ph.D., Associate Profecessor, Ph.D. Supervisor
Executive Director and Executive Deputy Secretary-General of Fujian Association for Artificial Intelligence

Email: ydchen@xmu.edu.cn
Office: Room 102-5, Building 5, Western District, Xiang'an Campus, Xiamen University

NLP lab, Department of Artificial Intelligence, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, China

Bio

Yidong Chen, Ph.D., is an associate professor in Department of Artificial Intelligence, School of Informatics, Xiamen University. His main research directions are artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine translation, sign language translation, automatic question answering, and sentiment analysis. He is the PI of 4 projects of the Natural Science Foundation of China, 1 sub-project of the key project of the National 863 Program of China, 1 project of the Ministry of Education-China Mobile Joint Research Fund. He received the third prize of the Science and Technology Award of Fujian Province (ranked fourth), in 2005; the second prize for the Outstanding Academic Papers of Natural Sciences of Fujian Province, in 2012; the first prize for the Qian-Weichang Chinese Information Processing Award (ranked second), in 2016; and the first prize of the Science and Technology Award of the Tibet Autonomous Region (ranked fourth), in 2018. He has published more than 40 research papers in journals such as "IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks and Learning Systems" and "IEEE/ACM Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing" and conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI, EMNLP, and COLING, and authorized 3 China national invention patent.

Academic Jobs

• Member of Language and Knowledge Computing Professional Committee, Machine Translation Professional Committee, Affective Computing Professional Committee, Natural Language Generation and Intelligent Writing Profession Committee, Computational Linguistics Professional Committee and Youth Working Committee of Chinese Information Processing Society of China (CIPSC)
• Member of Intelligent Media Professional Committee, Natural Language Understanding Committee and Education Working Committee of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI)
• CCF Senior Member
• Member of Data Science Professional Committee of Association of Fundamental Computing Education in Chinese Universities (AFCEC)
• Executive Director and Executive Deputy Secretary-General of Fujian Association for Artificial Intelligence (FAAI)
• Publication Chair of the 10th China Workshop on Machine Translation (CWMT 2014); Vice Chair of the Organization Committee of the 14th China Workshop on Machine Translation (CWMT 2018); Publication Co-Chair of the 15th China Conference on Machine Translation (CCMT 2019); Sponsorship Co-Chair of the 19th China Conference on Machine Translation (CCMT 2023); Program Co-Chair of the 20th China Conference on Machine Translation (CCMT 2024)
• Area Chair of the 22nd China National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL 2023)
• Area Chair of ACL 2024/2025, EMNLP 2024, NAACL 2024/2025

Selected Projects

• Research on Robust Neural Chinese Sign Language Translation Methods (Grant No. 62476232), National Natural Science Foundation of China, 2025.01-2028.12, PI
• Research and Industrialization of Multimodal Machine Translation Technology for "the Belt and Road" (Grant No. 2023H6001), University-Industry Cooperation Programs of Fujian Province of China, 2023.01-2025.12, PI
• Research on Neural Chinese Sign Language Translation Methods Integrating Sign Language Linguistic Knowledge (Grant No. 62076211), National Natural Science Foundation of China, 2021.01-2024.12, PI
• Research on the Fundamental Ability of Intelligent Natural Language Processing (Grant No. MCM20180402), Ministry of Education-China Mobile Joint Research Fund, 2019.09-2020.09, PI
• Research on a Chinese-to-English Discourse-Based SMT Model Incorporating Functional Discourse Analysis (Grant No. 61573294), National Natural Science Foundation of China，2016.01-2019.12, PI
• Research on Chinese‐English SMT for Tour‐Related Domain Based on Semantic and Discourse Information (Grant No. 2011J01369), Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China, 2011.04-2014.04, PI
• Research on SMT Methods Incorporating a Semantic Space Constructed from Multiple Knowledge Sources and a Synergetic‐Based Semantic Analysis Method (Grant No. 61005052), National Natural Science Foundation of China, 2011.01-2013.12, PI
• Research on Cross‐language Information Retrieval (Grant No. 2006AA010107-2), National 863 High Technology Research and Development Program of China, 2007.12-2010.11, PI

