I'm a postdoc in Natural Language Processing at Aalborg University (Copenhagen) advised by Prof. Johannes Bjerva and Prof. Euan Lindsay. My research is currently at the intersection of NLP and Education. Additionally, I'm affiliated to the Pioneer Centre for Artifical Intelligence.

Previously, I was a PhD Student in NLP at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) advised by Prof. Barbara Plank and Prof. Rob van der Goot. I was part of NLPnorth at ITU and MaiNLP at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). I worked on Computational Job Market Analysis (/ NLP for HR), where we investigated how to extract information (e.g., skills) from job ads data and match these to existing taxonomies.

Feel free to reach out to me if any of my work is interesting and you have ideas or would like to collaborate!

10.4.2025: I am looking for postdoc and faculty positions in Natural Language Processing (Applied NLP; Conversational Agents; NLP for HR and NLP for Education). If you are interested in my profile, please reach out to me!

News

10 April 2025

Kaleidoscope Pre-print Released!

A new multilingual benchmark for evaluating VLMs on exams is out.

21 February 2025

Area Chair for ACL 2025

I'll be serving as an Area Chair for ACL 2025.

20 February 2025

Sailor2 Technical Report Released

The Sailor2 Technical Report is out!

17 February 2025

LLM Agents for Educational Feedback Pre-print Released

A Pre-print on leveraging LLM agents for educational feedback is out!

Education

2020-2024

IT University of Copenhagen

Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing

Advisor: Barbara Plank & Rob van der Goot

2018-2020

University of Groningen

M.Sc. Information Science

2015-2018

University of Groningen

B.Sc. Information Science

Most Recent Publications

For the full list of publications, please check my Google Scholar

Pre-print 2025

Kaleidoscope: In-language Exams for Massively Multilingual Vision Evaluation

Israfel Salazar, Manuel Fernández Burda, Shayekh Bin Islam, Arshia Soltani Moakhar, Shivalika Singh, Fabian Farestam, Angelika Romanou, ... (other authors), Mike Zhang, (other authors), Desmond Elliott, Enzo Ferrante, Sara Hooker, Marzieh Fadaee

Pre-print 2025

Scaling Course Evaluations with Large Language Models: Semester-level Digestible Student Feedback for Program Leaders

Mike Zhang, Euan Lindsay, Maj-Britt Quitzau, Johannes Bjerva

Technical Report 2025

Sailor2: Sailing in South-East Asia with Inclusive Multilingual LLMs

Longxu Dou, Qian Liu, Fan Zhou, Changyu Chen, ... (30 authors), Mike Zhang, Shiqi Chen, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Xinyi Wan, Wei Lu, Min Lin

Under Review 2025

SEFL: Harnessing Large Language Model Agents to Improve Educational Feedback Systems

Mike Zhang, Amalie Pernille Dilling, Léon Gondelman, Niels Erik Ruan Lyngdorf, Euan D. Lindsay, Johannes Bjerva

Under Review 2025

HIFI-KPI: A Dataset for Hierarchical KPI Extraction from Earnings Filings

Rasmus T. Aavang, Giovanni Rizzi, Rasmus Tjalk-Bøggild, Alexandre Iolov, Mike Zhang, Johannes Bjerva

Experience

02/24 - Present

Postdoctoral Researcher Aalborg University

Advisor: Johannes Bjerva & Euan D. Lindsay

Investigating Educational Feedback tools for improving student learning.

10/23 - 11/23

Ph.D. Research Visitor EPFL

Advisor: Syrielle Montariol & Antoine Bosselut

Worked synthetic data and Large Language Models for Skill Extraction.

02/23 - 07/23

Ph.D. Research Visitor National University of Singapore

Advisor: Min-Yen Kan

Worked Retrieval Augmented methods for Skill Extraction.

07/22 - 12/22

Ph.D. Research Intern NEC Laboratories Europe GmBH

Advisor: Kiril Gashteovski

Investigated data-centric methods to improve Open Information Extraction.