Borui Zhang: Home

Self-intro:

I'm the natural language processing (NLP) specialist at Academic Research Consulting and Services (ARCS) department at Health Science Center Library (HSCL). I offer NLP consultations (e.g., training methods, datasets, papers, theories, etc.) and do collaborative research that uses NLP in different domains. My background is in theoretical linguistics and computer science, and I'm interested in research for a better understanding of human languages and NLP-related applications. One sets the foundations which inspire me to explore the human capacity of language, and the other empowers me with more tools for conducting research. I'm grateful that I had some opportunities to work on many different languages using machine learning methods such as Nepal Bhasa, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and Korean.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Linguistics (Minor in Computer Science) - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• M.A. in Linguistics - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• B.S. in Educational Technology - Tianjin Foreign Studies University, China

Teaching: 

IDS 2935 (Quest 2) - Fall 2023: Making Sense: Understanding the World with Data and AI 

(Student presentation snaps)

GMS 5909 - Fall 2023, Fall 2022: Finding Biomedical Research Information and Communicating Science

Guest Lecture - PHC 3793 - Fall 2023, Fall 2022: Higher Thinking for Healthy Humans: AI in Healthcare and Public Health

Guest Lecture - BME 6938 - Spring 2023: Multimodal Data Mining

Library AI Research: 

Library Graduate Internship Program: Collaborating with a UF graduate student intern and a faculty member from the Florida Museum of Natural History, we are leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques to enhance the understanding and interpretation of natural history image collections.

Selected Publications: 

• (to be published) Prompt Engineers or Librarians? An Exploration Zhang B. Med Ref Serv Q. 2023
• ChatGPT, an Opportunity to Understand More about Language Models Zhang B. Med Ref Serv Q. 2023 Apr-Jun; 42(2)
• Machine learning and natural language processing for classifying infant feeding status from clinical notes (co-author) AMIA 2022 Annual Symposium
• Shallow Parsing for Nepal Bhasa Complement Clauses Authors: Borui Zhang, Abe Kazemzadeh, Brian Reese In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, pages 61–67, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics. 2022
• The Multiple Mechanisms for Mandarin Sluices Co-authored with Jason Overfelt Proceedings of GLOW-in-Asia, 2019
• Embedding, Covert Movement, and Intervention in Newari Co-authored with Dustin Chac ́on Proceedings of LSA 2018
• Entropy Reduction Prediction on Mandarin Chinese Relative Clauses Processdings of 2016 Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Forum 2
• Adverbial phrase placements in L1-Chinese ESL learners’ writing Co-authored with Koller, T. Linguistic Portfolios, 4(1), 9. 2015 

Check out the slides of a friendly AI Introduction for Library Settings by our ARCS-AI team.

As the NLP specialist, I provide:

• AI Consultations: Discuss your information needs, including project ideas, required tools, and learning resources for NLP/AI projects
• Course Development & Customized AI Learning Materials: Develop courses and create customized tutorials and materials to accommodate various learning objectives in AI.
• Research Collaboration: Collaborate on publications and develop grant proposals focus on utilizing AI to transform information retrieval, knowledge representation, data structuring, etc., to meet domain specific needs.

• AI Information Assistance: Assist students, faculty, and staff in assessing the suitability of the proposed AI methods and data collection strategies for their research projects.

As a librarian at the Health Science Center Libraries, I liaise:

• Department of Neuroscience, College of Medicine 

• Department of Neuroscience, UF Scripps Biomedical Research