Chenxin DIAO

I am a full-time PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Emily Allaway.

Broadly, I study explainable NLP with an emphasis on sound reasoning over evidence. I develop frameworks that assess not only whether a statement is factually correct, but also whether the interpretations and arguments drawn from retrieved information are logically and evidentially justified. At present, I focus on over-generalisation in scientific writing, examining how claims become broader than the evidence supports.

I also maintain regular external research connections, including with Huawei Edinburgh Research Centre and CoCoA Lab led by my former supervisor, Steve Wilson. Before joining the University, I worked in industry on problems related to semantic parsing and agentic retrieval.

news

Sep 01, 2025	I joined ILCC at the University of Edinburgh as a full-time PhD student, supervised by Emily Allaway.

selected publications

ACL Findings

GeAR: Graph-enhanced Agent for Retrieval-augmented Generation

Zhili Shen^†, Chenxin Diao^†, Pavlos Vougiouklis^†, and 8 more authors

In The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), 2025

DOI arXiv Bib Blog Poster

@inproceedings{shen2025gear,
  title = {GeAR: Graph-enhanced Agent for Retrieval-augmented Generation},
  author = {Shen, Zhili and Diao, Chenxin and Vougiouklis, Pavlos and Merita, Pascual and Piramanayagam, Shriram and Graux, Damien and Tu, Dandan and Jiang, Zeren and Lai, Ruofei and Ren, Yang and others},
  booktitle = {The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)},
  pages = {12049--12072},
  year = {2025},
  google_scholar_id_no_citation = {2osOgNQ5qMEC},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.624},
}

EMNLP

Improving Retrieval-augmented Text-to-SQL with AST-based Ranking and Schema Pruning

Zhili Shen^†, Pavlos Vougiouklis^†, Chenxin Diao^†, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2024

DOI arXiv Bib Video Poster Slides

@inproceedings{shen2024improving,
  title = {Improving Retrieval-augmented Text-to-{SQL} with {AST}-based Ranking and Schema Pruning},
  author = {Shen, Zhili and Vougiouklis, Pavlos and Diao, Chenxin and Vyas, Kaustubh and Ji, Yuanyi and Pan, Jeff Z.},
  editor = {Al-Onaizan, Yaser and Bansal, Mohit and Chen, Yun-Nung},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2024},
  address = {Miami, Florida, USA},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.449/},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.449},
  pages = {7865--7879},
  google_scholar_id_no_citation = {d1gkVwhDpl0C},
}