PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Dongdong Zhang

Also known as 张冬冬

Dongdong Zhang is a Microsoft Research Asia research manager whose work spans machine translation, multilingual language models, and large language models. He earned bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees at Harbin Institute of Technology and joined Microsoft in 2006. His coauthored research ranges from hierarchical translation rules and cross-lingual pretraining to multilingual prompting and evaluation of generated text. As of October 2026, he leads a team working on multilingual machine translation and large language model research.

Works
125
Citations
2,178
h-index
24
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1999–2005

    Degrees at Harbin Institute

    He earns a B.S. in 1999, an M.S. in 2001, and a Ph.D. in 2005 from Harbin Institute of Technology.

  2. 2006

    Joining Microsoft

    He joins Microsoft in April 2006.

  3. 2010

    Hierarchical translation rules

    In 2010, he coauthors “A Joint Rule Selection Model for Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation,” which presents a joint model for predicting hierarchical translation rules from source and target context.

  4. 2020

    Cross-lingual pretraining

    In 2020, he coauthors Alternating Language Modeling (ALM), a cross-lingual pretraining method that creates code-switched sentences to capture context across languages.

  5. 2021

    Multilingual WMT systems

    He coauthors the 2021 WMT report on Microsoft's large-scale multilingual translation systems. Their submissions use DeltaLM, a multilingual encoder-decoder model.

  6. 2023

    Cross-lingual prompting

    In 2023, he coauthors cross-lingual-thought prompting (XLT), a template prompt designed to improve multilingual language model capability by stimulating cross-lingual and logical reasoning.

  7. 2024

    Reference-diverse evaluation

    In 2024, he coauthors Div-Ref, which uses large language models to create multiple reference expressions and improves the correlation between automatic evaluation and human judgments.

  8. As of October 2026

    Principal research manager

    In June 2026, he coauthors Mind the Gap, an evaluation of LLM agents on practical office automation tasks. As of October 2026, he is a principal research manager at Microsoft Research Asia and leads a team working on multilingual machine translation, cross-lingual generation and understanding, and large language model pretraining and fine-tuning.

Career

  1. Since 2008Microsoft ResearchPrincipal Research Manager
  2. 2025–2026University of Science and Technology Beijing
  3. 2017–2025Tongji University
  4. 2014–2015Harbin Institute of Technology
  5. 2006–2023Microsoft
  6. 2004–2005Lanzhou University of Technology

Education

  1. 2005Harbin Institute of TechnologyPh.D.
  2. 2001Harbin Institute of TechnologyM.S.
  3. 1999Harbin Institute of TechnologyB.S.

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

Most-cited works

  1. Achieving Human Parity on Automatic Chinese to English News Translation2018 · 529 citationsWith Tao Qin
  2. DeepNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000 Layers2024 · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · 113 citationsWith Furu Wei
  3. Sequence-to-Dependency Neural Machine Translation2017 · Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) · 111 citations
  4. A Probabilistic Approach to Syntax-based Reordering for Statistical Machine Translation2007 · 82 citations
  5. Alternating Language Modeling for Cross-Lingual Pre-Training2020 · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 76 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 32%Includes Microsoft. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Microsoft. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  3. Google alumni founded or led 87 other organizations, the most among the labs we compareIncludes Microsoft. We trace 212 organizations founded or led by AI lab alumni, and 223 career moves between the labs.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Microsoft. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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

  1. Dongdong Zhang at Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. A Joint Rule Selection Model for Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Alternating Language Modeling for Cross-Lingual Pre-Training ojs.aaai.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Multilingual Machine Translation Systems from Microsoft for WMT21 Shared Task aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation by Diversifying References aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Mind the Gap: Can Frontier LLMs Pass a Standardized Office Proficiency Exam? microsoft.com. Checked 19 October 2026.