Zilu Tang
NLP Researcher at Boston University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZilu Tang is an NLP researcher and PhD student at Boston University with nine years of interdisciplinary experience spanning bioengineering and applied AI research. She has driven practical advances in mechanistic interpretability, personalized alignment, and low-resource translation through internships at Apple AIML, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and IBM Research, with work accepted to venues including EMNLP, NAACL, and AACL-IJCNLP. Her projects range from mitigating LLM translation hallucinations and inventing explain-then-translate prompting for program translation to building large parallel corpora for code, demonstrating strength at the intersection of explainability and robust model generalization. Zilu’s background in bioengineering and brain–machine interfaces informs a human-centered approach to augmenting capability, and she often explores whether model explanations faithfully reflect internal mechanisms. Based in Cambridge, MA, she is actively seeking NLP internships focused on interpretability, alignment, efficient/low-resource methods, and reasoning for Summer 2026 and beyond.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
High School, General education, 3.97, High School, General education, 3.97 at Evansville day schoolGeneral education, General education at Redding Christian high schoolBachelor’s Degree, Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering, 3.74, Bachelor’s Degree, Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering, 3.74 at Rice UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Boston University
English, Chinese, Spanish
Github Skills (30)
sentence7
xai7
word-segmentation7
tokenizer7
arxiv7
nlp6
embedding6
natural-language-processing6
text-based6
representation-learning6
neural-machine-translation6
contrastive-learning5
deep-learning5
machine-learning5
natural-language-generation5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
PootieT/pootiet.github.io
Mar 2020 - Mar 2024
my personal website
Contributions:44 pushes, 2 branches in 4 years
reactnextjs
PootieT/AugCSE
Oct 2022 - Dec 2022
Contrastive sentence embedding with diverse augmentation
Contributions:13 commits, 1 PR, 9 pushes in 2 months
nlpsentencediversecontrastivesentence-embedding
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