Hi! I am Pingjun, a first-year PhD student (starting September 2025) at the Research Group Data Mining and Machine Learning, University of Vienna, where I will work under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Roth. My research interests lie in explainable natural language processing, human-centered NLP, and cross-lingual information retrieval.

Before that, I completed two Master’s degrees at LMU Munich: an M.A. in Cultural and Cognitive Linguistics (2020–2022) and an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics (2022–2025). From 2024 to 2025, I worked as a research assistant (HiWi) at the MaiNLP lab with Prof. Barbara Plank, focusing on projects in human label variation and information retrieval.

🔥 News

Nov 09, 2025: 🏆 Happy to share that our EMNLP Main paper LiTEx: A Linguistic Taxonomy of Explanations for Understanding Within-Label Variation in Natural Language Inference has been selected as SAC Highlights! Many thanks to all my co-authors.

Nov 04, 2025: 🍁 I will be presenting two posters at EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou: LiTEx and CLIR.

Sep 01, 2025: 🎷 I’ve just started my PhD at the University of Vienna! Excited to dive deeper into Explainable AI (XAI) and see where this journey takes me.

Aug 25, 2025: 🎉 2 paper accepted to EMNLP 2025 (1 main, 1 findings). Looking forward to presenting our work and seeing you all in Suzhou!

Aug 12, 2025: 🎓 I successfully defended my Master’s thesis at LMU.

📝 Publications

EMNLP 2025
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LiTEx: A Linguistic Taxonomy of Explanations for Understanding Within-Label Variation in Natural Language Inference
Pingjun Hong, Beiduo Chen, Siyao Peng, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Barbara Plank

EMNLP 2025
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Evaluating Large Language Models for Cross-Lingual Retrieval
Longfei Zuo, Pingjun Hong, Oliver Kraus, Barbara Plank, Robert Litschko

📋 Teaching

  • Teaching Assistant, Explainability for LLMs (Winter 2025/2026) at Uni Wien
  • Teaching Assistant, Information Retrieval (Summer 2025) at LMU
  • Teaching Assistant, Vertiefung der Grundlagen der Computerlinguistik (Winter 2024/2025) at LMU

📖 Educations

💻 Internships

  • 2024.09 - 2025.03, IT Enterprise Architecture Working Student, Infineon Technologies, Munich, Germany.
  • 2023.09 - 2024.08, Data Strategy & Operations Working Student, Allianz Commercial, Munich, Germany.
  • 2022.11 - 2023.08, Talent Acquisition Working Student, FERNRIDE, Munich Germany.
  • 2020.07 - 2020.09, Teaching Assistant, Teaching Assistant, New Oriental Education & Technology Group, Beijing, China.
  • 2019.07 - 2019.09, Assistant Editor, Foreign Language and Research Press, Beijing, China.