Zhihui Yang

I am a third-year Master’s student majoring in Computational Linguistics at Beijing Normal University, under the supervision of Renfen Hu. Prior to this, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Soochow University in 2023, supervised by Liulin Zhang. Also, I completed a Micro-credential in Intelligent Computing and Frontier Applications at Soochow University in 2023.

My main research interests lie at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), linguistics, and cognitive science. I am deeply curious about meaning in both machines and humans, with a particular emphasis on how non-textual information interacts with language to contribute to meaning.

I am working on and interested in questions such as the following:

Linguistics and Cognitive Science → NLP

• How to evaluate and analyze AI systems by leveraging cognitive theories and findings concerning perception, embodiment, and social interaction and linguistics throies concerning semantics and pragmantic [EMNLP findings 2025]
• How AI systems can achieve better language understanding through grounding
• How to design more efficient AI systems with greater cognitive plausibility by leveraging multimodal data and multimodal training approaches

NLP → Linguistics and Cognitive Science

• What AI systems can tell us about human conceptual representation and knowledge organization
• What cognitively plausible AI systems can reveal about language acquisition and processing

I have also worked on NLP for language and cultural studies, and I am broadly interested in:

• Developing useful tools to quantify linguistic features
• Applying NLP methods to support cultural studies

I have completed three language-related internships, including NLP Algorithm Engineer for AI Safety at Tencent, Linguistic Specialist at ByteDance, and AI Strategy Product Manager (TTS) at Xiaomi.

Outside of academics, I enjoy practicing karate and taking walks in nature.