Tenure-track Assistant Professor (starting soon)
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU)
Previously: Schuetze NLP Lab, Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS),
LMU Munich, Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)
Email: ecnie97 at gmail.com
About me
- I will soon join the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) as a tenure-track assistant professor, where I will build a research group at the intersection of NLP, large language models, language science, and human-centered AI.
- I received my PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) at LMU Munich, supervised by PD Dr. Helmut Schmid and Prof. Hinrich Schütze at the Schütze Lab.
- I was also affiliated with the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) and received my M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics and Informatics (Computer Science) from LMU Munich.
- Before LMU, I completed my undergraduate studies at SJTU, majoring in German Studies with a minor in Finance, and spent one exchange semester at the University of Heidelberg in Comparative German Studies.
For prospective students: I welcome motivated students interested in NLP, LLMs, language science, multilingual AI, interpretability, and human-centered AI. Please contact me if your interests overlap with the research directions below.
Research Vision
My research aims to develop language technologies that are multilingual, interpretable, efficient, and human-centered. Building on my recent work on multilingual LLMs, cross-lingual knowledge, language confusion, retrieval-augmented prompting, and neurolinguistic probing, my near-term agenda is to understand how large language models acquire, represent, edit, retrieve, and deploy linguistic and factual knowledge across languages. I am particularly interested in turning this understanding into reliable methods for low-resource, cross-cultural, and domain-specific settings.
- Multilingual NLP and multilingual LLMs: multilinguality of LLMs (Nie et al., 2025a), cross-lingual transfer (Nie et al., 2023a, Ma et al., 2024, Nie et al., 2025a), low-resource language technologies, and historical language processing (Nie et al., 2023b).
- Interpretability and internal mechanisms of LLMs: mechanistic interpretability (Nie et al., 2025b), multilingual representation analysis, language confusion, knowledge editing, and model behaviors related to language, knowledge, and reasoning.
- Human-inspired NLP and language science: NLP inspired by human language processing (Zhang et al., 2023, Yan et al., 2025), computational neurolinguistics (He et al., 2024, He et al., 2025a, He et al., 2025b), and interdisciplinary AI for language, culture, and cognition.
- Efficient and agentic methods for NLP: prompt-based learning (Nie et al., 2023c, Ma et al., 2023), retrieval- and memory-augmented methods, low-resource learning (Liu et al., 2024), and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (Yuan et al., 2024, Yuan et al., 2025).
Feel free to reach out if you're interested in topics related to NLP, LLMs, and Agentic AI, including multilinguality, interpretability, retrieval- and memory-augmented methods, human-inspired NLP, and their intersections with digital humanities, social sciences, and domain-specific applications.
Selected Publications
Ercong Nie*, Bo Shao*, Zifeng Ding, Mingyang Wang, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schütze. Bmike-53: Investigating cross-lingual knowledge editing with in-context learning. In ACL 2025 (oral). [Paper]
Ercong Nie, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schütze. Mechanistic Understanding and Mitigation of Language Confusion in English-Centric Large Language Models. In EMNLP 2025 Findings. [Paper]
Ercong Nie*, Sheng Liang*, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schütze. Cross-Lingual Retrieval Augmented Prompt for Low-Resource Languages. In ACL Findings 2023. [Paper], [Code]
Ercong Nie, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schuetze. Unleashing the Multilingual Encoder Potential: Boosting Zero-Shot Performance via Probability Calibration. In EMNLP Findings 2023. [Paper], [Code]
Ercong Nie, Shuzhou Yuan, Bolei Ma, Helmut Schmid, Michael Färber, Frauke Kreuter, Hinrich Schütze. Decomposed prompting: Unveiling multilingual linguistic structure knowledge in english-centric large language models. In IJCNLP-AACL 2025 Findings. [Paper]
Shuzhou Yuan, Ercong Nie, Michael Färber, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schuetze. GNNavi: Navigating the Information Flow in Large Language Models by Graph Neural Network. In ACL Findings 2024. [Paper], [Code]
Bolei Ma*, Ercong Nie*, Shuzhou Yuan, Helmut Schmid, Michael Färber, Frauke Kreuter, Hinrich Schuetze. ToPro: Token-Level Prompt Decomposition for Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling Tasks. In EACL 2024 (oral). [Paper], [Code]
(* denotes equal contribution)
See more in my publications.
Academic Roles
Service Roles
- Area Chair (AC): ACL ARR (ACL 2026)
- Program Chair: ICLR 2026 Workshop MemAgents
Reviewer
I regularly review for major NLP conferences and leading AI/ML venues, as well as SCI/SSCI-indexed international journals in NLP, AI, and related interdisciplinary fields.
- Conferences: ICML, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING, EACL, LREC, IJCNN, etc.
- Journals: IEEE TNNLS, ACM TIST, ACM TALLIP, Natural Language Processing, Royal Society Open Science, Acta Psychologica, Journal of Computational Social Science.
Community Members
- Committee member of NICE, an NLP and AI Academic Exchange Platform.
- Member of AI Grid, a German AI community connecting young AI scientists funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
- Junior member of Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), one of six German national AI Competence Centers.
- Member of NLP/CL communities such as ACL, GSCL (German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology)
Credits: This page was originally created by Peiqin Lin and has been adopted and modified by me.
