Prof. Pascale FUNG of Electronic and Computer Engineering was elected a 2020 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her significant contributions toward statistical natural language processing (NLP), comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans.

The fellows program recognizes ACL members whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary in terms of scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community and/or educational or outreach activities with broader impact. Nine fellows are elected for 2020.

Prof. Fung’s research interest lies in building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans. To achieve this goal, her specific areas of research are using statistical modelling and deep learning for natural language processing, spoken language systems, emotion and sentiment recognition, and other areas of AI. She is the Director of HKUST Center for AI Research (CAiRE) and co-founded the Human Language Technology Center. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Prof. Fung has been active in providing professional services to the international community. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum, and she represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. She is a past president and a board member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistic Data and Corpus-Based Approaches to NLP. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL annual meeting, ACL and Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshops.