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Education, teaching and service, publications, and talks.
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 |
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.
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.
Publications
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2026 - 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.
- Li, N., & Zhan, W. Polarity Shift in the “bù ‘not’ + Adj./Verb” Construction. Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2024), LNAI 15552, 340–354. Springer.
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2024 - Xiao, L., Hu, N., Zhan, W., Qin, Y., Deng, S., Sun, C., Cai, Q., & Li, N. Overview of CCL24-Eval Task 3: The Fourth Evaluation on Chinese Spatial Cognition. CCL 2024 (Evaluations), 122–134. Taiyuan, China.
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2023 - Xiao, L., Zhan, W., Sui, Z., Qin, Y., Sun, C., Xing, D., Li, N., Zhu, F., & Wang, P. Overview of CCL23-Eval Task 4: The 3rd Chinese Spatial Cognition Evaluation. CCL 2023 (Evaluations), 150–158. Harbin, China.
- Xiao, L., Sun, C., Zhan, W., Xing, D., Li, N., Wang, C., & Zhu, F. A Quality Assessment Report of the Chinese Spatial Cognition Evaluation Benchmark. CCL 2023, 547–558. Harbin, China.
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2020 - Li, N. Acoustic Analysis of Single-word Tones and Two-word Changed Tones in Ganzhou Dialect. ChinaXiv:202011.00035.
Talks and Presentations
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Aug 2026 Personal Interpretations as Pragmatic Label Variation: Perspectivist Grounding Annotation and (V)LLM Evaluation
HLV-DP workshop (Human Label Variation in Discourse and Pragmatic phenomena), ESSLLI 2026, Prague, Czech Republic — long talk, 12 August -
Aug 2026 Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue
SIGDIAL 2026, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA — oral, 5 August -
May 2026 Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask
LREC 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain — oral -
Nov 2025 DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning
4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives), EMNLP 2025, Suzhou, China — poster -
Oct 2025 Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask
DeMeVa Year 3 Workshop, Utrecht University
Selected Awards and Scholarships
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2023 - China National Scholarship, Ministry of Education
- 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
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.
- Annotation schemes that record speaker intent and addressee interpretation separately.
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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
- Whether models track how grounding develops in a dialogue or rely on static referential cues.
- Evaluation design for multimodal reasoning about shared understanding.