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Language Technology Group (LT)
Department of InformaticsLanguage Technology Group (LT)

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Language Technology

Xintong Wang

Name: Xintong Wang       
Position: Ph.D. Candidate
Email: xintong.wang@uni-hamburg.de
Phone: +49 40 42883-2322
Office: Monday and Friday at HCDS, Tuesday to Thursday at LT
Address:

Informatikum, Vogt-Kölln-Straße 30, 22527 Hamburg

[Curriculum Vitae] We are hiring student assistants. Self-motivated students with experience in NLP or VLP are welcome. I am always open to collaborations!

I am a forth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hamburg (Universität Hamburg/Exzellenzuniversitäten), Language Technology Group, advised by Prof. Dr. Chris Biemann, who is the best supervisor I've ever had. My research is supported by DFG Project Crossmodal Learning for Improving Human Reading. Before I join LT group, I got the M.Eng. and B.Eng. in Computer Science at the South China University of Technology (Double First-Class Universities and Disciplines) in 2019 and 2016 respectively. I have worked with Prof. Wenjie Li (She taught me how to do research and be critical.) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Prof. Min Yang (She introduced NLP to me.) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, I also collaborate with Dr. Ding Liang, from whom I got a lot of valuable advice.

Research Interests:

I have broad interests in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in cross-modal learning and natural language generation.

  • Truthfulness, safeness and explainable Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Parameter-efficient fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLP Models)
  • Hallucination mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs)

News:

  • Dec. 2024: I will serve as an area chair for ACL ARR!
  • Nov. 2024: One paper accepted to COLING 2025!
  • May 2024: One paper accepted to ACL Findings 2024!
  • Mar. 2024: One paper accepted to NeusymBridge at LREC-COLING 2024!
  • Aug. 2023: Co-organizer of CLEF-2024 SemEval Task: Multilingual Text Detoxification.
  • Jul. 2023: One paper accepted to ECAI 2023!
  • Jun. 2023: Invited talk at the University of Wuppertal.
  • Dec. 2022: Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
  • May 2022: One paper accepted to LREC 2022!
  • Apr. 2021: Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Hamburg.

Projects: SFB TRR 169 Project C7: Crossmodal Learning for Improving Human Reading. 

               Funded by German Research Foundation: 05.2020 - 12.2024, Doctoral Researcher

Selected Publications during PhD: [Full Publication List]

         2025

  • Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Amit Ronen, Abinew Ali Ayele, Naquee Rizwan, Florian Schneider, Xintong Wang, Seid Muhie Yimam, Daniil Alekhseevich Moskovskiy, Elisei Stakovskii, Eran Kaufman, Ashraf Elnagar, Animesh Mukherjee and Alexander Panchenko. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) (CORE Rank A).
  • Xintong Wang, Yixiao Liu, Jingheng Pan, and Chris BIemann, Mitigating Biases in Chinese Toxic Language via Sentiment Polarity Consistent Rewrites: Benchmark and Evaluation, Preprint.
  • Xintong Wang, Jingheng Pan, Longqin Jiang, Liang Ding, Xingshan Li, and Chris Biemann, CogSteer: Cognition-Inspired Selective Layer Intervention for Efficient Semantic Steering in Large Language Models, Preprint. [PDF]

         2024

  • Xintong Wang, Jingheng Pan, Liang Ding, and Chris Biemann, Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Instruction Contrastive Decoding, Findings of  the Association for Computational Linguistic 2024. (ACL 2024). (CORE Rank A*)
  • Xintong Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Xingshan Li, and Chris Biemann. Probing Language Models from A Human Behavioral Perspective. Proceedings of Bridging Neurons and Symbols for Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs Reasoning (Neusymbridge) at the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024).

         2023

  • Xintong Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Liang Ding, Sanyuan Zhao, and Chris Biemann. Using Self-Supervised Dual Constraint Contrastive Learning for Cross-modal Retrieval. European Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2023. (ECAI 2023). (CORE Rank A - 24%)

         2022

  • Xintong Wang*, Florian Schneider*, Özge Alaçam, Prateek Chaudhury, and Chris Biemann. MOTIF: Contextualized Images for Complex Words to Improve Human Reading. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2022. (LREC 2022). (CORE Rank B)  [MOTIF Dataset]

Teaching:

  • Instructor: Master Course: Exercises Statistical Methods of Language Technology, Summer 2025
  • Co-instructor: Bachelor Course Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing, Winter 2024
  • Project Mentor: Master Project Web Interfaces for Language Processing Systems, Summer 2022, 2023.
  • Co-instructor: Master Course Natural Language for the Web Winter semester, Winter 2020.

Supervision:

          Master Theses:

  • Xiaoyu Li, MSc, at Technische Universität Berlin & Beijing Institute of Technology, 06.03.2024
    • Thesis: Methods towards Understanding and Application of Foundation Models
  • Fabian Meyer MSc, at Universität Hamburg, 16.04.2023
    • Thesis: On the Potential and Limits of Zero-Shot Out-of-Distribution of Detection
  • Anton Orell Wiehe, MSc, at Universität Hamburg, 10.07.2022
    • Thesis: Domain Adaptation for Multi-Modal Foundation Models
  • Matthew Ng Cher-Wai, MSc, at Universität Hamburg, 06.06.2022
    • Thesis: Multi-modal Fictional Backstory Generation using Transformer-Aspect-Backstory Generator
  • Ankit Srivastava, MSc, at Universität Hamburg, 13.03.2022
    • Thesis: Complex Word Identification for Language Learners
  • Florian Schneider,  MSc, at Universität Hamburg, 27.07.2021
    • Thesis: Self-Supervised Multi-Modal Text-Image Retrieval Methods to Improve Human Reading

          Research Assistants and Interns:

  • Longqin Jiang, MSc, Research assistant, at Universität Hamburg, 01.05.2024 - Current
    • Topic: Trustful and Explainable Large Language Models
  • Yixiao Liu, BSc, Remote intern, at Southwest University, 01.10.2023 - Current
    • Topic: Mitigating Biases in Chinese Toxic Language
  • Jingheng Pan, MSc, Research assistant, at Universität Hamburg, 15.09.2023 - Current
    • Topic:  Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models
  • Xiaoyu Li, MSc, Research assistant, at Technische Universität Berlin, 01.10.2022 - 30.09.2023
    • Topic: Dual Constraint Contrastive in Cross-modal Retrieval
  • Prateek Chaudhury BSc, Remote intern, at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, 01.06.2021 - 31.08.2021
    • Topic: Reading Material Analysis for Second Language Learners

Professional Activities:

  • Invited Talk: Probing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Predicting Human Behavioral Data, June 2022, University of Wuppertal
  • Area Chair: ARR, ACL 25'
  • Conference Reviewer: ACL 25', EMNLP 25', NAACL 25', COLING 25', AISTATS 25', EMNLP 24', NeurIPS 24', ECCV 24', ACM MM 24', ACL 24', LREC-COLING 24', CVPR24', AACL23', EMNLP 23', ECAI 23', ACM MM23', ACL23‘, EACL 22', AACL 22', EMNLP 22', EMNLP 21', ACL 21', NAACL 21', IJCAI 21' (Senior PC), ACL 20', EMNLP 20', AACL-IJCNLP 20', EMNLP-IJCNLP 19', NLPCC 19'
  • Journal Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), IEEE Access