Shaonan Wang | Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Innovative Research Award

Published on by Top Teachers

Innovative Research Award

Shaonan Wang
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), Hong Kong
Shaonan Wang
Affiliation The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)
Country Hong Kong
Scopus ID 57190678458
Documents 46
Citations 786
h-index 17
Subject Area Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Research Areas Natural Language Processing, Neurobiology of Language
Event Top Teachers Awards
ORCID 0000-0001-5455-1359
Google Scholar ydFT-G8AAAAJ

Shaonan Wang, Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), conducts research at the intersection of natural language processing, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the neurobiology of language. His work integrates language representations with neuroimaging to investigate human language processing and develop brain-informed computational models. Shaonan Wang’s academic profile combines research leadership, interdisciplinary collaboration, teaching, editorial service, and competitive research funding. His stated work spans brain–machine alignment, distributed semantic representations, neural encoding and decoding, multimodal language understanding, and fine-grained semantic compositionality, connecting methods from artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience.[1][2]

Abstract

Shaonan Wang is an Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University whose research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and the neurobiology of language. His academic work combines distributed semantic representations, neural encoding and decoding, multimodal learning, and neuroimaging-based analysis. His profile also includes interdisciplinary collaborations, competitive grant participation, teaching, conference leadership, editorial service, and invited academic presentations. Bibliographic records supplied for this article identify 46 Scopus documents, 786 Scopus citations, and a Scopus h-index of 17, while a separate Google Scholar record supplied in the profile reports 55 documents, 1,317 citations, and an h-index of 21.[1][2]

Keywords

  • Natural language processing
  • Neurobiology of language
  • Computational linguistics
  • Brain encoding and decoding
  • Multimodal representation
  • Artificial intelligence

Introduction

Shaonan Wang’s research is positioned at the intersection of computational approaches to language and empirical investigation of the human brain. His stated research programme seeks to understand how linguistic meaning is represented, integrated, and composed by humans while examining how insights from neural mechanisms can inform computational models. This interdisciplinary orientation connects natural language processing with cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging.

His doctoral training was completed in 2018 at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, following a bachelor’s degree in Automation from Northeastern University in 2013. His subsequent academic appointments included positions at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Research Associate role at New York University under the supervision of Liina Pylkkänen.[1][2]

Research Profile

Shaonan Wang’s research profile includes natural language processing, computational linguistics, neurobiology of language, neural encoding and decoding, multimodal word and sentence representation, and semantic compositionality. The supplied profile identifies nine completed or ongoing research projects and collaborations with researchers including Nan Lin of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Nai Ding of Zhejiang University; and Liina Pylkkänen of New York University.[1][2]

Education and Training

  • Northeastern University, China: Bachelor of Science in Automation, 2013.
  • Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences: Ph.D. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems, 2018; supervisor Dr Chengqing Zong.

Professional Appointments

  • Assistant Professor, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University: August 2025–present.
  • Associate Professor, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences: November 2020–August 2025.
  • Research Associate, New York University: November 2021–November 2023; supervisor Dr Liina Pylkkänen.
  • Assistant Professor, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences: June 2018–November 2020.

Research Contributions

The supplied research statement describes Wang as an early contributor to brain–machine alignment, integrating computational linguistics with neuroimaging to study language processing. His work combines distributed semantic representations with fMRI and MEG data and investigates semantic compositionality through fine-grained semantic features. This approach is presented as a bridge between cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

His publication record includes studies of sentence-level brain decoding, neural encoding and decoding, multimodal representation, human-attention-guided sentence representation, and neural cross-lingual summarization. These publications illustrate a continuing research interest in representations that can be examined in both machine-learning systems and human neural data.[3][4][5]

Research Grants

  • General Research Fund — HKD 753,900, Principal Investigator.
  • General Research Fund — HKD 764,380, Co-Investigator.
  • PolyU Start-up Fund Presidential Young Scholars Scheme — HKD 4,000,000, Principal Investigator.
  • PolyU Start-up Fund — HKD 500,000, Co-Investigator.
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 61906189 — CNY 270,000, Principal Investigator.
  • Beijing Advanced Discipline on Intelligent Science and Technology Interdisciplinary Project — CNY 200,000, Principal Investigator.
  • Independent Project of the National Key Laboratory of Pattern Recognition — CNY 800,000, Principal Investigator.
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 62036001 — CNY 2,870,000, Co-Principal Investigator.
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China, No. 2021ZD0204105 — CNY 43,190,000, Co-Principal Investigator.

