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). I am leading the LANG (LAnguage and kNowledGe) Lab. 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

The recent research interest of our lab mainly includes evaluation, benchmark, and alignment of large language models.
<= Welcome to follow us on RedNote (小红书).
I am looking for self-motivated students with strong programming skill to work with me. Please read this FAQ before emailing me!
欢迎2027年获得华师大数据学院保研/考研录用的同学联系我

News

         [2025]
  • 2025-09: One paper about EduNLP survey for the NLP techinuques in Education Domain was accepted by TKDE ;
  • 2025-05: Two paper about RAG for the real-time community QA and Knowledge Editing were accepted by ACL 2025 ;
  • 2025-03: One tutorial about EducationalNLP was accepted by AIED 2025;
  • 2025-01: One paper about Visual GEC was accepted by NAACL 2025;
         [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])

Agent & Alignment & Industrial

We have developed agents and alignment algorithms under different industrial scenarios. 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 [WSDM'20; ACL'20; ACL'23]. For Question Answering with Databases, we explored to align Large Language Models (LLMs) to a domain-specific database [EMNLP'23; CIKM'24; ; AAAI'25]. For Multi-modal Question Answering, we discussed the applications of LLMs and its safety issue [MM'23; IJCAI'24;ECCV'24]. For LLM-based agents, we explored function tool calling [ICLR'26]
There are surveys [TKDE'22] you can start with. We have demonstration pages [Demonstration Page (only works within ECNU)] that you can try on!

Cross-lingual & Low-resource & Educational

We have worked on the educational NLP tasks, such as Math Word Problem (MWP) solving [AAAI demo'22; ACL'23; EMNLP Finding'23], Writing Correction Assistant [COLING'25;COLING'25;NAACL'25], Difficulty-controllable Writing [COLING'24;EACL'26], and Essay Scoring [AIED'24;EMNLP Finding'24].
There are surveys [TKDE'25] you can start with. We have online websites [国际中文教育知识图谱 (account: guest; passcode: guest), 中介语智能批改 and 水杉中文 (only with authorized access)] in service for CFL teaching and learning!

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 (Completed)
  • 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 Language Education Agent
    the Ministry of Education of Shanghai, PI
  • Jun. 2025 - Dec. 2025: Knowldge Base Construction for CFL learner
    Center for Language Education and Cooperation, Participants (Completed)
  • Oct. 2025 - Sep. 2027: Research on Key Techinuqes for CFL Education
    East China Normal University, PI
  • Dec. 2025 - Nov. 2027: Database Construction for CFL Education
    Shanghai Data Bureau, PI
  • Dec. 2025 - Dec. 2026: Test Case Generation for Database via LLMs
    Joint Reseach Program with TeleDB, PI
  • Jun. 2026 - Jul. 2026: Evaluation of LLMs on ASR in Shanghaiese
    Joint Reseach Program with Alibaba, PI
  • Aug. 2026 - Oct. 2027: Finance Event Simulating via Agents
    Joint Reseach Program with Guotai Haitong Securities, PI

Teaching


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 Multi-modality Techniques on Language Learning.
    Chengdu, China, 2026 China National Computer Congress (2026.10)
  • Tutorial on EducationalNLP.
    Palermo, Italy, 2025 AIED (2025.07)
  • Tutorial on 水杉中文.
    Confucius Institutes, Turino, Italy (2025.06)
  • 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 (Assistant Research Fellow, ECNU, Shanghai)
  • Wenbiao Tao
  • Yuan Liu
  • Xinchen Ma
  • Xiaoman Wang

Master students

  • Keren Tan (Shanghai excellent graduate student 2024) (Guotai Junan Securities, Shanghai); Jiani Wang (Midea, Shanghai); Lei Pan(AISPEECH, Shanghai)
  • Xin Liu (PhD candidate, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi); Hanyue Du (Shanghai excellent graduate student 2025) (CMCC, Shanghai); Alex Xiang Li (BiliBili, Shanghai)
  • Hanlun Zhu (National Scholarship 2025) (ByteDance, Shanghai); Yike Zhao (Echo Tech, Shanghai); Xiaoman Wang (National Scholarship 2025) (PhD candidate, ECNU)
  • Qinwen Chen; Xinyuan Li; Qianyu Wang
  • Xuanjun Zong; Yuxuan Lin; Shihao Zhang
  • Wei Zeng; Biao Jin; Shuimu Wang

Undergraduate students

  • Qingyuan Tian (CIKM 2023; EMNLP Finding 2023) (PhD candidate, SJTU)
  • Yufei Gao (ICLR@DATA-FM 2025; IJCAI 2026) (Master student, FDU)
  • Shuhuan Gu (EACL 2026) (Master student, CAS)
  • Qiyuan Xiao; Shuai Li