About Me
I am a Lecturer (=Assistant Professor) in Natural Language Processing at Queen's University Belfast, affiliated with the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Centre for Intelligent Sustainable Computation. I welcome PhD applications in the areas of my research interests and am happy to discuss potential projects.
I was a PhD student and later a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. During the time, I was a GAIL Fellow and a member of the machine translation group, EdinburghNLP, and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation. I also worked at Aveni.ai as a senior research engineer, where we delivered the UK's first LLM for financial services.
Research Interests
- make AI work for complex tasks: long-context modelling, reward modelling, self-improving systems
- make AI work for many languages: machine translation, multilingual multicultural NLP
- measure progress meaningfully: LLM memorization, scalable and reliable benchmarking
- AI/LLMs for finance and coding
Recent Preprints
- Dayyán O'Brien, Barry Haddow, Emily Allaway, and Pinzhen Chen. MatheMagic: Generating dynamic mathematics benchmarks robust to memorization.
- Xiao Zhu, Chenmien Tan, Pinzhen Chen, Rico Sennrich, Yanlin Zhang, and Hanxu Hu. CHARM: Calibrating reward models with Chatbot Arena scores.
- Wenhao Zhu, Pinzhen Chen, Hanxu Hu, Shujian Huang, Fei Yuan, Jiajun Chen, and Alexandra Birch. Generalizing from short to long: Effective data synthesis for long-context instruction tuning.
- Shaoxiong Ji, Zihao Li, Indraneil Paul, Jaakko Paavola, Peiqin Lin, Pinzhen Chen, Dayyán O'Brien, Hengyu Luo, Hinrich Schütze, Jörg Tiedemann, and Barry Haddow. EMMA-500: Enhancing massively multilingual adaptation of large language models.
Experience
- 2025-now, Queen's University Belfast, Assistant Professor
- 2024-2025, University of Edinburgh, Research Associate
- 2024-2025, Aveni.ai, Senior Research Engineer
- 2020-2024, University of Edinburgh, PhD, advised by Kenneth Heafield and Barry Haddow
- 2023, Microsoft, Research Visit
- 2022, Huawei, Research Intern
- 2019, University of Edinburgh, Research Assistant
- 2015-2019, University of Edinburgh, BEng, 1st class & class medal for highest marks
- 2018, Goldman Sachs, Technology Analyst Intern
Website last updated: 24 Mar 2026.