Jianfeng Gao
Jianfeng Gao researches NLP and machine learning. Gao led natural-language computing at Microsoft Asia from 1999 to 2005 and later worked on interfaces, search and translation from 2005 to 2014. He coauthored UniLM in 2019, combining different language-modeling tasks in a shared transformer. ACL elected him a Fellow in 2024. He is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.
Timeline
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1999–2005
Language research at Microsoft Asia
Gao led Microsoft’s natural-language computing group from 1999 to 2005. The group worked on Chinese speech recognition, Chinese and Japanese input methods and a Windows language platform.
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2005–2014
Interfaces, search and translation
Gao led Project X research from 2005 to 2006 and worked as a principal researcher in Redmond from 2006 to 2014. His work covered natural interfaces, search, query understanding, spelling and statistical translation.
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2019
Unified language-model pre-training
Gao coauthored UniLM with Li Dong and seven other researchers. The 2019 UniLM paper used a shared transformer trained for unidirectional, bidirectional and sequence-to-sequence prediction, using attention masks to control context. The approach supports language understanding and generation.
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2024
Recognition and later AI leadership
ACL elected Gao a Fellow in 2024. Gao is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. His later work covers multimodal and agentic models.
Sources and credits
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