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
Apr 06, 2026: 🎉 1 paper accepted to ACL 2026 Findings. Check it out: Agree, Disagree, Explain: Decomposing Human Label Variation in NLI through the Lens of Explanations.
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 papers 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
Agree, Disagree, Explain: Decomposing Human Label Variation in NLI through the Lens of Explanations
Pingjun Hong, Beiduo Chen, Siyao Peng, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Benjamin Roth, Barbara Plank
- In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, Jul 2026
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
- In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2025
Evaluating Large Language Models for Cross-Lingual Retrieval
Longfei Zuo, Pingjun Hong, Oliver Kraus, Barbara Plank, Robert Litschko
- In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2025
📋 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
- 2022.10 - 2025.08, Master of Science - Computational Linguistics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
- 2020.10 - 2022.08, Master of Art - Cultural and Cognitive Linguistics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
- 2016.09 - 2020.08, Bachelor of Art - German Language and Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China.
- 2010.09 - 2016.06, Beijing National Day School, Beijing, China.
💻 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.