Professional Activities and Scientific Leadership

  • Senior Area Chair, ACL 2025.
  • Executive Chair, Neuromatch Academy Curriculum, 2022–2024.
  • Tutorial Co-Chair, COLING 2025.
  • Co-Chair, Virtual Infrastructure Committee, ACL-IJCNLP 2021.
  • Guest Editor, Journal of Neurolinguistics.
  • Associate Editor, Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Processing and Scientific Data.
  • Review Editor, Neurobiology of Language, a specialty section of Frontiers in Language Sciences.
  • Reviewer for journals and conferences including Nature Communications, Scientific Data, Communications Biology, Cognition, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Human Brain Mapping, ACL, and IJCAI.

Teaching

  • Text Analysis, Renmin University, Spring 2024 — Instructor.
  • Computational Linguistics for Brain Encoding and Decoding, UCAS-AI, Summer 2024 — Instructor.
  • NeuroAI, Neuromatch Academy, 2024 — Teaching Assistant.
  • Deep Learning, Neuromatch Academy, 2022–2023 — Teaching Assistant.
  • Natural Language Processing, UCAS, 2020–2021 — Teaching Assistant.

Honors and Awards

  • 2022 NYU FAS Postdoctoral Travel Grant Award.
  • 2022 Member of Qingyuan Club in Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.
  • 2021 China Association for Science and Technology Young Talent Support Project.
  • 2020 Young Talent Incentive of the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
  • 2020 Scholarship by the China Scholarship Council.
  • 2019 Chinese Academy of Sciences Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award.
  • 2019 Member of Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS.
  • 2018 Chinese Information Processing Society of China Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award.
  • 2018 CAS Presidential Scholarship, Special Prize.
  • 2018 Beijing Outstanding Graduate Student Award.
  • 2018 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Outstanding Graduate Student Award.

Publications

Selected publications examine neural cross-lingual summarization, sentence-level brain decoding, distributed semantic representations, and neural encoding and decoding. Notable studies have appeared in ACL/EMNLP, AAAI, NeurIPS, and IEEE TNNLS, demonstrating interdisciplinary contributions connecting natural language processing with brain-based language research.[3][4][5]

Selected publications supplied for the profile demonstrate the breadth of Shaonan Wang’s work across natural language processing and brain-based language research. The following studies are among the publications identified as having notable citation activity in the supplied bibliographic information.

  1. Zhu, J.; Wang, Q.; Wang, Y.; Zhou, Y.; Zhang, J.; Wang, S.; Zong, C. NCLS: Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2019. ACM/ACL Anthology.
  2. Sun, J.; Wang, S.; Zhang, J.; Zong, C. Towards Sentence-Level Brain Decoding with Distributed Representations. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 33(01), 7047–7054, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33017047.
  3. Sun, J.; Li, M.; Chen, Z.; Zhang, Y.; Wang, S.; Moens, M.-F. Contrast, Attend and Diffuse to Decode High-Resolution Images from Brain Activities. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36, 12332–12348, 2023. https://doi.org/10.52202/075280-0541.
  4. Sun, J.; Wang, S.; Zhang, J.; Zong, C. Neural Encoding and Decoding with Distributed Sentence Representations. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 32(2), 589–603, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2020.3027595.
  5. Wang, S.; Zhang, J.; Zong, C. Learning Sentence Representation with Guidance of Human Attention. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.09189, 2016. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1609.09189.

Research Impact

The supplied profile reports substantial bibliometric activity across Scopus and Google Scholar, with the two sources providing different citation and h-index counts. The Scopus record supplied for this article lists 46 documents, 786 citations, and an h-index of 17, whereas the supplied Google Scholar information reports 55 documents, 1,317 citations, and an h-index of 21.[1][2]

The publication examples include work on neural cross-lingual summarization, sentence-level brain decoding, neural encoding and decoding, and multimodal brain-related representation learning. Their reported citation counts in the supplied profile range from 61 to 187, illustrating sustained scholarly use of several contributions across language technology and neurocognitive research.[3][4][5]

Invited Talks and Lectures

  • “Two Words Are Faster Than One: Neural Dynamics of Accelerated Meaning in Phrases,” 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, 2026.
  • “Mapping Multidimensional Semantic Dynamics in the Brain with Naturalistic Stimuli,” University of Macau.
  • “Decoding the Multimodal Mind: Generalizable Brain-to-Text Translation via Multimodal Alignment and Adaptive Routing,” ICPEAL 2025.
  • “Modeling Linguistic Processes through Experimental and Naturalistic Designs,” SNL 2024 Symposium.
  • “Computational Linguistics for Brain Encoding and Decoding: Principles, Practices and Beyond,” ACL 2024 Tutorial.
  • “Deep Learning for Brain Encoding and Decoding: Principles, Practices and Beyond,” IJCAI 2024 Tutorial.
  • “How Do Transformers Integrate Meanings?” HBAI-IJCAI 2024 Workshop.
  • “Word Representation and Combinatorial Processing in Language Understanding for Machines and Humans,” CityUHK LT Research Forum Series.
  • “Neural Encoding and Decoding with Textual Representations,” Neuroimaging Methods Workshop, December 10, 2022.
  • “Combining Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience Research, Language Learning, and Ancient Poetry Appreciation,” ISLSEAI-2022.
  • “Human and Machine Language Understanding,” YSSNLP-2022.
  • “Human and Machine Language Understanding,” CCL-2021.
  • “Neural Encoding and Decoding in the Brain,” YSSNLP-2019.
  • “Associative Multichannel Autoencoder for Multimodal Word Representation,” EMNLP-18.
  • “Investigating Inner Properties of Multimodal Representation and Semantic Compositionality with Brain-based Componential Semantics,” AAAI-18.
  • “Learning Multimodal Word Representation via Dynamic Fusion Methods,” AAAI-18.
  • “Exploiting Word Internal Structures for Generic Chinese Sentence Representation,” EMNLP-17.
  • “Learning Sentence Representation with Guidance of Human Attention,” IJCAI-17.

Award Suitability

Based on the information supplied, Shaonan Wang’s profile presents several factors relevant to an academic recognition assessment: interdisciplinary research spanning artificial intelligence and neuroscience; peer-reviewed publication activity; competitive grant participation; conference leadership; editorial service; teaching experience; international research experience; and documented honors from academic and professional organizations. These indicators provide a structured basis for evaluating suitability for an innovation-oriented academic award.[1][2]

The profile also records leadership activities such as Senior Area Chair for ACL 2025, Executive Chair of the Neuromatch Academy Curriculum during 2022–2024, and Tutorial Co-Chair for COLING 2025. Such service activities, together with research funding and invited presentations, provide evidence of professional engagement beyond publication output.

Conclusion

Shaonan Wang’s supplied academic record describes an interdisciplinary researcher working across natural language processing, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and neurobiology of language. His profile combines research contributions, competitive funding, teaching, editorial responsibilities, scientific leadership, collaborations, invited talks, and academic honors. The evidence presented here supports consideration of his work within an academic recognition framework while leaving final award evaluation to the relevant awarding body.[1][2]

References

  1. Elsevier. (n.d.). Scopus author details: Shaonan Wang, Author ID 57190678458. Scopus. https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57190678458
  2. Google Scholar. (n.d.). Shaonan Wang — Google Scholar profile. https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=ydFT-G8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
  3. Zhu, J.; Wang, Q.; Wang, Y.; Zhou, Y.; Zhang, J.; Wang, S.; Zong, C. (2019). NCLS: Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. https://aclanthology.org/D19-1302/
  4. Sun, J.; Wang, S.; Zhang, J.; Zong, C. (2019). Towards Sentence-Level Brain Decoding with Distributed Representations. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 33(01), 7047–7054. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33017047
  5. Sun, J.; Wang, S.; Zhang, J.; Zong, C. (2020). Neural Encoding and Decoding with Distributed Sentence Representations. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 32(2), 589–603. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2020.3027595