Wei Shi received his Ph.D. Magna Cum Laude in December 2020 and joined DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group as a Senior Algorithm Engineer in 2021. He was a Ph.D. candidate and junior researcher working on Natural Language Processing under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg at The Department of Language Science and Technology and Collaborative Research Center SFB-1102 of Saarland University in Germany.

2024-01: Wei Shi has left MiniMax Inc, but is still working on LLMs.
2022-06: Wei Shi has left Alibaba and joined MiniMax Inc., a startup company focusing on LLM and Multimodality models.

Research Interests

Large Language Models, Multimodal AI, Discourse Relation Parsing, Sentiment Analysis, Text Generation, Relation Extraction, Deep Learning, Natural Language Understanding

Education

2016 – 2020

Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics

Saarland University, Germany

Advisor: Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg

2013 – 2016

M.Sc. in Computer Science

Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Advisors: Prof. Dr. Hongwei Hao and Prof. Dr. Bo Xu

2008 – 2012

B.Eng. in Automation

Wuhan University, Hubei, China

Publications

Entity Enhancement for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification in the Biomedical Domain

Wei Shi and Vera Demberg

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Next Sentence Prediction helps Implicit Discourse Relation Classification within and across Domains

Wei Shi and Vera Demberg

EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019

A Hybrid Model for Globally Coherent Story Generation

Fangzhou Zhai, Vera Demberg, Pavel Shkadzko, Wei Shi and Asad Sayeed

StoryNLP@ACL 2019

Acquiring Annotated Data with Cross-lingual Explicitation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Wei Shi, Frances Yung and Vera Demberg

DISRPT@NAACL 2019

Learning to Explicitate Connectives with Seq2Seq Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Wei Shi and Vera Demberg

IWCS 2019

Using Explicit Discourse Relation Connectives in Translation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Wei Shi, Frances Yung, Raphael Rubino and Vera Demberg

IJCNLP 2017

On the Need of Cross Validation for Discourse Relation Classification

Wei Shi and Vera Demberg

EACL 2017

Attention-based Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory Networks for Relation Classification

Peng Zhou, Wei Shi, Jun Tian, Zhenyu Qi, Bingchen Li, Hongwei Hao, and Bo Xu

ACL 2016

Professional Activities

PC member of IEEE TCSS, CoNLL 2018-2019, NAACL-HLT 2019, ACL 2019-2020, AACL-IJCNLP 2020