Miao is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), The University of Edinburgh. He works with Prof. Mirella Lapata (ACL Fellow) as part of EdinburghNLP, where he also spent a year as a visiting PhD student. His postdoctoral research is funded through the Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship awarded to Prof. Mirella Lapata. Miao completed his PhD in NLP/AI at School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, where he was jointly advised by Prof. Eduard Hovy (ACL Fellow, AAAI Fellow; The University of Melbourne and Carnegie Mellon University) and Prof. Jey Han Lau (The University of Melbourne). Miao's PhD thesis, "Multi-Document Summarization: From Ideational to Opinionated Sources," explores how to enable computers to effectively understand and integrate different types of information across multiple documents, specifically factual statements and expressions of opinion.

Research Interests

Miao's research focuses on natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI). His long-term research vision is to develop AI systems capable of reasoning across extensive and complex information sources, thereby augmenting human cognition by compensating for limitations in processing speed and working memory. His research interests include: (1) examining how humans cognitively correlate and integrate dispersed information for decision-making (ACL'24, arXiv'25), e.g., making well-informed decisions in financial investment and in peer review for scientific publications, (2) creating computational models, with a current emphasis on long-context language models, that can reason over voluminous, heterogeneous, and distributed information at superhuman speeds (AAAI'23, EMNLP'23), e.g., performing question answering or summarization across hundreds of scientific articles to enhance human comprehension, and (3) establishing controlled experimentation and high-quality evaluation for both model outputs and their inner workings and behaviours, ensuring these models are not only useful but also verifiable and explainable for real-world utility (ACL'24, ACL'25, arXiv'25).

Selected Publications

• Who Gets Cited Most? Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Scientific Articles
  Miao Li, Alexander Gurung, Irina Saparina, and Mirella Lapata.
  Preprint (September 2025).
  [abstract] [paper] [data] [code]

• Decomposed Opinion Summarization with Verified Aspect-Aware Modules
  Miao Li, Jey Han Lau, Eduard Hovy, and Mirella Lapata.
  ACL 2025 Findings.
  [abstract] [paper] [code] [poster]

• A Sentiment Consolidation Framework for Meta-Review Generation
  Miao Li, Jey Han Lau, and Eduard Hovy.
  ACL 2024.
  [abstract] [paper] [code] [dataset] [slides] [poster]

• NewsBench: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Assessing Editorial Capabilities of Large Language Models in Chinese Journalism
  Miao Li, Ming-Bin Chen, Bo Tang, Shengbin Hou, Pengyu Wang, Haiying Deng, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Keming Mao, Peng Cheng, and Yi Luo.
  ACL 2024.
  [abstract] [paper] [code] [dataset] [slides] [poster]

• Summarizing Multiple Documents with Conversational Structure for Meta-Review Generation
  Miao Li, Eduard Hovy, and Jey Han Lau.
  EMNLP 2023 Findings.
  [abstract] [paper] [code] [dataset] [poster]

• DeltaScore: Fine-grained Story Evaluation with Perturbations
  Zhuohan Xie, Miao Li, Trevor Cohn, and Jey Han Lau.
  EMNLP 2023 Findings.
  [abstract] [paper] [code]

• Compressed Heterogeneous Graph for Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization
  Miao Li, Jianzhong Qi, and Jey Han Lau.
  AAAI 2023. Oral.
  [abstract] [paper] [code] [slides] [poster]

• A Benchmark and Comprehensive Survey on Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment via Representation Learning
  Rui Zhang, Bayu Distiawan Trisedy, Miao Li, Yong Jiang, Jianzhong Qi.
  VLDB Journal 2022.
  [abstract] [paper] [code]

• A Topic Augmented Text Generation Model: Joint Learning of Semantics and Structural Features
  Hongyin Tang, Miao Li, Beihong Jin.
  EMNLP 2019. Oral.
  [abstract] [paper] [appendix]

Honors and Awards

• AAAI-23 Student Scholarship, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, January 2023

• Google Conference Scholarship, Google Inc., January 2023

• Excellent Student Cadre, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, June 2019

• National Scholarship for Graduates, Education Ministry of China, November 2018

• The First Prize Scholarship, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, October 2018

• Excellent Student Cadre, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, June 2018

• Outstanding Graduate, Northeastern University, June 2017

• Outstanding Graduate Thesis Award, Northeastern University, July 2017

• The First Prize Scholarship, Northeastern University, September 2016

• National Scholarship for Undergraduates, Education Ministry of China, October 2016

• The First Prize Scholarship, Northeastern University, September 2015

• National Scholarship for Undergraduates, Education Ministry of China, October 2015

• Excellent Student Cadre, Northeastern University, October 2015

Teaching Experiences

• INFR10078 - Foundations of Natural Language Processing, The University of Edinburgh (AY 2025/2026, Semester 2), Course Tutor

Professional Services

• Reviewer for journals: TKDE 2025

• Reviewer for conferences: ICLR 2026, ACL 2023-2026, EMNLP 2023-2025, NAACL 2025, EACL 2023, NLPCC 2022-2023, WSDM 2022, SIGIR 2022, SIGKDD 2022, CIKM 2022

• Reviewer for ACL Rolling Review (2021 - Present)