Natural Language Interfaces to Data
Connecting natural language with databases, focusing on data-centric tasks including Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Visualization, and Text-to-OverpassQL.
About Me
I am a second-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the supervision of Professor Chen Jason Zhang. I also work closely with Professor Raymond Chi-Wing Wong. I previously earned my Master’s degree from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and my Bachelor of Science from Chongqing University.
My research centers on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Data Management, with a particular focus on data-centric tasks. I am also interested in Data Preparation for LLM, including efficient and automated quality and diversity assessment of large-scale pre-training datasets, noisy data cleaning, and coreset selection. In addition, I explore mathematical optimization techniques to enhance Data Agent performance and efficiency.
💡 I am seeking exchange or visiting research opportunities in 2027, as well as long-term research collaborators with shared interests. If you are interested in my work, please feel free to contact me via email: zhuoy.wan@connect.polyu.hk.
Research Directions
Data Preparation for LLM
Preparing large-scale pre-training data through quality and diversity assessment, noisy data cleaning, and coreset selection.
Data Agent & Optimization
Exploring autonomous data agents and mathematical optimization to improve their performance and efficiency.
News
Two papers, XOver (first author) and Text-to-RLS, have been accepted to ICDE 2027!
Our paper Meta-Moderator has been accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026!
I was invited to serve as a Program Committee Member for WSDM 2027.
My first-author paper TACO has been accepted to SIGMOD 2027 (first round)!
Earlier updates
Our paper SrDetection has been accepted to Findings of ACL 2026!
I became a Ph.D. candidate at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University!
Two papers, OsmT (first author) and VisPoison, have been accepted to ICDE 2026!
Our paper on medical image debiasing has been accepted to Medical Image Analysis!
My first-author paper DataVisT5 has been accepted to ICDE 2025!
Publications
Google Scholar ↗I have 9 publications at SIGMOD, ICDE, ACL Findings, EMNLP Findings, and Medical Image Analysis, including 4 first-author papers at CCF-A conferences.
PUBLISHED & ACCEPTED
XOver: Execution-Calibrated Exemplar Contextualization for Multilingual Text-to-OverpassQL on OpenStreetMap
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
TACO: Token-Aware Context Optimization for Structured OpenStreetMap Query Generation
ACM Conference on Management of Data
OsmT: Bridging OpenStreetMap Queries and Natural Language with Open-source Tag-aware Language Models
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
DataVisT5: A Pre-trained Language Model for Jointly Understanding Text and Data Visualization
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
Text-to-RLS: Towards Constraint-Anchored Row-Level Security in Natural Language Database Interfaces
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
Meta-Moderator: Empowering Multi-Agent Debate with Meta-Cognition
The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
SrDetection: A Self-Referential Framework for Data Leakage Detection in Code Large Language Models
The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
VisPoison: An Effective Backdoor Attack Framework for Tabular Data Visualization Models
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
Medical Image Debiasing by Learning Adaptive Agreement from a Biased Council
Medical Image Analysis
PREPRINTS
Education
Honors & Awards
Second Prize, The Chinese Mathematics Competitions
Second-class Scholarship, Chongqing University
Advanced Individual of Scientific and Technological academic innovation, Chongqing University
Third Prize, The 8th TipDM Cup Data Mining Challenge Committee
Outstanding Student, Chongqing University
Outstanding Student, Chongqing University
Third-class Scholarship, Chongqing University
Teaching Assistant
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Artificial Intelligence (COMP4431)
Fall 2026With Dr. Wai Man Pang · Undergraduate students
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Smart Tourism and Big Data Analytics (HTM568)
Summer 2026, 2025, 2024With Prof. Chen Jason Zhang · Master’s students
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Data Structures and Database Systems (COMP5112)
Spring 2026With Prof. Wen Hua · Master’s students
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Internet Infrastructure and Protocols (COMP5311)
Fall 2025With Prof. Donghui Dai · Master’s students
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Service and Cloud Computing (COMP4442)
Spring 2025With Prof. Zhaorui Zhang · Undergraduate students
Academic Services
- Program Committee Member: WSDM 2027.
- Conference Reviewer: WWW 2027.
- Journal Reviewer: International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.
- Co-reviewer: ACL, VLDB, ICDE, EMNLP, ACM MM, AAAI.
Contact
Correspondence Address
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong · 香港九龍紅磡
zhuoy.wan@connect.polyu.hk