Selected Publications

• Biao Fu, Liang Zhang, Peigen Ye, Pei Yu, Cong Hu, Xiaodong Shi, Yidong Chen*. Improving End-to-end Sign Language Translation via Multi-level Contrastive Learning. IEEE/ACM Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2025, accepted. (CCF B)
• Ruiquan Zhang#, Rui Zhao#, Zhicong Wu, Liang Zhang, Haoqi Zhang, Yidong Chen*. Dynamic Feature Fusion for Sign Language Translation Using HyperNetworks. In Findings of NAACL 2025, accepted.
• Ruiquan Zhang#, Cong Hu#, Pei Yu, Yidong Chen*. Improving Multilingual Sign Language Translation with Automatically Clustered Language Family Information. In Proc. of COLING 2025, pp. 3579-3588. (CCF B)
• Suhail Muhammad Kamal, Yidong Chen*, Shaozi Li. Advancing Continuous Sign Language Recognition Through Denoising Diffusion Transformer-Based Spatial-Temporal Enhancement. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2025, 37(4-5): e8385. (CCF C)
• Pei Yu#, Changhao Lai#, Cong Hu, Shan Liu, Liang Zhang, Biao Fu, Yidong Chen*. Improving Non-autoregressive Sign Language Translation with Random Ordering Progressive Prediction Pre-training. In Proc. of ECAI 2024, pp. 250-257. (CCF B)
• Suhail Muhammad Kamal, Yidong Chen*, Shaozi Li. Adversarial autoencoder for continuous sign language recognition. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2024, 36(22): e8220. (CCF C)
• Honghao Fu#, Liang Zhang#, Biao Fu, Jinsong Su, Xiaodong Shi, Yidong Chen*. Signer Diversity-driven Data Augmentation for Signer-Independent Sign Language Translation. In Findings of NAACL 2024, pp. 2182-2193.
• Tong Sun#, Biao Fu#, Cong Hu, Liang Zhang, Ruiquan Zhang, Xiaodong Shi, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen*. Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation. In Proc. of LREC-COLING 2024, pp. 372-384. (CCF B)
• Cong Hu, Biao Fu, Pei Yu, Liang Zhang, Xiaodong Shi, Yidong Chen*. An Explicit Multi-modal Fusion Method for Sign Language Translation. In Proc. of ICASSP 2024, pp. 3860-3864. (CCF B)
• Rui Zhao#, Liang Zhang#, Biao Fu, Cong Hu, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen*. Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Sign Language Translation with Cross-Modal Alignment. In Proc. of AAAI 2024, pp. 19643-19651. (CCF A)
• Biao Fu#, Kai Fan#, Minpeng Liao#, Zhongqiang Huang*, Boxing Chen, Yidong Chen*, Xiaodong Shi. Adapting Offline Speech Translation Models for Streaming with Future-Aware Distillation and Inference. In Proc. of EMNLP 2023, pp. 16600-16619. (CCF B)
• Liang Zhang#, Chulun Zhou#, Fandong Meng, Jinsong Su*, Yidong Chen*, Jie Zhou. HyperNetwork-based Decoupling to Improve Model Generalization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction. In Proc. of EMNLP 2023, pp. 6213-6223. (CCF B)
• Zhongjian Miao, Wen Zhang, Jinsong Su*, Xiang Li, Jian Luan, Yidong Chen*, Bin Wang, Min Zhang. Exploring All-In-One Knowledge Distillation Framework for Neural Machine Translation. In Proc. of EMNLP 2023, pp. 2929-2940. (CCF B)
• Liang Zhang#, Zijun Min#, Pei Yu, Ante Wang, Jinsong Su*, Yidong Chen*. Exploring Effective Inter-encoder Semantic Interaction for Document-Level Relation Extraction. In Proc. of IJCAI 2023, pp.5278-5286. (CCF A)
• Pei Yu#, Liang Zhang#, Biao Fu, Yidong Chen*. Efficient Sign Language Translation with a Curriculum-based Non-autoregressive Decoder. In Proc. of IJCAI 2023, pp. 5260-5268. (CCF A)
• Biao Fu#, Peigen Ye#, Liang Zhang, Pei Yu, Cong Hu, Xiaodong Shi, Yidong Chen*. A Token-level Contrastive Framework for Sign Language Translation. In Proc. of ICASSP 2023. (CCF B)
• Liang Zhang, Jinsong Su*, Zijun Min, Zhongjian Miao, Qingguo Hu, Biao Fu, Xiaodong Shi, Yidong Chen*. Exploring Self-distillation based Relational Reasoning Training for Document-level Relation Extraction. In Proc. of AAAI 2023, pp. 13967-13975. (CCF A)
