Hi, my name is Zifan (子凡) [tsɹ̩³ fan²] Jiang (蒋) [tɕjɑŋ³]
I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student working on sign language processing and translation, advised by Prof. Dr. Sarah Ebling and Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich, and funded by the Flagship IICT Project. I have publications in top computational linguistics conferences (including ACL, EMNLP, EACL, LREC-COLING, and WMT) and regularly serve as a reviewer for ACL Rolling Review.
Our work is publicly accessible for research and teaching, demonstrated and summarised in this notebook. Please also check the resource page for datasets and the GitHub repos linked in the relevant papers.
To cope with the visual-gestural nature of sign language, I also study computer vision and visited theVisual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Zisserman.
From August 2021 to 2024, I was lucky to be a scientific programmer part-time on the SNSF project EVOPHON led by Prof. Dr. Steven Moran. There I developed experience in phonetics, phonology, and audio signal processing, sometimes even including animal communication.
For prospective supervision on a student (master thesis) project, please only write to me with a proposed idea and motivation, ideally attached with a brief CV and transcript to show your capability. I also recommend checking the CL project webpage and mailing list regularly.
I am open to exchange and collaboration opportunities! A brief CV of mine is here.
Before being intrigued by languages and linguistics ...
I have a solid background in computer science and software engineering. For some years, I was mainly engaged in Web development, which gave me experience in software engineering, computer networks, human-computer interaction, programming languages, Web accessibility, and rich-text editors.
Publications
Find me on Google Scholar.
Teaching
| Spring 2025 | Teaching Assistant forIntroduction to Computational Linguistics 2 |
| Autumn 2024 | Essentials in Text and Speech Processing |
| Spring 2024 | Intermediate Methods and Programming in Digital Linguistics |
| Autumn 2023 | Multimodality 101 for Advanced Methods for Text and Speech Processing Sign Language Processing (guest lecture) for Artificial Intelligence for Language Accessibility Teaching Assistant for Essentials in Text and Speech Processing |
Spring 2022 / Autumn 2022 / Autumn 2023 |
Intro to Machine Learning (guest lecture) for Intro to data science |
| Spring 2021 | Teaching Assistant for Informatics II (data structures and algorithms) |
News
- 2025/07: I will join Google DeepMind Zurich as a student researcher until the end of the year!
- 2024/11: I start my research stay in VGG, Oxford!
- 2024/07: I am excited to share the preprint of our new work: SignCLIP: Connecting Text and Sign Language by Contrastive Learning, which will be presented at EMNLP 2024, Miami! Thecode and a demo notebook are available.
- 2024/06: We (and deaf colleagues from HfH) were thrilled to receive the Swiss NLP Award at SwissText 2024 for our work in sign language machine translation!
- 2024/06: I talked at the Using AI to decode primate communication Symposium about Understanding Great Ape Calls and Gestures with Deep Pretrained Neural Networks , the fascinating connection between primatology and my Ph.D. work on human language. The talk was also reported in the magazine l'uniscope.
- 2024/05: I presented SwissSLi: The Multi-parallel Sign Language Corpus for Switzerland as a poster at LREC-COLING 2024 in Turin. The corpus is available on SWISSUbase.
- 2024/05: I talked at the Chinese Science Club in Zurich on Sign Language (手语) + AI = ?.
- 2024/02: I gave a colloquium talk on Recent Developments in Sign Language Processing.
- 2023/10: We published a new preprint SignBank+: Multilingual Sign Language Translation Dataset, a cleaned resource for SignWriting-based machine translation.
- 2023/10: Our paper Linguistically Motivated Sign Language Segmentation was accepted at EMNLP 2023 findings! A possible use case of the model is demonstrated in this Colab notebook.
- 2023/09: I attended the EASIER Autumn School: Sign language data meets data science – data science meets sign linguistics, a lot learned about sign language linguistics!
- 2023/09: I talked about my ongoing Ph.D. work Towards realistic sign language translation at the SLIN (Sign Language in the Netherlands) workshop in Antwerp, nice to meet you all!
- 2023/08: I presented Automatic Sound Event Detection and Classification of Great Ape Calls Using Neural Networks as a poster at ICPhS 2023 in Prague.
- 2023/07: Our paper Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses received an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023!
- 2023/06: We released An Open-Source Gloss-Based Baseline for Spoken to Signed Language Translation and the paper appeared at the AT4SSL2023 @EAMT workshop.
- 2023/06: We released the training data for the WMT-SLT23 shared task.
- 2023/05: I presented my first research paper Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages Represented in SignWriting at the LoResMT @ EACL 2023 workshop in Dubrovnik, great thanks to the organizers!
- 2022/12: The findings of the first WMT-SLT shared task (on sign language translation) (me as a co-organizer) were presented at WMT22, co-located with EMNLP 2022.
- 2022/11: I gave a talk on the preliminary work of Automatic Sound Event Detection and Classification of Great Ape Calls Using Neural Networks at the workshop Development and evolution of primate vocal communication in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
- 2022/04: I started my Ph.D. journey at the University of Zurich!
- 2022/02: I finished my master's thesis project with Dr. Mathias Müller and Amit Moryossef on Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages in Written Form. Heartfelt thanks to both!