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About Me

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Nice to meet you! I'm a final-year student at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), double majoring in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. My research interests focus on how AI understands and applies human language. Outside of academics, I'm passionate about outdoor activities, writing, and playing music. I serve as first flute in the PolyU Orchestra and have performed at various music festivals and concerts. If we share similar interests, feel free to reach out—I would be glad to connect with you!

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Education

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2022.8 - 2026.7

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

B.A. Linguistics & Translation
Secondary Major in Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics

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Publications

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EMNLP 2025

PhonoThink: Improving Large Language Models' Reasoning on Chinese Phonological Ambiguities

Jianfei Ma, Zhaoxin Feng, Emmanuele Chersoni, Huacheng Song, Ziqi Zhang

BlackboxNLP 2025

From BERT to LLMs: Comparing and Understanding Chinese Classifier Prediction in Language Models

Ziqi Zhang, Jianfei Ma, Emmanuele Chersoni, Jieshun You, Zhaoxin Feng

Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language 2026

Pitch Elevation on Wh-Words in Cantonese Spontaneous Speech

Zhang, Z., Xu, A., & Hsu, Y. Y.

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Projects

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BenchmarkMultilingualCoT

IntEx-Bench: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark

Designed a 7,000+ entry multilingual benchmark with dual evaluation framework — zero-shot CoT for explicit reasoning and contextual embedding extraction for implicit representation. Developed Semantic Feature-CoT framework to enhance compound word interpretability.

Project Leader & First Author · Oct 2025 – Feb 2026
EEG-fMRICognitive ScienceLLM

Cognitive Processing in Healthy Aging — An EEG-fMRI Study

Extracted Surprisal and Entropy features from LLMs and aligned them with neuroimaging data to explore how computational linguistic indicators predict brain processing mechanisms across the lifespan.

Research Assistant · PolyU & HKU · Mar 2026 – Present
MultimodalHealthcareNLP+CV

Intelligent Health Monitoring System (Multimodal LLMs)

Designed an elder care system integrating NLP, speech recognition, and computer vision. Advanced to Hong Kong Regional Finals of the China International College Students' Innovation Competition 2024.

Project Member · CUHK · May 2024 – Sep 2024
PhoneticsSpeechPython

Cantonese Spontaneous Speech Corpus & Phonetics Research

Analyzed 40K+ interrogative sentences from Common Voice and OpenSLR. Built automated pipeline for batch audio analysis using Python, Praat, and Montreal Forced Aligner. Applied Linear Mixed-Effects Models for statistical analysis.

Project Leader · PolyU & HIT (Shenzhen) · May 2025 – Dec 2025
Syntactic AnalysisProbingPsycholinguistics

Mechanisms of LLMs in Processing Ambiguous Sentences

Constructed a 1,000+ Garden-path sentence dataset. Used Dependency-Trained Probes for deep syntactic analysis and minicons library for token-level log probability evaluation.

Research Assistant · PolyU · Aug 2025 – Dec 2025
Course DesignLanguage ScienceAI

Teaching Plan Development Project of Techniques in Language Science Course

Contributed to the development and writing of the teaching plan for Techniques in Language Science (CBS4953), offered by the LST Department. Introduced interdisciplinary topics integrating cognitive linguistics with AI.

Student Assistant · PolyU · May 2025 – Jun 2025
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Beyond Research

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First Flute — PolyU Orchestra

Tsinghua-PolyU joint concert soloist · HKGNA 2024 Music Festival

First Flute · 2023 – Present

Volunteer Teacher — Cambodia

Teaching AI tools & coding with Scratch and Google Teachable Machine

Volunteer Teacher · Cambodia

Southeast University Summer Research Camp

Completed studies, field trips, and research activities on economics, history, and culture at Southeast University

Jun 2024 – Jul 2024