Yingjia Wan

Master’s student in Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge

About

Yingjia Wan (Alisa Wan) is a master’s student in NLP at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Ivan Vulić and Prof Anna Korhonen. Her research interests include multimodal NLP, prompting, debiasing language models, and the intersection of NLP and cognitive science. Her master’s dissertation was on multimodal prompting with human cognition signals on language models. Before that, she graduated top of the cohort as a valedictorian from the University of Macau, with a B.A. in English and a minor in Computer Science.

Interests

Multimodal Learning
Prompting
Aligning Cognition with NLP
Debiasing Large Language Models

Education

MPhil in Linguistics (NLP track), 2022-2023
University of Cambridge, UK
Funded Exchange, 2019-2020
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
B.A. in English Studies, 2017-2021
University of Macau, Macao S.A.R., China

Publications

Yingjia Wan, Ivan Vulić (2023). Multimodal Tuning with Human Cognition Data as Prompts. (Master’s Dissertation).

Yingjia Wan, Matthew Wallace (2022). Reading-While-Listening vs. Reading-Only in A Second Language at Different Language Proficiencies: an Eye-Tracking Study. In AsiaTEFL 2022 (also presented at The LELPG Conference 2023 at the University of Edinburgh).

PDF

Sarah Stilwell, Anjli Narwani, Jessica Pelton, Xi Zhang, Qi Zeng, Qi Zhao, Yingjia Wan, Kevin Miller (2021). Pedagogy in a Pandemic: College Instructor Perspectives on Online Instruction during COVID-19 at Universities in USA and China. In AERA 2022 Annual Meeting.

Link

Research Experience

Research Student

Language Technology Lab (LTL), Uniersity of Cambridge

February 2022 – Present Cambridge, UK

Topic: Enriching Language Models with Human Cognition Data via Multi-Modal Prompt-based Finetuning.

Content:

Explored both hard and soft prompting methods to introduce cognition signals into SOTA language models;
Designed a multimodal mapping framework ‘CogMAP’ (Cognition Mapping And Prompting);
Acquired a robustly large performance gain with both eye-tracking and EEG signals on CogMAP.

Research Assistant

Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Uniersity of Macau

January 2021 – February 2022 Macao S.A.R, China

Topic: Examining Bilinguals’ Cognitive Attention to Content Words During Listening Assessments.

Content:

Used Praat to locate and extract the trial-specific speech data duration;
Wrote code to align temporal gaze data with speech data, extracting word-level fixation hits;
Analysed the correlation between gaze variables and L2 proficiency level.

Research Intern

Department of Computer Science & of Psychology, University of Macau

July 2019 – December 2020 Macao S.A.R, China

Topic: Applying NLP in Developmental Psychology.

Content:

Dataset collection and annotation;
Trained a Bi-LSTM on sequence classification of growth mindsets;
Analysed individuals’ growth mindsets and socio-economic status in correlation with their lexical usage patterns.