About

I have been a postdoc at King's College London in Natural Language Processing since Feb 2023, funded by EPSRC. My advisors are Dr. Lin Gui and Prof. Yulan He. My research interests lie in the areas of natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on narrative understanding and interactive AI applications. I holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an MSc in Data Science from the University of Warwick. I also earned her BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.


Research interests:

News

Attending the LLM evaluation workshop

Nov 2023, Attending the LLM evaluation workshop at The Alan Turing Institute. Yulan presented our work on NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding.

Presenting at Cambridge

Oct 2023, Presenting our work on NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding at Cambridge.

Attending the ACL 2023

July 2023, Attending the ACL 2023 and present our work on Tracking Brand-Associated Polarity-Bearing Topics in User Reviews.

Attending the London University Diplomatic Summit 2023

June 2023, Attending a panel discussion on the topic of Fake News and Global Health and specifically misinformation and disinformation, exploring their potential impacts on global health and possible solutions.

Attending the UK AI Fellows Conference 2023

May 2023, Attending the UK AI Fellows Conference 2023 and present our work on CONE and OverPrompt.

Attending the EACL 2023

May 2023, Attending the EACL 2023 and present our work on PANACEA: An Automated Misinformation Detection System on COVID-19.

Publication

Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives

R. Zhao, Q.Zhu, H.Xu, J.Li, Y.Zhou, Y. He, & L. Gui., Feb 2024, Preprint.

Existing datasets for narrative understanding often fail to represent the complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Conan, designed for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narratives. 

we construct OpenToM, a new benchmark for assessing N-ToM with (1) longer and clearer narrative stories, (2) characters with explicit personality traits, (3) actions that are triggered by character intentions, and (4) questions designed to challenge LLMs' capabilities of modeling characters' mental states of both the physical and psychological world. 

NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding

R. Zhao, W. Zhang, J. Li, L. Zhu, Y.Li,. Y. He, & L. Gui., Feb 2024, Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations.

NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or increase affinity with other characters through conversations.

NarrativePlay: An Automated System for Crafting Visual Worlds in Novels for Role-Playing

R. Zhao, W. Zhang, J. Li, L. Zhu, Y.Li,. Y. He, & L. Gui., Feb 2024, Proceedings of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: System Demonstrations.

We introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. 

OverPrompt: Enhancing ChatGPT through Efficient In-Context Learning

J. Li, R. Zhao, Y. He, & L. Gui., Dec 2023, NeurIPS 2023 R0-FoMo Workshop.

We propose to leverage the in-context learning capability of LLMs to handle multiple task inputs, thereby reducing token and time costs. This could potentially improve task performance during API queries due to better conditional distribution mapping. 

Are NLP Models Good at Tracing Thoughts: An Overview of Narrative Understanding

L. Zhu, R. Zhao, L.Gui, & Y. He., Dec 2023, Findings of EMNLP.

We conduct a comprehensive survey of narrative understanding tasks and the potential of modularized LLMs to address novel narrative understanding tasks. 

Cone: Unsupervised Contrastive Opinion Extraction

Zhao, R., Gui, L. & He, Y., Jul 2023, The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR). ACM.

Contrastive opinion extraction aims to extract a structured summary or key points organised as positive and negative viewpoints towards a common aspect or topic.

We propose a novel semi-supervised approach for vaccine attitude detection, called VADET. A variational autoencoding architecture based on language models is employed to learn from unlabelled data the topical information of the domain. 

Some Observations on Fact-Checking Work with Implications for Computational Support

Procter R., Arana-Catania M., He Y., Liakata M., Zubiaga A., Kochkina E. & Zhao, R., Jun 2023, The 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: News Media and Computational Journalism Workshop.

In this work, we present the results of interviews with eight members of fact-checking teams from two organisations. Team members described their fact-checking processes and the challenges they currently face in completing a fact-check in a robust and timely way. 

PANACEA: An Automated Misinformation Detection System on COVID-19

Zhao, R., Arana-catania, M., Zhu, L., Kochkina, E., Gui, L., Zubiaga, A., Procter, R., Liakata, M. & He, Y., May 2023, Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations.

In this demo, we introduce a web-based misinformation detection system PANACEA on COVID-19 related claims, which has two modules, fact-checking and rumour detection.

Tracking Brand-Associated Polarity-Bearing Topics in User Reviews

Zhao, R., Gui, L., Yan, H. & He, Y., Jan 2023, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics: MIT Press.

In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic Brand-Topic Model (dBTM) which is able to automatically detect and track brand-associated sentiment scores and polarity-bearing topics from product reviews organised in temporally-ordered time intervals.

Adversarial Learning of Poisson Factorisation Model for Gauging Brand Sentiment in User Reviews

Zhao, R., Gui, L., Pergola, G. & He, Y., Apr 2021, Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)

In this paper, we propose the Brand-Topic Model (BTM) which aims to detect brand-associated polarity-bearing topics from product reviews.

Contact

Email: runcong.zhao@kcl.ac.uk

Twitter: @runcongz

Address: N6.11, Bush House, 30 Aldwych, London WC2B 4BG