Welcome to my personal website!

I am a postgraduate student at the University of Sydney, majoring in Data Science with a specialization in Machine Learning.

I have recently embarked on my research journey in the world of Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of my research interests is to improve the performance of LLMs in conversational scenarios. Many dialogues occur in my past teamwork experiences, work internships, and daily life. These dialogues can be highly professional, such as business negotiations or financial analyses, or quite ordinary, such as dates or bargaining. The potential value of LLMs lies in adopting appropriate strategies and producing suitable outputs in the proper context to achieve specific objectives. Considering my educational background in AI and Social Science, another of my research interests is to expand the application of NLP to a broader field so that NLP can empower more disciplines and make NLP more socially valuable and commercially valuable.

Currently, I am delving deeper into research and actively seeking opportunities for research internships (one of the reason is that I have no supervisor or mentor so far) and pursuing a PhD or MS/PhD.

Finally, I would like to thank who have accompanied and helped me in my life and work, especially my senior, Hongbin Na and Zimu Wang, for their patient and professional advice and pleasant collaboration.

Degrees

• M.S. in Data Science, University of Sydney, 2025.07 (expected)
  • GPA: 3.20/4.00 (current)
• B.S. in Economics, University of Sydney, 2023.12
  • GPA: 3.85/4.00

Papers

(The asterisk * appearing after authors means equal contribution.)
(OSS means One-Sentence-Summary about the paper.)

• [COLING2025] [2024] Detecting Conversational Mental Manipulation with Intent-Aware Prompting
  • Author: Jiayuan Ma*, Hongbin Na*, Zimu Wang, Yining Hua, Yue Liu, Wei Wang, Ling Chen
  • Award: Best Short Paper, Oral
  • OSS: Based on Theory of Mind as motivation, a new approach, Intent-Aware Prompting (IAP), was introduced to detect mental manipulation in dialogues, which notably reduces false negatives and improving overall performance on detection.

Internships

• 2023.12 - 2024.02, ESG Research Intern
  • PwC China (Shanghai, China)
• 2023.06 - 2023.08, VC Research Intern
  • Shenzhen Capital Group Co. Ltd (Shanghai, China)
• 2022.09 - 2022.12, IBD Research Intern
  • China Securities Co. Ltd (Beijing, China)
• 2021.06 - 2021.07, Consulting Assistant Intern
  • Capgemini Consulting (China) Co. Ltd (Hangzhou, China)

Skills

• Computing
  • Python, R, STATA, MS Office
• Languages
  • Chinese, English, Spanish (B1), Japanese (N5)
• Certificates
  • ACCA (passed 5/13), CFA Level 1 (in preparation)