The Natural Language Processing Institute was founded in 1990 on the basis of the Computational Linguistic Research Group and the Computational Linguistics Research Group and the Computational Linguistics Laboratory within the former Foreign languages Department of Shanghai Jiaotong University. Professor Yang Huizhong has been Director of the institute, under whose guidance several researchers holding the degree of Ph.D in linguistics and the title of associate professor are undertaking various research projects. The institute was one of the very first which initiated computational linguistic research in the country, and has been very influential in the field both at home and abroad. The institute constructed the JDEST Corpus in the 1980s, which was the first corpus of English for Academic Purposes in the world, and which has been commended by the famous British linguist G.Leech as "the pioneer" in specialized corpus construction. The JDEST Corpus has been expanded to a size of 4,000,000 words of running texts. At present, it is the largest and the most comprehensive English corpus in the country, providing resources for EAP research and data for policy making in English language education. Professor Yang Huizhong and his colleagues have also developed a series of standardized language testing theories and procedures, exerting great and profound influence at home and abroad. The institute has become a center of language testing research, taking the lead in techniques of automatic testee data processing, test score equating, composition score adjusting and item analysis. The institute is oriented to the following research fields and topics:

　1、Natural language processing

　　(1) Corpus linguistic research
　　(2) Automatic tagging and parsing
　　(3) Machine translation
　　(4) Computer-assisted language teaching and learning
　　(5) Computer-assisted lexicography and electronic dictionary study

　2、Language testing

　　(1) Psycho-linguistic measure and language testing statistics
　　(2) Automatic marking and grading
　　(3) Standardized testing and the IRT applications
　　(4) Test bank study
　　(5) Validation study
　　(6) Computer-assisted adaptive language testing

　In recent years, the NLP institute has completed seven major research projects, six of which have reached internationally advanced standards. Major completed projects are as follows:

　　(1) Computer-assisted English Teaching Software
　　(2) JDEST Corpus
　　(3) AGTS Automatic Tagging System
　　(4) JDL Chinese Input System
　　(5) French-Chinese Machine Translation System
　　(6) College English Test Data Processing System
　　(7) Chinese Learners of English Corpus (CLEC) (in collaboration with Guangdong University of Foreign Languages and Trade)

　　In addition, we have also, in cooperation with the institutes and enterprises in Japan, England and the Taiwan Province, completed many projects in language engineering and language testing. Currently, we are engaged in the construction of "The College English Spoken English Corpus", a project funded by the National Tenth Five-year Social Sciences Programme, and also in several projects in corpus application studies.