Miao is currently a final-year PhD candidate at School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne (UoM), jointly advised by Prof. Eduard Hovy (UoM and CMU) and Dr. Jey Han Lau (UoM) within NLP Group. He has been a visiting PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Mirella Lapata at ILCC, The University of Edinburgh since March 2024. His PhD journey in Melbourne started in December 2020. Before that, he earned a B.E. from Northeastern University in 2017 and studied as an exam-exempted master’s student at Institue of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he obtained an M.Sc. in July 2020.

Research Interests

Miao's research focuses on natural language generation (NLG), a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), dedicated to developing language technologies to enable computers to understand and generate natural language like humans.

Throughout the years of pursuing the PhD, he has been primarily interested in multi-document integrative reasoning. He is now developing simple but effective methodologies with language models from the perspective of information integration and complex reasoning to make multi-document summarization less opaque and more grounded.

In the long term, his overarching research goal is to enable language generation systems to perform derivations over complex contexts. It mainly requires understanding how humans correlate and integrate complex information from multiple sources from first principles, developing language models capable of human-level integrative reasoning over voluminous and heterogeneous information sources with intricate interdependencies, and establishing robust evaluation methodologies on not only generations but also inner workings and behaviours of these systems for real-world complex tasks to make them useful and understandable.

Selected Publications

• 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.
  Findings of EMNLP 2023.
  [abstract] [paper] [code] [dataset] [poster]

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

• Personalized Abstractive Opinion Tagging
  Mengxue Zhao, Yang Yang, Miao Li, Jingang Wang, Wei Wu, Pengjie Ren, Maarten de Rijke and Zhaochun Ren.
  SIGIR 2022. Oral.
  [abstract] [paper]

• 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]

• A New Effective Neural Variational Model with Mixture-of-Gaussians Prior for Text Clustering.
  Miao Li, Hongyin Tang, Beihong Jin, Chengqing Zong.
  ICTAI 2019. Oral.
  [abstract] [paper]

• Clustering Large-Scale Origin-Destination Pairs: A Case Study for Public Transit in Beijing
  Miao Li, Hongyin Tang, Beihong Jin.
  UIC 2018. Oral.
  [abstract] [paper]

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

Professional Services

• Reviewer for ACL Rolling Review (2021 - Present)

• Member of reviewer committees: NLPCC 2022-2023, EACL 2023, ACL 2023-2024, EMNLP 2023-2024, NAACL 2025

• Subreviewer for WSDM 2022, SIGIR 2022, SIGKDD 2022, and CIKM 2022