Xinliang (Frederick) Zhang | 心亮

Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Department of EECS, University of Michigan.

Office number: 3921

Bob and Betty Beyster Building,

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Hi there, I am Xinliang (Frederick) Zhang. I am from Hangzhou. My Chinese name is 张心亮. Usually, I go by Frederick.

I am a 4th-year CSE Ph.D. candidate at University of Michigan (UM). My advisor is Dr. Lu Wang and I am a member of LAUNCH Lab. I am also affiliated with Michigan AI Lab.

I received my B.S. degrees from the Ohio State University (OSU) in Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) and Math (Minor). I also obtianed my B.Eng. degree from Sichuan University (SCU) in Industrial Engineering (IE). I was fortunate to have Dr. Huan Sun as my advisor at OSU and proud of being part of SunLab. I was also privileged to work closely with Dr. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe.

I spent some fun time as a reserach scientist intern at Adobe Research in Bay Area (May-Oct. 2024) and Bloomberg AI in NYC (May-Aug 2023).

My reserch interests lie in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML) and Computational Social Science (CSS). Meanwhile, I am a regular PC member/reviewer for NLP venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING and ACL ARR).

  • I primarily work on Structural Learning and Multi-granularity Information Extraction, as well as efficient LLMs (training and inference).
  • I used to work on Natural Language Inference, Information Retrieval, and Question Answering & Generation as an undergraduate researcher.
  • I am also interested in investigating Annotation Disagreements, and NLP applications for Social Science and Healthcare (Clinical NLP).

I was awarded Outstanding Reviewer at NAACL 2022. My work received Best Paper Award at BIBM 2021.

I am fortunate to have been mentoring so many talented young brains, and passionate about teaching!
  • Yufan Wu (2024), Now Ph.D. @ OSU
  • Xiaoyan Bai (2024), Now Ph.D. @ UChicago
  • Jiayi Zhang (2021-2022), Now Ph.D. @ NEU
  • Changyuan Qiu (2021-2022), Now Ph.D. @ UW

More about me:

  • My broad personal (academic) interests extend to Optimization, Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Linguistics. Explore more (academic) interests now!
  • I am passionate about language learning as well, especially East Asian languages. I am almost always fascinated with the stunning beauty of languages.
  • I am amazed by Brushtalk in ancient times, and I hope the NLP advancements I am dedicted to will help realize a new form of Brushtalk across all nations in modern times.

You may reach out to me at xlfzhang@umich.edu.

I am looking for self-motivated UGs/masters to work with on topics like Information Extraction (e.g., temporal reasoning & event extraction), Efficient LLMs (training & inference), and Evaluation. Please contact me directly, if interested.

news (news archive)

Sep 19, 2024 Our paper Narrative-of-Thought: Improving Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models via Recounted Narratives got accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2024! Thanks to my advisor. Paper and codes will be available soon. I can’t wait to see you guys in Miami in November!
Aug 26, 2024 I am GSIing CSE 592 (Artificial Intelligence Foundations) this semester. It has been three years and a half since I TAed last time.
Jun 18, 2024 Attend NAACL 2024 @Mexico City, Mexico, my first international in-person conference experience. I present my paper MOKA at the poster session! Feel free to check it out if aligning AI with human values and AGI are in your mind! Also, this Friday (06/21) also marks my fifth year in NLP research. Congrats to myself!
May 16, 2024 Our paper ULTRA: Unleashing LLM’s Potential for Event Argument Extraction through Hierarchical Modeling and Pairwise Self-Refinement got accepted to Findings of ACL 2024! Thanks to my mentor and collaborators at Bloomberg. Paper will be available soon.
May 13, 2024 Pleased to start my 2nd PhD internship at Adobe Research. I will work with Dr. Victor Bursztyn.
Mar 13, 2024 Our paper MOKA: Moral Knowledge Augmentation for Moral Event Extraction got accepted to NAACL 2024! Thanks to my advisor and collaborators. Paper, codes and dataset will be available soon. I can’t wait to see you guys in Mexico City this summer!
Nov 16, 2023 Check out my recent two pre-print paper: MOKA: Moral Knowledge Augmentation for Moral Event Extraction (We leverage retrival augmentation to embrace and integrate moral knowledge at multiple granularities: lexical- and scenario-levels) and ULTRA: Unleash LLM’s Potential for Event Argument Extraction (We unleash LLM’s potential cost-effectively through hierarchical modeling and self-refinement by means of pairwise comparison and learning from errors)!
Oct 7, 2023 Our paper All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison got accepted to EMNLP 2023! Congratulations to my collaborators and advisor. Paper is available online.
Oct 7, 2023 Two paper got accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2023, Unveiling Partisan and Counter-Partisan Events in News Reporting and You Are What You Annotate: Towards Better Models through Annotator Representations! Congratulations to my collaborators and advisor. Paper, codes and datasets are available online.
May 22, 2023 Pleased to start my 1st PhD internship at Bloomberg AI. I will work with Dr. Alakananda Vempala (mentor) and Temma Choji (supervisor).
Feb 3, 2023 I have passed my Prelim and been advanced to candidacy.
Oct 6, 2022 Attend Text As Data (TADA) 2022 @NYC. I present our paper SEESAW (A Graph-Augmented Generative Entity-to-Entity Stance Detection Framework) at the oral session! Thanks for the Travel Grant to support my travel!
Oct 6, 2022 Our paper Generative Entity-to-Entity Stance Detection with Knowledge Graph Augmentation got accepted to EMNLP 2022! Thanks to my advisor and collaborator. Paper, codes and dataset will be available soon.
Oct 6, 2022 Our paper Late Fusion with Triplet Margin Objective for Multimodal Ideology Prediction and Analysis got accepted to EMNLP 2022! Congratulations to my mentee, collaborator and advisor. Paper, codes and dataset will be available soon.
Sep 19, 2022 Start serving as AI Tea Coordinator at Michigan AI Lab.
Sep 9, 2022 Our POLITICS demo is available online now! Feel free to apply our demo to measure the ideology or the stance of your text.
Jul 10, 2022 Attend NAACL 2022 @Seattle, my first in-person conference experience. We present our paper POLITICS at the poster session! Feel free to use our tool.
Jul 8, 2022 Awarded Outstanding Reviewer at NAACL 2022!
Apr 7, 2022 Our paper POLITICS: Pretraining with Same-story Article Comparison for Ideology Prediction and Stance Detection got accepted to Findings of NAACL 2022! Thanks to my advisor and collaborators. Paper and codes are available online, and data is available upon request. POLITICS is downloadable from Huggingface.
Dec 10, 2021 Our paper CliniQG4QA: Generating Diverse Questions for Domain Adaptation of Clinical Question Answering has won the Best Paper Award at IEEE BIBM 2021. Fun fact: it’s my first-ever NLP research project!