I am an Applied Scientist at Amazon AWS, working in the Bedrock Core Science team. I was a Ph.D. student in Prof. Jiawei Han’s Data Mining Group (DMG) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I obtained my M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. with a dual degree in Computer Science and Mathematics also at UIUC. My research interests lie in text mining, especially for mining structured knowledge from unstructured text data with minimal supervision.

News

• [2025.08] Two papers are accepted by EMNLP 2025 on LLM-Guided Scientific Paper Retrieval and Logically-Informed Retrieval.
• [2025.07] I have passed my Ph.D. final defense! Many thanks to my thesis committee: Prof. Jiawei Han, Prof. Tarek Abdelzaher, Prof. Hanghang Tong, and Dr. Xin Luna Dong.
• [2025.05] Three papers are accepted by ACL 2025 with 2 in main and 1 in findings: Unsupevised Episode Detection, LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction, and Instruction Tuning for Taxonomy Construction!
• [2025.01] One paper on Hierarchical Text Classification with LLMs is accepted by WWW 2025!
• [2024.12] Two tutorials are accepted by WWW 2025 and SDM 2025!
• [2024.10] I have passed my prelimenary exam!
• [2024.09] One paper on Semantic Indexing for Academic Paper Search is accepted by EMNLP 2024!

Education

• Ph.D. (2021-2025) in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Han

• M.S. (2019-2021) in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [Thesis]
  Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Han

• B.S. (2015-2019) dual degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  Graduated with Highest Honor & Bronze Tablet

Contact

• Email: zhangyy114[at]gmail[dot]com