Ziru Chen

Ron | 陈子如 | チン シジョ
The Ohio State University
C.V.      chen.8336@osu.edu
ronch99      @RonZiruChen

I am a Ph.D. student at OSU SunLab advised by Prof. Huan Sun. My research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Conversational AI, and Human-Computer Interaction. I'm currently interested in:
  • Interactive Language Agents: Large langauge models (LLMs) have achieved astonishing results on various tasks. With LLMs, I'm particularly interested in building language agents that can autonomously plan for their tasks, refine their answers, and memorize task-specific knowledge. Moreover, I value the human-centered nature of language agents: although they excel at instruction following, how can we enable them to proactively collaborate with human users? When would users prefer such agents over other mature (e.g. GUI-based) tools for their tasks, such as database browsing and web navigation?
  • Active and Continual Learning: The development of language agents is never a one-time effort. After the initial depolyment, how can we teach models to solve new problems via trial-and-error and learn from their mistakes? How to adapt models to novel language uses, especially those not covered in the training corpus? How to turn general agents into more personalized assistants according to the users' preference?
  • Reliability and Explainability: While LLMs are powerful, they also make silly mistakes here and there. How can we enable models to better calibrate their predictions and explain them in natural language? How to prevent LLMs from giving undesired responses (e.g. misinformation, hallucination, social bias)?
I am also interested in human languages themselves and philosophy. So far, I can speak Chinese, English, Japanese (JLPT N2), and some elementary Korean. My favorite quote is “Cogito, ergo sum.” (or in English, “I think. Therefore, I am.”) by René Descartes.

News

  • 10/2023: 2 papers on text-to-SQL parsing and 1 paper on LLM attribution evaluation accepted at EMNLP 2023.
  • 07/2023: Our TacoBot report is accepted as a demo paper at SIGDIAL 2023.
  • 05/2023: 1 paper accepted at ACL 2023 and 3 preprints out on Arxiv.
  • 06/2022: Won the 3rd place in Alexa Prize TaskBot Challege as a student co-lead! Check out our report.
  • 04/2022: Excited to receive the Undergraduate Research Award from OSU CSE Department!
  • 02/2022: Thrilled to receive the University Fellowship as an incoming Ph.D. student!
  • 05/2021 - 07/2021: Had some fun time at Deep Learning Lab, Westlake University as a Research Intern.
  • 04/2021: Excited to receive the CIS Undrgrad Scholarship from OSU CSE Department!

Honors and Awards

  • University Fellowship, The Ohio State University, 2022 - 2023 & 2026 - 2027
  • 3rd Place (Student Co-lead of Team TacoBot), 1st Alexa Prize Taskbot Challenge, Amazon, 2022
  • Undergraduate Research Award, The Ohio State University, 2022
  • CIS Undergrad Scholarship, The Ohio State University, 2021 - 2022

Teaching


Selected Publications

Please check out my Google Scholar for a complete list of publications.


Interesting TMI

* TMI is a Korean short-hand of "Too Much Information," which roughly refers to fun facts that could have not been shared ;)
I was born on Thanksgiving that year.
My first name in Japanese sounds like "to wash feet" in Chinese.
My MBTI is INTJ.