Assistant Professor at Aberdeen
Lecturer at Heidelberg
Email: wei.zhao@abdn.ac.uk
Welcome!
I am leading the WeNLP4Science Research Group at the University of Aberdeen, but also the head of the AberdeenNLP Group (since July 2026). Our research group has broad interests in NLP/LLMs and Machine Learning (e.g., evaluation, cross-temporal NLP and geometric ML), and we recently blend our expertise into LLMs for Science, with a focus on post-training, evaluation and applications of LLMs in scientific and industrial domains.
Previously, I was an Invited Postdoc at Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and Heidelberg University, working on the Geometry and Representation Learning. In December 2022, I earned my Ph.D. in NLP from the AIPHES Training Group at TU Darmstadt, Germany.
Recent News
08/2025: Two papers about tokenization for temporal reasoning and evaluation of LLMs accepted at EMNLP
05/2025: Our workshop on Towards Human-LLM Collaboration for Ethical and Responsible Science Production will be held at IJCNLP-AACL
05/2025: Our workshop on LLMs for Cross-Temporal Research will be held at COLM
04/2025: Recipient of Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL
04/2025: Recipient of Computing Grant from Google
03/2025: Recipient of Sponsorship Funding from Artificial Intelligence Journal
02/2025: Recipient of Research Catalyst Funding from the University of Aberdeen
01/2025: A paper about evaluation of LLMs accepted at NAACL
01/2025: Recipient of Computing Credits from OpenAI
12/2024: A paper nominated by ARR Area Chair for Best Paper Award
12/2024: Two papers about LLMs for human annotation accepted at the CoMeDi Workshop, co-located with COLING
08/2024: Recipient of Research Collaboration Grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh
07/2024: A paper about LLMs for lexicography accepted at the LLM-LEX Workshop, co-located with EURALEX
07/2024: Recipient of Computing Credits from Google
06/2024: Three papers about cross-temporal research accepted at the LChange Workshop, co-located with ACL
04/2024: A paper about graph embedding accepted at TMLR
02/2024: A paper about evaluation of LLMs accepted at JMLR
01/2024: A paper about cross-temporal research accepted at EACL
01/2024: Joined the University of Aberdeen
WeNLP4Science Research Group
PhD Students (Main Supervisor)
University of Aberdeen
University of Aberdeen
University of Aberdeen
Affiliated Researchers
University of Central Punjab
Data Scientist & AI Engineer
MSC/BSC Thesis Students
Heidelberg University
University of Aberdeen
University of Aberdeen
University of Aberdeen
Job Placement
2026 Paul Oamen (MSC at Aberdeen) → PhD at the University of Aberdeen, UK
2026 Zenyi Gomez (BSC at Aberdeen) → Founder in Residence at Entrepreneur First, UK
2025 Lydia Körber (MA at Heidelberg) → European Parliament, Brussels
2025 Gagan Bhatia (MSC at Aberdeen) → PhD at Technische Universität Nürnberg, Germany
2023 Xianghe Ma (MSC at Heidelberg) → Hyundai Motor, Germany
Teaching
CS4051: Natural Language Processing (2024-2025) at Aberdeen
CS5063: Evaluation of AI Systems (2024-2026) at Aberdeen
CS551N: Introduction to Programming (2024-2026) at Aberdeen
CS551P: Advanced Programming (2024-2025) at Aberdeen
PS/HS: Diachronic Language Models (2023-2025) at Heidelberg
PS/HS: Cross-Temporal NLP (2025-2026) at Heidelberg
Open Positions
We currently have no job vacancies.Media
10/2024: Large Language Models No Match for Humans in Literary Translation, Slator
05/2025: QA-Based Evaluation Takes on Literary AI Translation, Slator