• Zeyang Zhang, Yidong Chen*, Changle Zhou. Self-Growing Binary Activation Network: A Novel Deep Learning Model With Dynamic Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2024, 35(1): 624-633. (CCF B)
• Liang Zhang#, Jinsong Su#, Yidong Chen*, Zhongjian Miao, Zijun Min, Qingguo Hu, Xiaodong Shi. Towards Better Document-level Relation Extraction via Iterative Inference. In Proc. of EMNLP 2022, pp. 8306-8317. (CCF B)
• Zhongjian Miao#, Xiang Li#, Liyan Kang, Wen Zhang, Chulun Zhou, Yidong Chen*, BinWang, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su*. Towards Robust Neural Machine Translation with Iterative Scheduled Data-Switch Training. In Proc. of COLING 2022, pp. 5266-5277. (CCF B)
• Jiangbin Zheng, Yidong Chen*, Chong Wu, Xiaodong Shi, Suhail Muhammad Kamal. Enhancing Neural Sign Language Translation by highlighting the facial Expression information. Neurocomputing, 2021, 464: 462-472. (CCF C)
• Biao Fu#, Yiqi Tong#, Dawei Tian, Yidong Chen*, Xiaodong Shi, Ming Zhu. CTRD: A Chinese Theme-Rheme Discourse Dataset. In Proc. of NLPCC 2021, pp. 65-76. (CCF C)
• Yidong Chen*, Enjun Zhong, Yiqi Tong, Yanru Qiu, Xiaodong Shi. A Document-Level Machine Translation Quality Estimation Model Based on Centering Theory. In Proc. of CCMT 2021, pp. 1-15.
• Yiqi Tong, Yidong Chen*, Guocheng Zhang, Jiangbin Zheng, Hongkang Zhu, Xiaodong Shi. Generating Diverse Back-Translations via Constraint Random Decoding. In Proc. of CCMT 2021, pp. 92-104.
• Yiqi Tong, Yidong Chen*, Xiaodong Shi. A Multi-Task Approach for Improving Biomedical Named Entity Recognition by Incorporating Multi-Granularity Information. In Findings of ACL-IJCNLP 2021, pp. 4804-4813.
• Yiqi Tong, Jiangbin Zheng, Hongkang Zhu, Yidong Chen*, Xiaodong Shi. A Document-Level Neural Machine Translation Model with Dynamic Caching Guided by Theme-Rheme Information. In Proc. of COLING 2020, pp. 4385-4395. (CCF B)
• Jiangbin Zheng, Zheng Zhao, Min Chen, Jing Chen, Chong Wu, Yidong Chen*, Xiaodong Shi, Yiqi Tong. An Improved Sign Language Translation Model with Explainable Adaptations for Processing Long Sign Sentences. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2020: 1-11.
• Yu Wan, Yidong Chen*, Xiaodong Shi, Changle Zhou. Constructing and Validating Word Similarity Datasets by Integrating Methods from Psychology, Brain Science and Computational Linguistics. Soft Computing, 2018, 22(21): 6967-6979. (CCF C)
• Jinsong Su, Zhenqiao Song, Yaojie Lu, Mu Xu, Changxing Wu, Yidong Chen*. Exploring Implicit Semantic Constraints for Bilingual Word Embeddings. Neural Processing Letters, 2017, 48(2): 1073-1088. (CCF C)
• Yidong Chen, Yu Wan, Xiaodong Shi, Suxia Xu*. Deriving Probabilistic Semantic Frames from HowNet. In Proc. of CLSW 2017, pp. 303-314.
• Yidong Chen*, Zhehuang Huang, Xiaodong Shi. An SNN-Based Semantic Role Labeling Model with Its Network Parameters Optimized Using an Improved PSO Algorithm. Neural Processing Letters, 2016, 44(1): 245-263. (CCF C)

Courses

• C Programming (undergraduate course), 2007-2018
• Linux Kernel Analysis (undergraduate course), 2010-
• Network Information Processing (undergraduate course), 2018-
• Principle and Practice of Machine Translation (graduate course), 2011-2013
• Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation (graduate course), 2014-
• Computational Linguistics (graduate course for Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University), 2022-

Demos / Resources

• Sign Language Translation Platform of Xiamen University
• A Chinese-English Document-level Translation Quality Assessment Dataset
• CTRD: A Chinese Theme-Rheme Discourse Dataset
• A Chinese Word Similarity Gold-standard Dataset