Yunshi Lan (兰韵诗)
School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University (ECNU)
Address: 3663 North ZhongshanRd, Putuo District, Shanghai, China
Office: Western Room x115, Mathematics Building
Email: yslan [at] dase.ecnu.edu.cn

About Me ([GitHub] [Google Scholar]

I am currently an Associate Professor at the School of Data Science & Engineering, East China Normal University (ECNU). Before that, I was a research scientist at LARC, Singapore Management University (SMU). I obtained my Ph.D degree from School of Computing & Information System, Singapore Management University. I was trained (by my amazing supervisor Prof. Jing Jiang and secondary supervisor Prof. Feida Zhu) to be a NLP researcher. I received my Bachelor degree from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Southwest University (SWU).

Research Interest

My recent research interest mainly includes knowledge bases, question answering, information extraction, text generation, deep learning and large language models.
I am looking for self-motivated students with strong programming skill to work with me. Please read this FAQ before emailing me!
2025年研究生招生已满，2026年获得华师大数据学院保研/考研录用的同学欢迎联系我

News

         [2024]
  • 2024-12: One paper about LLM evaluation was accepted by AAAI 2025; We won the First Price in Financial GraphRAG Competition.
  • 2024-11: Two papers about Grammatical Error Correction were accepted by COLING 2025.
  • 2024-09: Two papers about FL were accepted by ICDM 2024; Two papers about Relation Extraction and Peer Reviewing were accepted by EMNLP 2024.
  • 2024-07: One paper about multi-modal LLMs was accepted by ECCV 2024；One paper about NL2GQL was accepted by CIKM 2024.
  • 2024-05: One demo paper about Finance QA system was accepted by ECML PKDD 2024.
  • 2024-04: One survey paper about multi-modal LLMs was accepted by IJCAI 2024.
  • 2024-03: One paper about automated scoring was accepted by AIED 2024.
  • 2024-02: One paper about text simplification was accepted by COLING 2024.
         [2023]
  • 2023-12: We won the Best Innovation Award in Yangtze River Delta Fintech Innovation & Application Global Competition.
  • 2023-10: Two papers about Question Answering and Chain-of-Thought were accepted by EMNLP 2023.
  • 2023-09: One paper about FL was accepted by NeurIPS 2023.
  • 2023-08: One paper about Chinese Grammar Error Correction dataset was accepted by ACM CIKM 2023.
  • 2023-07: One paper about Knowledge Base Visual Question Answering was accepted by ACM MM 2023.
  • 2023-06: Rank First in the evaluation of NLPCC2023 Shared Task 8: Chinese Spelling Check.
  • 2023-05: Three papers about Question Answering, Math Word Problem Solving were accepted by ACL 2023.
  • 2023-04: One paper about FL was accepted by CVPR 2023.

Research Highlights ([Full List])

Question Answering

We have developed question answering systems under different scenarios. For Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), we proposed different methods to improve the accuracy of answering questions over passages [AAAI'20; ACL'23]. For Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA), we investegated and improved different modules in the QA framework, which achieve SOTA results in a variety of scenarios (e.g., simple questions [IJCAI'19], complex questions [WSDM'20; ACL'20; ACL'23], conversational questions [ACL'21]). For Question Answering with Databases, we explored to generate complex questions in a specific domain [EMNLP'23; AAAI'25] and align Large Language Models (LLMs) to a domain-specific database [CIKM'24]. For Multi-modal Question Answering, we discussed the applications of LLMs and its safety issue [MM'23; IJCAI'24;ECCV'24].
There are surveys [TKDE'22] you can start with. We have demonstration pages [Demonstration Page (only works within ECNU)] that you can try on!

Educational NLP

We have worked on the educational NLP tasks, such as Math Word Problem (MWP) solving [AAAI demo'22; ACL'23; EMNLP Finding'23], Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) [NLPCC'23], Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) [CIKM'23;COLING'25;NAACL'25], Text Simplification [COLING'24], and Essay Scoring [AIED'24;EMNLP Finding'24].
There are surveys [ArXiv] you can start with.

Selected Papers

(* indicates equal contribution, # indicates corresponding author)

Grants

  • Jan. 2023 - Dec. 2025: Knowledge Base Question Answering System in Interactive Environments
    National Science Foundation of China, PI
  • Jan. 2024 - Dec. 2027: Intelligent Low Carbon Oriented Theories and Critical Techniques for Perception and inference of Cross-Border Electric Power Trading Big Data
    National Science Foundation of China, ECNU PI
  • Oct. 2022 - Sep. 2024: Knowledge Base Construction and Question Answering for an Education Intelligent Platform
    Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program, PI (Completed)
  • July. 2022 - Dec. 2023: Online Education Toolkit and Platform Development for International Chinese Education
    East China Normal University, PI (Completed)
  • Aug. 2023 - Dec. 2023: Financial KBQA collaborating with Large Language Models
    Joint Reseach Program with Guotai Junan Securities, PI (Completed)
  • Sep. 2023 - Dec. 2024: Question Answering System in PolarDB Community
    Joint Reseach Program with Alibaba Cloud, ECNU Co-PI (Completed)
  • Jan. 2024 - Dec. 2025: Researches on International Education of Chinese and Computer Science with LLMs
    East China Normal University, PI
  • Jan. 2024 - Dec. 2028: Researches on Knowledge Mining based on Scientific Data and Literature
    National Science Foundation of China, ECNU PI
  • Oct. 2024 - Oct. 2025: Text2SQL over Electric Power Trading Big Databases
    Joint Reseach Program with Tellhow Sci-tech Co., Ltd., PI
  • Jan. 2025 - Dec. 2026: Research on Intelligent Language Education Agent
    National Science Foundation of China & The Royal Society, PI
  • Jan. 2025 - Dec. 2026: Research on Intelligent CFL Education Agent
    the Ministry of Education of Shanghai, PI

Teaching

  • Deep Learning
    for both undergraduate students and postgraduate students
    2024 Spring Deep Learning (Undergraduate)
    2025 Spring Deep Learning (Undergraduate)

Professional Service

  • I serve as an Area chair in ARR
  • I have served as a session chair in EMNLP 2023
  • I regularly serve as the reviewer of ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, IJCAI

Invited Talk

  • Tutorial on EducationalNLP.
    Palermo, Italy, 2025 AIED (2025.07)
  • Invited Talk on Stuctured Data Management via Large Language Models.
    Xi'an, 2024 CCF ChinaSoft (2024.11)
  • Invited Talk on Applications of Large Language Models on Finance Domain.
    ECNU (2023.12)
  • Invited Talk on Knowledge-based Question Answering with Large Language Models. [Slides]
    NUST, NLP Group (2023.11)
    SCU, NLP Group (2023.12)

Mentoring Experience

PhD students

  • Yuanyuan Liang
  • Wenbiao Tao
  • Yuan Liu

Master students

  • Zeyu Sheng (ByteDance, Shanghai); Xuyao Hu (Xiecheng, Shanghai); Yuze Huang (Xiecheng, Shanghai); Yuxuan Huang (Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shanghai)
  • Keren Tan (Shanghai excellent graduate student 2024) (Guotai Junan Securities, Shanghai); Jiani Wang (Midea, Shanghai); Lei Pan(AISPEECH, Shanghai)
  • Xin Liu; Hanyue Du; Alex Xiang Li (BiliBili, Shanghai)
  • Hanlun Zhu; Yike Zhao; Xiaoman Wang
  • Qinwen Chen; Xinyuan Li; Qianyu Wang

Undergraduate students

  • Qingyuan Tian (CIKM 2023; EMNLP Finding 2023) (PhD candidate, SJTU)