Zining Zhu (朱子宁)
PhD Student, University of Toronto
zining@cs.toronto.edu
Research interests: Interpretability, NLP + Society. My long-term goal is to build reliable and trustworthy NLP systems that can be stably deployed across different domains. I am interested in understanding the mechanisms and abilities of neural NLP systems encoding and using knowledge, with language as a medium. I am also interested in the impacts of NLP systems to societies.
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Selected Publications
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An information theoretic view on selecting linguistic probes
Zining Zhu, Frank Rudzicz. EMNLP 2020
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Examining the rhetorical capacities of neural language models
Zining Zhu, Chuer Pan, Mohamed Abdalla, Frank Rudzicz. EMNLP 2020 BlackboxNLP Workshop
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Semantic coordinates analysis reveals language changes in the AI field
Zining Zhu, Yang Xu, Frank Rudzicz. arXiv preprint 2011.00543
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Detecting Cognitive Impairments by Agreeing on Interpretations of Linguistic Features
Zining Zhu, Jekaterina Novikova, Frank Rudzicz. NAACL 2019
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Natural Languages Understanding by a Compositional Alignment of Word Embeddings
Zining Zhu. Engineering Science Undergraduate Thesis (supervisor: Frank Rudzicz)
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Semi-Supervised Classification by Reaching Consensus among Modalities
Zining Zhu, Jekaterina Novikova, Frank Rudzicz. NeurIPS 2018 IRASL Workshop
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Deconfounding Age Effects with Fair Representation Learning When Assessing Dementia
Zining Zhu, Jekaterina Novikova, Frank Rudzicz. arXiv preprint 1807.07217
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Robuatness Against the Channel Effect in Pathological Voice Detection
Yi-Te Hsu, Zining Zhu, Chi-Te Wang, Shih-Hau Fang, Frank Rudzicz, Yu Tsao. NeurIPS 2018 ML4H Workshop
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Deep Neural Networks for Improved, Impromptu Trajectory Tracking of Quadrotors
Qiyang Li, Jingxing Qian, Zining Zhu, Xuchan Bao, Mohamed K. Helwa, Angela P. Schoellig. ICRA 2017
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2020
2019
2018
2017
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Experience
Education
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University of Toronto 2019 - 2024 (Expected) Ph.D student in Computer Science Supervisor: Frank Rudzicz |
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University of Toronto 2014 - 2019 Bachelor in Engineering Science, Robotics option. |
Work / Research
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Tencent Jarvis Lab, Machine Learning Engineering Intern, May 2019 - Aug 2019 Neural language models and pre-training techniques. |
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Winterlight Labs, Research Software Engineer, Sep 2017 - Sep 2018 Automatic detection of dementia from narrative speeches. |
TripAdvisor, Software Engineering Intern, June - Aug, 2017 Android applications and Java API. |
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Dynamic Systems Lab at UTIAS, Research Assistant, May - Sep, 2016 Enhancing drone controllers using deep neural networks. |
Teaching
University of Toronto, as Teaching Assistant:
- CSC401/2511 Natural Languages Computing, 2020W, 2021W
- CSC309 Web Programming 2020F
- ECE324 Introduction to Machine Intelligence, 2019F
- CSC180 Introduction to Computer Science 2016F
Service
- Reviewing for conferences:
- ACL (2020, 2021)
- EMNLP (2020)
- NAACL (2021)
- AAAI (2021)
- Reviewing for journals:
- IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (2020)
- Computer Methods & Programs in Biomedicine (2018)
Awards
- Vector Institute PhD Fellowship, 2020
- Dean’s List, undergraduate years 2014 - 2019
- Engineering Science Research Opportunity Program (ESROP) fellowship, 2016 summer
- Chinese Physics Olympics (CPhO) Provincial 1st Prize, 2013
Selected Talks
- Invited talk. Improving the neural NLP model performances with linguistic probes, Zhi-Yi Technology Advances in NLP talk, Nov 20, 2020
- Invited talk. An information theoretic view on selecting linguistic probes, Tsinghua University AI TIME talk, Oct 30, 2020
- Spotlight talk. Examining the rhetorical capacities of neural language models, Vector Institute NLP Symposium, Sep 16, 2020
- Invited talk. RecitalBoard: Efficient pre-training methods for language modeling, Tencent Jarvis Lab, Shenzhen, China, Aug 5, 2019
- Invited talk. Detecting cognitive impairments with machine learning, UTMIST, Toronto, Canada, Nov 20, 2018
- Invited talk. Probabilistic Graphical Models, UTADA, Toronto, Canada, Oct 21, 2017
Media Coverage
- TechXplore, A new machine learning model to isolate the effects of age in predicting dementia July 27, 2018
Misc
- Notes about some AI / NLP conferences.
NAACL’18 NAACL’19 AAAI ‘20 ACL ‘20 - I paddled at dragonboat teams: Iron Dragons (2018-2019 season) and Vic Scarlet Dragons (2017-2018 season).
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