Xinran Zhao

I am a second year master student majoring in Computer Science at Stanford University, where I work on Natural Language Processing with Prof. Christopher Manning.

I did my bachelors at HKUST with a GPA of 3.958 (top 1%) and have received the Academic Achievement Medal and First Class Honors. At HKUST, I was fortunate to work on commonsense reasoning, pronoun coreference resolution, hate speech detection, and knowledge graph mining with Prof. Yangqiu Song. I also worked closely with Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung on text simplification and an AI-supported online education platform.

During my exchange at Cornell University, I started my journey in NLP from debate argument mining and received great help and guidance from Prof. Claire Cardie.

I am actively looking for a Ph.D. position in NLP. I love to discuss new ideas. Do email me to start a chat.

Email  /  CV  /  Linkedin  /  GitHub  /  Google Scholar

I am interested in working on meaningful research on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. My goal is to build effetive and faithful systems to tackle the great ambiguity of natural languages.

Some interesting directions I am thinking of:
(1) using retrieval-based method to improve the temporal and visual awareness of semi-parametric language models;
(2) checking the robustness and interpretability of large language models with datasets formatted beyond simple lists of text sequences (e.g., with meaningful innate connections across instances);
(3) leveraging compositionality to manipulate (e.g., compressing or decorating) natural language datasets.

Besides researching, I am also keen on other activities: