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General Information
| Full Name | Nan Li |
| Position | PhD Candidate, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University |
| Project | DeMeVa — Conflicting Interpretations in Dialogue |
| Advisors | Prof. Massimo Poesio and Prof. Albert Gatt |
| n.li@uu.nl | |
| Languages | Chinese (native), English (proficient), French, Dutch and Russian (basic) |
| Funding | Dutch Research Council (NWO), AiNed Fellowship Grant |
Academic Interests
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Dialogue, grounding, and misunderstanding
- How interlocutors establish common ground in asymmetric collaborative tasks, and how apparent agreement can mask referential misalignment.
- How grounding succeeds or fails, and what kinds of evidence — linguistic, behavioural, visual — reveal it.
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Perspectivism and human label variation
- Modeling disagreement between annotators as signal rather than noise.
- Label distribution learning and in-context approaches to perspective modeling.
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Language and vision-language models
- How far models can approximate the cognitive processes behind human interaction — what an interlocutor believes, intends, and takes to be shared, and how those states are revised as the interaction unfolds.
- What the individual modalities contribute, and how they interact: language, gaze, gesture, and the visual scene each carry partial evidence, and they may reinforce, complement, or contradict one another.
Education
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2024 – present PhD in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands - Department of Information and Computing Sciences.
- Advisors: Prof. Massimo Poesio and Prof. Albert Gatt.
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2021 – 2024 Master in Chinese Linguistics (Chinese Information Processing)
Peking University, Beijing, China - Supervisor: Prof. Weidong Zhan.
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2017 – 2021 Bachelor in Computational Linguistics
Peking University, Beijing, China - Supervisor: Prof. Weidong Zhan.
Selected Publications
The full list is on the publications page.
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2026 - Li, N., Gatt, A., & Poesio, M. Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX. Accepted to the MINT Workshop at EMNLP 2026. arXiv:2609.18011.
- Li, N. Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents. Accepted to the LM Playschool Workshop at EMNLP 2026. arXiv:2608.28458.
- Li, N., Gatt, A., & Poesio, M. Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue. SIGDIAL 2026, 694–710. Atlanta, GA, USA. ACL.
- Li, N., Gatt, A., & Poesio, M. Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask. LREC 2026, 4988–5001. Palma, Mallorca, Spain. ELRA.
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2025 - Ignatev, D., Li, N., Wong, H. M., Dang, A., & Yaschuk, S. K. DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning. NLPerspectives @ EMNLP 2025, 171–181. Suzhou, China. ACL.
Selected Talks
The full list, with slides, is on the presentations page.
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12 Aug 2026 Personal Interpretations as Pragmatic Label Variation: Perspectivist Grounding Annotation and (V)LLM Evaluation
HLV-DP workshop, ESSLLI 2026 · Prague -
5 Aug 2026 Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue
SIGDIAL 2026 · Atlanta -
14 May 2026 Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask
LREC 2026 · Palma de Mallorca
Research Experience
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2024 – present PhD Researcher
Natural Language Processing group, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University · Utrecht, The Netherlands - With Prof. Massimo Poesio and Prof. Albert Gatt, within DeMeVa (NWO AiNed Fellowship Grant).
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2020 – 2024 Research Assistant
Institute of Computational Linguistics (ICL), School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing, China - With Prof. Zhifang Sui and Prof. Weidong Zhan.
Teaching and Service
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Oct 2026 Local Organizer
INLG 2026, the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, Utrecht, The Netherlands — 17–21 October -
2024 – present Instructor, Applications of Machine Learning
Utrecht University, Department of Information and Computing Sciences - Tutorial sessions, academic years 2024–2025 and 2025–2026.
- INFOB3APML, Bachelor 3, 7.5 EC, Period 2.
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2022 – 2023 Technical Assistant
Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL), Peking University - Maintained and curated the CCL Corpus, one of the most widely used Chinese language corpora.
- Contributed to the SpaCE corpus.
Selected Awards and Scholarships
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2023 - National Scholarship, Ministry of Education, China
- Merit Student (14%), Peking University
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2021 – 2024 - First Class Graduate Student Academic Scholarship, Peking University
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2022 / 2023 - Specialized Graduate Student Academic Scholarship, Peking University
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2022 - Excellent Student Leader (1%), Peking University
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2021 - Excellent Graduate, Beijing
- Weiming Scholar, Peking University
- Excellent Graduate, Peking University
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2020 - Merit Student Pacesetter (2%), Peking University