Sihao Chen
Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSihao Chen is a Senior Applied Scientist with nine years of experience building scalable, efficient, and trustworthy language technologies, currently working on LLM post-training, reinforcement learning, and AI agents at Microsoft in Redmond. He completed a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania where he focused on retrieval and language inference systems to combat information pollution and improve real-world information access. His background includes multiple Google research internships and a Tencent Americas stint, contributing practical RLHF and retrieval-augmented generation expertise. An active open-source contributor, he has improved core NLP tooling in the well-regarded CogComp libraries—adding readers, sentence splitters, and compatibility fixes that aid broad research use. Known for treating language as data (“I process language”), he blends deep research rigor with production-minded engineering to move models from prototypes into robust systems.
9 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (13)
javas10
nlp10
natural-language-processing10
java10
perl9
python8
lemmatization7
named-entity-recognition7
tokenizer6
tagging5
part-of-speech-tagger5
part-of-speech5
dependency-parsing4
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
CogComp/cogcomp-nlp
Feb 2017 - Sep 2018
CogComp's Natural Language Processing Libraries and Demos: Modules include lemmatizer, ner, pos, prep-srl, quantifier, question type, relation-extraction, similarity, temporal normalizer, tokenizer, transliteration, verb-sense, and more.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 commits, 4 PRs, 1 branch in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Sihao primarily contributed to the CogComp NLP libraries by addressing specific issues and integrating new features. Their work includes fixing a bug in a Perl script used for parsing, supporting unitary labels in the CoNLLNerReader, merging updates, and adding a PARC3Reader. These changes enhance the functionality and compatibility of the NLP tools within the CogComp ecosystem. Further contributions include adding sentence splitters to handle lower-case acronyms.
ellipsisverbextractionnatural-language-understandingpos-tagging
CogComp/perspectrum
Sep 2018 - Oct 2019
Perspectrum: a dataset of claims, perspectives and evidences
Contributions:351 commits, 6 PRs, 14 pushes in 1 year
datasetsdatasetclaimslime
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