CV
Research Interests
My research investigates the mechanisms underlying reasoning in large language models: how reasoning behaviour is induced, whether chain-of-thought reflects the computation that actually drives a model’s answer, and how far reasoning skills learned in one domain transfer to another. I approach this by combining behavioural and mechanistic analysis with neuro-symbolic methods.
This builds on a broader background in information extraction and language understanding (e.g., event relation extraction, event graph generation, and question answering) and is grounded in applied work with legal and law-enforcement partners, where reasoning failures carry serious consequences.
Keywords: Reasoning in LLMs; Chain-of-thought Faithfulness; Neuro-Symbolic AI; Textual Event Understanding; Evaluation of LLMs.
Employment
- Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Sheffield, School of Computer Science, 2024 – present
- Research Assistant, University of Warwick, Department of Computer Science, 2022 – 2024
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Warwick, Department of Computer Science, 2020 – 2024
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Warwick, 2020 – 2024
Fully funded by Warwick. Supervisors: Prof. Yulan He and Dr. Gabriele Pergola.
Thesis: Understanding Event Relation in Text via Representation Learning and LLM-based Graph Generation - M.Sc. in Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, 2017 – 2020
GPA 3.69/4.00. Thesis: A Study of Aspect Embedding and Conflict Sentiment Recognition on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis - B.Sc. in Logic, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China, 2013 – 2017
GPA 3.7/4.00. Thesis: An Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis System for Online Car Reviews
Research Projects and Funding
- Addressing Socio-technical Limitations of LLMs for Medical and Social Computing (AdSoLve), 2024 – present
Funded by UKRI via Responsible AI UK as a keystone project. Role: post-doctoral researcher.
Research on LLMs and complex reasoning (logical and legal), developing neuro-symbolic methods for real-world problems. Engage directly with law firms to build an evaluation platform that reflects practitioner requirements. - NLP to Detect Threatening and Abusive Language Toward Victims, 2023 – 2024
Funded by the OPCSA Police STAR Fund. Role: lead engineer (team of 3).
Built a platform helping police gather evidence from victims’ devices, analysing text conversations with LLMs and providing in-depth, interactive feedback. Generalised and published as a system demonstration at NAACL 2025. - An Event-Centric Dialogue System for Second Language Learners, 2022 – 2023
Funded by the Warwick RDF Science Development Award.
Built an annotation platform and curated IntrEx, the first large-scale dataset annotated for interestingness and expected interestingness in teacher–student interactions.
Teaching and Supervision
- Guest Lecturer, University of Sheffield — Natural Language Processing, 2024 – present
Lectures delivered: Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Machine Translation; In-Context Learning and Retrieval Augmented Generation. - Teaching Assistant, University of Warwick, Department of Computer Science, 2020 – 2024
Natural Language Processing (M.Sc., 2020–2024); Logic and Verification (B.Sc., 2020–2023); Formal Systems Development (M.Sc., 2021–2022).
Duties: delivering seminars and lectures, advising laboratory experiments, and marking. - Doctoral supervision — co-supervised 6 Ph.D. students, resulting in 5 peer-reviewed publications.
Academic Service
- Area Chair, ACL Rolling Review (ACL ARR), 2025 – 2026 — rounds serving EMNLP 2025 and EACL 2026.
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.
- Reviewer, ACL Rolling Review (ACL ARR), 2023 – 2026 — rounds serving NAACL 2024, ACL 2024, ACL 2026, EMNLP 2026.
- Reviewer, EMNLP (2023) and EACL.
- Programme Committee, 4th Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP) at EMNLP 2026.
- Programme Committee, 3rd Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP) at EMNLP 2025.
- Organiser, NLP seminar series, University of Sheffield, 2024 – present.
- Mentor for 2 Student Research Workshop papers at EACL 2025.
Publications
22 peer-reviewed publications — 17 conference papers and 5 journal articles. The full, always-current list lives on the Publications page; the PDF above also contains it in full.
Selected:
- Fundamental Reasoning Paradigms Induce Out-of-Domain Generalization in Language Models — Findings of ACL 2026
- Compliance vs. Sensibility: On the Reasoning Controllability in Large Language Models — Findings of EMNLP 2026
- No Shortcuts to Culture: Indonesian Multi-hop Question Answering — TACL 2026
- Enhancing Logical Reasoning via Symbolically-Guided Monte Carlo Process Supervision — EMNLP 2025
- Cascading Large Language Models for Salient Event Graph Generation — NAACL 2025
References
Available on request.