Welcome to my website!

I completed my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. My research specializes in natural language processing, deep learning, and social media mining. I have had the privilege of interning at Microsoft Research, Meta, Google, and Borealis AI. Additionally, I was a visiting researcher at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi. I earned my M.Sc. in Data Science at Clarkson University, where I was advised by Dr. Boris Jukic.

Awards:

• Anne and George Piternick Research Award (2024), UBC.
• Ph.D. Travel Award of School of Information (2019, 2021, and 2023), UBC.
• Distinguished Teaching (2022), UBC.
• Tung Graduate Fellowship (2021-2022), UBC.
• Affiliated Fellowship (2021-2022), UBC.
• President’s Academic Excellence Initiative Ph.D. Award (2020-2023), UBC.
• Evelyn Markwei Memorial Award (2020-2021), UBC.
• International Tuition Award (2018-2023), UBC.
• Graduate Scholarship of School of Information (2018-2023), UBC.
• Graduate Scholarship (2016-2017), Clarkson University, USA.

Publications:

• Zhang, Chiyu, Sun, Y., Wu, M., Chen, J., Lei, J., Abdul-Mageed, M., Jin, R., Liu, A., Zhu, J., Park, S., Yao, N., Long, B. (2024). EmbSum: Leveraging the Summarization Capabilities of Large Language Models for Content-Based Recommendations. In Proceedings of 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ‘24). ACM.

• Wang, R., Li, H., Wu, M., Wang, Y., Han, X., Zhang, Chiyu, Baldwin, T. (2024). Demystifying Instruction Mixing for Fine-tuning Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop). ACL.

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Keleg, A., Elmadany, A., Zhang C., Hamed, I., Magdy, W., Bouamor, H., Habash, N. (2024). NADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task. In Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference. ACL.

• Zhang, Chiyu, Sun, Y., Chen, J., Lei, J., Abdul-Mageed, M., Wang, S., Jin, R., Park, S., Yao, N., & Long, B. (2024). SPAR: Personalized Content-Based Recommendation via Long Engagement Attention. arXiv 2402.10555. (Under Review)

• Zhang, Chiyu, Cai, H., Li, Y., Wu, Y., Hou, L., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2024). Distilling Text Style Transfer With Self-Explanation From LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop). ACL.

• Wu, M., Waheed, A., Zhang, C., Abdul-Mageed, M., & Aji, A. F. (2024). LaMini-LM: A Diverse Herd of Distilled Models from Large-Scale Instructions. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). ACL. GitHub

• Zhang, C., Doan, K. D., Liao, Q., & Abdul-Mageed, M. The Skipped Beat: A Study of Sociopragmatic Understanding in LLMs for 64 Languages. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

• Zhang, C., Abdul-Mageed, M., & Jawahar, G. (2023). Contrastive Learning of Sociopragmatic Meaning in Social Media. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023. ACL.

• Zhang, C., Yan, Q., Meng, L., & Sylvain, T. (2023). What Constitutes Good Contrastive Learning in Time-Series Forecasting?. IJCAI’s workshop: AI4TS: AI for time series analysis.

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., Elmadany, A., Bouamor, H., & Habash, N. (2022). NADI 2022: The Third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task. In Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 85–97, Abu Dhabi. ACL. [Data]

• Zhang, C., Abdul-Mageed, M., & Nagoudi, E. M. B. (2022). Decay No More: A Persistent Twitter Dataset for Learning Social Meaning. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Novel Evaluation Approaches for Text Classification Systems on Social Media (NEATCLasS). AAAI Press. (Best Paper Award) [Data and Model]

• Zhang, C., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2022). Improving Social Meaning Detection with Pragmatic Masking and Surrogate Fine-Tuning. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, pages 141–156, Dublin, Ireland. ACL. [Code]

• Laricheva, M., Zhang, C., Liu, Y., Chen, G., Tracey, T., Young, R., & Carenini, G. (2022). Automated Utterance Labeling of Conversations Using Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of 15th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Pittsburgh, USA.

• Liu, Y., Laricheva, M., Zhang, C., Boutet, P., Chen, G., Tracey, T., Carenini, G., & Young, R. (2022). Transition to Adulthood for Young People with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities: Emotion Detection and Topic Modeling. In Proceedings of 15th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Pittsburgh, USA.

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., Elmadany, A., Bouamor, H., & Habash, N. (2021). NADI 2021: The Second Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task. In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 244–259, Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual). ACL. [Data]

• Qiu, Y., Yang, X., Li, Z., Zhang, C., & Chen, S. (2021). Investigating the impacts of artificial intelligence technology on technological innovation from a patent perspective. Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences, 6(1), 129-140.

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., Bouamor, H., & Habash, N. (2020, December). NADI 2020: The First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task. In Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 97–110, Barcelona, Spain (Online). ACL. [Data]

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., Elmadany, A., & Ungar, L. (2020). Toward micro-dialect identification in diaglossic and code-switched environments. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5855–5876, Online. [Data] [Model]

• Elmadany, A., Zhang, C., Abdul-Mageed, M., & Hashemi, A. (2020, May). Leveraging Affective Bidirectional Transformers for Offensive Language Detection. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection, pages 102–108, Marseille, France. European Language Resource Association.

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., & Hashemi, A. (2020, May). AraNet: A Deep Learning Toolkit for Arabic Social Media. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection, pages 16–23, Marseille, France. European Language Resource Association. [Software]

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., Rajendran, A., Elmadany, A., Przystupa, M., & Ungar, L. (2019). Sentence-Level BERT and Multi-Task Learning of Age and Gender in Social Media. arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.00637.

• Abdul-Mageed, M., Zhang, C., Elmadany, A., Rajendran, A., & Ungar, L. (2019). DiaNet: BERT and Hierarchical Attention Multi-Task Learning of Fine-Grained Dialect. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.14243.

• Zhang, C., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2019, December). BERT-Based Arabic Social Media Author Profiling. In Proceedings of 11th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 12-15, 2019. CEUR-WS.org.

• Zhang, C., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2019, December). Multi-Task Bidirectional Transformer Representations for Irony Detection. In Proceedings of 11th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 12-15, 2019. CEUR-WS.org.

• Zhang, C., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2019, August). No Army, No Navy: BERT Semi-Supervised Learning of Arabic Dialects. In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 279–284, Florence, Italy. ACL. (Best System Paper) [Code]

• Zhang, C., Rajendran, A., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2019, June). UBC-NLP at SemEval-2019 Task4: Hyperpartisan News Detection with Attention-Based Bi-LSTMs. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 775–781, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. ACL. [Code]

• Rajendran, A., Zhang, C., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2019, June). UBC-NLP at SemEval-2019 Task 6: Ensemble Learning of Offensive Content with Enhanced Training Data. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 775–781, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. ACL.

• Rajendran, A., Zhang, C., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2019, January). Happy Together: Learning and Understanding Appraisal from Natural Language. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Affective Content Analysis (AffCon 2019), Honolulu, USA, January 27, 2019. CEUR-WS.org. (Best System Paper)

• Qiu, Y.*, & Zhang, C.*. (2018, September). Wrapper feature selection algorithm for the optimization of an indicator system of patent value assessment. IPPTA, 30(3), 300-308

• Qiu, Y.*, Zhang, C.*, & Shuixuan, C. (2017, March). Research of Patent-value Assessment Indicator System Based on Classification and Regression Tree Algorithm. Journal of Xiamen University (Natural Science)(2), 244-251.

• Qiu, Y., & Zhang, C. (2016, August). Research of indicator system in customer churn prediction for telecom industry. In 2016 11th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE) (pp. 123-130). IEEE.