PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Colin Cherry

Colin Cherry is a Google DeepMind researcher in machine translation whose 2026 work studies reasoning in translation. His career includes a 2008 paper on phrase-based decoding, a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, and research roles at Microsoft and Canada's National Research Council. His published work covers tweet stance detection, multilingual neural translation, live speech translation, PaLM prompting, and open data for low-resource languages. He served as NAACL secretary and was general chair of its 2025 conference.

Works
208
Citations
8,948
h-index
44
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2008

    Phrase-based decoding

    In 2008, he publishes a paper on cohesive phrase-based decoding for statistical machine translation while at Microsoft Research.

  2. By 2016

    A PhD and NRC research

    By 2016, he is a Senior Research Officer at NRC Canada and holds a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta. His roles span Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group and Text Analytics at NRC.

  3. 2016–2017

    NAACL secretary and stance detection

    From 2016 to 2017, he serves as NAACL secretary. In 2016, he co-authors SemEval Task 6 on detecting stance in tweets.

  4. 2019

    A multilingual translation model

    In 2019, he contributes to Google’s effort to train a single neural translation model on more than 25 billion sentence pairs from over 100 languages to and from English.

  5. January 2021

    Stabilizing live translation

    In January 2021, he is a Staff Research Scientist at Google Research and describes an update to Google Translate’s live transcription feature that reduces translation revisions.

  6. 2023

    Prompting PaLM for translation

    In 2023, he co-authors a study of PaLM translation prompting that finds example quality is the most important factor in few-shot prompts.

  7. 2025

    NAACL 2025 and SMOL

    In 2025, he serves as general chair of NAACL while working at Google Translate in Montreal. He co-authors SMOL, an open-source machine-translation data suite for low-resource languages.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research at Google DeepMind

    As of October 2026, he works at Google DeepMind on research into reasoning for machine translation.

Career

  1. Since 2026Google DeepMindResearcher
  2. From 2021Google ResearchStaff Research Scientist
  3. 2017–2025Google
  4. 2010–2017National Research Council CanadaSenior Research Officer
  5. From 2008Microsoft Research
  6. 2003–2016University of Alberta
  7. 1959–1963University of London
  8. 1959–1979Imperial College London

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. SemEval-2016 Task 6: Detecting Stance in Tweets2016 · International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) · 845 citationsWith Saif Mohammad
  2. NRC-Canada-2014: Detecting Aspects and Sentiment in Customer Reviews2014 · International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) · 697 citationsWith Saif Mohammad
  3. On human communication1966 · 604 citations
  4. Data-Driven Response Generation in Social Media2011 · 568 citations
  5. Unsupervised Modeling of Twitter Conversations2010 · 421 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  2. Google alumni founded or led 87 other organizations, the most among the labs we compareIncludes Google. We trace 212 organizations founded or led by AI lab alumni, and 223 career moves between the labs.
  3. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  4. Of 462 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 190 work there nowIncludes Google. Our estimates of where former Google and Google DeepMind people work now, including moves within Google.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Colin Cherry yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Natural Language Processing Group - Microsoft Research: Publications microsoft.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Cohesive Phrase-Based Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. NAACL Officers 2016 naacl.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Colin Cherry research.google. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. SemEval-2016 Task 6: Detecting Stance in Tweets aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Exploring Massively Multilingual, Massive Neural Machine Translation research.google. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Stabilizing Live Speech Translation in Google Translate research.google. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Organizing Committee - NAACL-HLT 2025 2025.naacl.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. SMOL: Professionally Translated Parallel Data for 115 Under-represented Languages aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  11. When Does Reasoning Help in Machine Translation? A Hierarchical Analysis of LRM Reasoning Traces arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.