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Jian Zhu

Assistant Professor
University of British Columbia
jian.zhu (at) ubc.ca


About Me

Hi there! I am currently an assistant professor at the Linguistics Department at the University of British Columbia, an associate member of UBC Computer Science, part of UBC NLP Group, and an instructor for the UBC MDS-CL Program.

Research

My research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, speech/language technology, and computational social sciences. The big questions I ask are how AI systems learn and discover structures in unfamiliar languages with limited supervision, and how AI agents can reshape knowledge and culture production across research communities and broader human societies.

In my current work, I am developing deployable and efficient systems that generalize across world languages, including those with little or no training data (e.g. ZIPA; CLAP-IPA). Increasingly, I am working on how AI agents can form and test hypotheses about previously unseen languages and environments (e.g. AutoTypologist; LingGym). With equal passion, I also study the structure and the dynamics of digital cultures and communities (e.g., ICWSM paper; CHI paper).

Before UBC

Before joining UBC, I was a post-doctoral research fellow at Blablablab, UMSI. I had obtained my Ph.D. in Linguistics and Scientific Computing from the Department of Linguistics and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. During my Ph.D. years, I was fortunately advised by Pam Beddor and David Jurgens.

News

Group

See other Lab Alumni.

For students

If you are a UBC undergraduate or MDS-CL student and interested in working with me, please fill in this Google Form. I will reach out to you if our research interests are closely aligned.

For current PhD students and researchers interested in working together, feel free to connect with me!

For PhD/MA applicants, if you are interested in working with me on multilingual speech processing, sign language processing, LLM agents for computational social sciences/meta-linguistic knowledge discovery, please consider applying to UBC Linguistics Department and mention my name in your statement. Students with strong computational backgrounds are particularly welcome. I also occasionally co-supervise graduate students with faculty in the UBC NLP Group, depending on shared research interests and available opportunities.

Representative Publications

For a full list of publications, please see Google Scholar.

  1. LLM Agents as Computational Typologists
    Changbing Yang, Christopher Hammerly, Freda Shi, Jian Zhu.
    EMNLP, 2026
    PDF Code Page

  2. LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding
    Yisong Miao, Jian Zhu, Vered Shwartz.
    EMNLP, 2026
    PDF Code Page

  3. AudioNoisePrints: Model-free audio watermarking using spatial correlation in flow matching TTS
    Timothy Tin-Long, Jian Zhu, Aidan Pine, Mengzhe Geng
    Interspeech, 2026
    PDF Page

  4. From Pixels to Personas: Tracking the Evolution of Anime Characters
    Rongze Liu, Jiaxin Pei, Jian Zhu
    ICWSM, 2026
    PDF Code Page

  5. POWSM: A Phonetic Open Whisper-Style Speech Foundation Model
    Chin-Jou Li, Kalvin Chang, Shikhar Bharadwaj, Eunjung Yeo, Kwanghee Choi, Jian Zhu, David Mortensen, Shinji Watanabe
    ACL, 2026
    PDF Code Page

  6. LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists?
    Changbing Yang, Franklin Ma, Freda Shi, Jian Zhu.
    EMNLP, 2025
    PDF Code Page Outstanding Paper Award

  7. ZIPA: A family of efficient models for multilingual phone recognition
    Jian Zhu, Farhan Samir, Eleanor Chodroff, David R Mortensen
    ACL, 2025
    PDF Code Page

  8. Who Reaps All the Superchats? A Large-Scale Analysis of Income Inequality in Virtual YouTuber Livestreaming
    Ryan Zhao, Brian Diep, Jiaxin Pei, Dongwook Yoon, David Jurgens, Jian Zhu
    ACM CHI, 2025.
    PDF Page

  9. Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet
    Shenran Wang, Changbing Yang, Michael Parkhill, Chad Quinn, Christopher Hammerly, Jian Zhu
    NAACL, 2025.
    PDF Page Best Theme Paper Runner-Up

  10. The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword spotting and forced alignment in any language
    Jian Zhu, Changbing Yang, Farhan Samir, Jahurul Islam
    Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 2024.
    PDF Code Page

  11. ByT5 model for massively multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
    Jian Zhu, Cong Zhang, David Jurgens
    Interspeech, 2022.
    PDF Code Page

  12. Phone-to-audio alignment without text: A Semi-supervised Approach
    Jian Zhu, Cong Zhang, David Jurgens
    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2022.
    PDF Code Page

  13. Idiosyncratic but not Arbitrary: Learning Idiolects in Online Registers Reveals Distinctive yet Consistent Individual Styles
    Jian Zhu, David Jurgens
    Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2021.
    PDF Code Page

  14. The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change
    Jian Zhu, David Jurgens
    Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 2021.
    PDF Code Page

Lab Alumni

Here is a list of brilliant students I have worked with.


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