Welcome to my homepage!

Hi, I’m Changbing, a 5th-year PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. I received my MS in Computational Linguistics from the University of Colorado Boulder and my BA in English & Linguistics from Southeast University.

Internship Experience

Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon
Project: Multimodal World Models for Agent Planning
Research Intern, National Research Council Canada
Project: Multi-Agent Systems for Low-Resource Language Glossing

Research Interests

My research is at the intersection of linguistics and AI. My work mainly focuses on multilingual LLMs, language technologies, and linguistically grounded AI evaluation. My research studies how language models represent, generalize, and reason across languages, and how these models can be adapted into practical tools for language analysis and language documentation.

I am currently on the job market and actively seeking research positions in both academia and industry. Please feel free to reach out if you think there might be a good fit!

Publications

Changbing Yang, Patricia Anderson, Godfred Agyapong, Sarah Moeller. Annotation Tools for Language Documentation: A Survey of Capabilities, Gaps, and Morphological Support. ComputEL-9, 2026. Travel Grant
Changbing Yang, Patrick Littell, Gabriel Bernier-Colborne, Yanfei Lu and Mengzhe Geng. GlossMATE: Multi-Agent Translator Explanations for Glosses. LREC 2026.
Changbing Yang, Franklin Ma, Freda Shi, Jian Zhu. LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists? EMNLP 2025 (Oral). 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award
Shenran Wang, Changbing Yang, Mike Parkhill, Chad Quinn, Christopher Hammerly, Jian Zhu. Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet. NAACL 2025. 🏆 Best Theme Paper Runner-Up
Changbing Yang, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg. Multiple Sources are Better Than One: Incorporating External Knowledge in Low-Resource Glossing. EMNLP 2024.
Jian Zhu, Changbing Yang, Farhan Samir, Jahurul Islam. The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword matching and forced alignment in any language. NAACL 2024.
Adam Wiemerslage, Changbing Yang, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg, and Katharina Kann. An Investigation of Noise in Morphological Inflection. ACL 2023 Findings.
Garrett Nicolai, Changbing Yang, Miikka Silfverberg. Penalizing Divergence: Multi-Parallel Translation for Low-Resource Languages of North America. COLING 2022.
Changbing Yang, Ruixin (Ray) Yang, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg. Generalizing Morphological Inflection Systems to Unseen Lemmas. SIGMORPHON 2022.
Adam Wiemerslage, Miikka Silfverberg, Changbing Yang, Arya D McCarthy, Garrett Nicolai, Eliana Colunga, Katharina Kann. Morphological Processing of Low-Resource Languages: Where We Are and What’s Next. ACL 2022 Findings.
Bruce Oliver, Clarissa Forbes, Changbing Yang, Farhan Samir, Edith Coates, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg. An Inflectional Database for Gitksan. LREC 2022.
Clarissa Forbes, Farhan Samir, Bruce Harold Oliver, Changbing Yang, Edith Coates, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg. Dim Wihl Gat Tun: The Case for Linguistic Expertise in NLP for Underdocumented Languages. ACL 2022 Findings.
Changbing Yang, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg. Unsupervised paradigm clustering using transformation rules. SIGMORPHON 2021.
Beilei Xiang, Changbing Yang, Yu Li, Alex Warstadt and Katharina Kann. CLiMP: A Benchmark for Chinese Language Model Evaluations. EACL 2021.
Sarah Moeller, Ling Liu, Changbing Yang, Katharina Kann and Mans Hulden. IGT2P: From Interlinear Glossed Texts to Paradigms. EMNLP 2020.
Sarah Beemer, …, Changbing Yang and Mans Hulden. Linguist vs. Machine: Rapid Development of Finite-State Morphological Grammars. SIGMORPHON 2020.

Invited Talks & Guest Lectures

Invited Talk, Ontario Tech University, July 2026
LingGym: Evaluating LLMs’ meta-linguistic reasoning using IGT and reference grammars.
Invited Talk, Nanyang Technological University, May 2026
Imagining the Future of Language Documentation with LLMs.
Guest Lecture, Nanyang Technological University, May 2026
How Machines Translate.
Invited Talk, University of British Columbia (NLP Group), Feb 2026
Multilingual speech synthesis for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet.
Invited Talk, University of Florida (Computational Linguistics Lab), Jan 2026
LingGym: Evaluating LLMs’ meta-linguistic reasoning using IGT and reference grammars.
Invited Talk, Shanghai International Studies University, Nov 2025
LingGym: Evaluating LLMs’ meta-linguistic reasoning using IGT and reference grammars.
Invited Talk, National Research Council Canada, Jun 2025
Multilingual speech synthesis for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet.
Guest Lecture, LING 242: Computational Tools for Linguistic Analysis (UBC), Nov 2024
Automatic glossing encoder–decoder models for linguistic annotation and low-resource language processing.

Awards & Honors

ComputEL-9 (US 1,000), Supported by Google, 2026
Research Grant (CAD 7,500), Vector Institute, 2026
Outstanding Student Contribution, NRC, 2025
Ph.D. CoLab Award (CAD 8,000), UBC, 2024
Affiliated Fellowship (CAD 16,000), UBC, 2023–2024
Teaching Assistant Excellence Award, UBC, 2023, 2024, 2025
Faculty of Arts Graduate Award, UBC, 2021–2026
International Tuition Award, UBC, 2021–2026
President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award, UBC, 2021–2026
JASSO Scholarship (JPY 80,000), Tohoku University, 2017
Province-level Student Research Training Program Scholarship (CNY 2,000), Southeast University, 2016
Course Scholarship (CNY 1,000), Southeast University, 2015

Academic Service

Reviewer: AAAI (2027), ACL Rolling Review (2021–present), NAACL (2022), SIGMORPHON (2022, 2023, 2024), ComputEL-8 (2025), WiNLP (2025, 2026), ACL-SRW (2026)

Program Committees: SIGMORPHON (2022, 2023, 2024)，Computel-8 (2025)

Teaching Experience

Lecturer, UBC, 2026 fall

LING 142 Language and Technology

Lab Instructor / Senior TA, UBC, 2024–2026

DSCI 511: Programming for Data Science
DSCI 512: Algorithms and Data Structures
COLX 521: Corpus Linguistics

Teaching Assistant, UBC, 2022–2024

COLX 525: Computational Morphology
COLX 561: Computational Semantics
COLX 581: NLP for Low-Resource Languages

Teaching Assistant, UBC, 2023

LING 142: Language and Technology