Pinzhen Chen

I am a postdoctoral researcher in School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, where I am also a member of the machine translation group, EdinburghNLP, and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation. I also go by Patrick or 陈品桢.

I work on the High Performance Language Technologies project, specifically on the translation system pipeline and multilingual large language models (LLMs). I occasionally contribute to MaLA and UTTER on LLM multilinguality and evaluation. I am also a senior NLP engineer at Aveni, making large language models for financial services.

Experience

2024-present, University of Edinburgh, Research Associate
2024-present, Aveni.ai, Senior NLP Engineer
2020-2024, University of Edinburgh, PhD supervised by Kenneth Heafield and Barry Haddow
2023, Microsoft Research Asia, Research Visit
2022, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Research Scientist Intern
2019, University of Edinburgh, Research Assistant
2015-2019, University of Edinburgh, BEng Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering. Awarded first class honours and a Class Medal for attaining the top performance in the degree
2018, Goldman Sachs, Technology Analyst Intern

Services

Action Editor/Area Chair
- Association for Computational Linguistics Rolling Review (ARR): 2024
Program Committee/Reviewer
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR): 2025
- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS): 2024
- ACM Computing Surveys: 2024
- Information Processing and Management: 2024
- Conference on Language Modeling (COLM): 2024
- European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI): 2024
- Association for Computational Linguistics Rolling Review (ARR): 2021, 2023, 2024
- Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM): 2022, 2023, 2024
- Financial Support for Third Parties from the Horizon Europe project Unified Transcription and Translation for Extended Reality (UTTER FSTP): 2023
- Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following: 2023
- Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): 2023
- Conference on Machine Translation (WMT): 2021, 2022
- International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval): 2022
Teaching Assistant at University of Edinburgh
- Machine Learning Practical: mentor and marker, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23
- Introductory Applied Machine Learning: marker, 2020-21, 2021-22
- Informatics Research Proposal: tutor, 2020-21
- System Design Project: mentor, 2018-19
Supervision
- Dayyán O'Brien. 2024. Research Intern. Multilingual data processing, as part of the EMMA-500 model's effort.
- Zhanghao Hu, Yijun Yang, and Junjie Xu. 2023. Machine Learning Pratical project on efficient question answering, shortlisted for a best project prize donated by IBM UK and published at LREC-COLING 2024.

Recent research

Preprint

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. 2024. arXiv preprint.
Hanxu Hu*, Simon Yu*, Pinzhen Chen*, and Edoardo M. Ponti. Fine-tuning large language models with sequential instructions. 2024. arXiv preprint.
Shaoxiong Ji and Pinzhen Chen. Lucky 52: How many languages are needed to instruction fine-tune large language models?. 2024. arXiv preprint.

Publications

Yuanchao Li, Pinzhen Chen, Peter Bell, and Catherine Lai. Crossmodal ASR error correction with discrete speech units. 2024. Accepted to the 2024 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop.
Pinzhen Chen, Simon Yu, Zhicheng Guo, and Barry Haddow. Is it good data for multilingual instruction tuning or just bad multilingual evaluation for large language models?. 2024. Accepted to the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
Dawei Zhu, Pinzhen Chen, Miaoran Zhang, Barry Haddow, Xiaoyu Shen, and Dietrich Klakow. Fine-tuning large language models to translate: Will a touch of noisy data in misaligned languages suffice?. 2024. Accepted to the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
Vilém Zouhar*, Pinzhen Chen*, Tsz Kin Lam, Nikita Moghe, and Barry Haddow. Pitfalls and outlooks in using COMET. 2024. Accepted to the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation.
Vivek Iyer, Bhavitvya Malik*, Pavel Stepachev*, Pinzhen Chen, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch. Quality or quantity? On data scale and diversity in adapting large language models for low-resource translation. 2024. Accepted to the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation.
Pinzhen Chen, Zheng Zhao, and Shun Shao. Cher at KSAA-CAD 2024: Compressing words and definitions into the same space for Arabic reverse dictionary. 2024. In Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference.
Nikolay Arefyev, Mikko Aulamo, Pinzhen Chen, Ona de Gibert, Barry Haddow, Jindřich Helcl, Bhavitvya Malik, Gema Ramírez-Sánchez, Pavel Stepachev, Jörg Tiedemann, Dušan Variš, and Jaume Zaragoza. HPLT's first release of data and models. 2024. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation.
Pinzhen Chen, Zhicheng Guo, Barry Haddow, and Kenneth Heafield. Iterative translation refinement with large language models. 2024. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation.
Vivek Iyer, Bhavitvya Malik*, Wenhao Zhu*, Pavel Stepachev*, Pinzhen Chen, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch. Exploring very low-resource translation with LLMs: The University of Edinburgh's submission to AmericasNLP 2024 translation task. 2024. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
Yijun Yang, Jie He, Pinzhen Chen, Victor Gutierrez Basulto, and Jeff Pan. UniArk: Improving generalisation and consistency for factual knowledge extraction through debiasing. 2024. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.
Nikolay Bogoychev, Pinzhen Chen, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch. The ups and downs of large language model inference with vocabulary trimming by language heuristics. 2024. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP.
Zhanghao Hu*, Yijun Yang*, Junjie Xu*, Yifu Qiu, and Pinzhen Chen. EEE-QA: Exploring effective and efficient question-answer representations. 2024. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation.
Zeyu Zhao, Pinzhen Chen, and Peter Bell. Regarding topology and adaptability in differentiable WFST-based E2E ASR. 2024. In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops.
Pinzhen Chen*, Shaoxiong Ji*, Nikolay Bogoychev, Andrey Kutuzov, Barry Haddow, and Kenneth Heafield. Monolingual or multilingual instruction tuning: Which makes a better Alpaca. 2024. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024.
Nikolay Bogoychev* and Pinzhen Chen*. Terminology-aware translation with constrained decoding and large language model prompting. 2023. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation.
Vivek Iyer, Pinzhen Chen, and Alexandra Birch. Towards effective disambiguation for machine translation with large language models. 2023. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation.
Ashok Urlana*, Pinzhen Chen*, Zheng Zhao, Shay B. Cohen, Manish Shrivastava, and Barry Haddow. PMIndiaSum: Multilingual and cross-lingual headline summarization for languages in India. 2023. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023.
Pinzhen Chen and Gerasimos Lampouras. Exploring data augmentation for code generation tasks. 2023. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023.

Personal

I enjoy travelling, cooking, and doing photography. I sometimes play badminton, basketball, as well as board and card games. Thanks for reading this far. Here is the reward for reinforcement—photos of my cat Luckie.