I am Weijia Zhang, a Software Engineer at Google, working on user and click modeling for Google Ads. Previously, I was an Applied Scientist at Amazon in Seattle. I completed my Ph.D. at the Information Retrieval Lab, University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas.

Research Interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Agentic AI, with a particular focus on agentic deep research and table understanding.

[Email] [Google Scholar] [LinkedIn]

News

• Aug, 2025: One paper accepted at EMNLP 2025 Findings.
• Sep, 2024: One paper accepted at EMNLP 2024.
• Aug, 2024: One paper accepted at ICPR 2024.
• Jul, 2024: One paper accepted at ECAI 2024.
• Jul, 2024: One paper accepted at INLG 2024 (Oral).

Arxiv Preprints

1. CARD: Cluster-level Adaptation with Reward-guided Decoding for Personalized Text Generation
   Yutong Song, Jiang Wu, Weijia Zhang, Chengze Shen, Shaofan Yuan, Weitao Lu, Jian Wang, Yu Wang, Nikil Dutt, Amir M. Rahmani
   [pdf]

2. Beyond Natural Language Plans: Structure-Aware Planning for Query-Focused Table Summarization
   Weijia Zhang, Songgaojun Deng, Evangelos Kanoulas
   [pdf]

Publications

1. Summarize-Exemplify-Reflect: Data-driven Insight Distillation Empowers LLMs for Few-shot Tabular Classification Yifei Yuan, Jiatong Li, Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Evangelos Kanoulas, Renjun Hu EMNLP 2025 Findings: The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing [pdf]

2. FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture
   Wenyan Li, Xinyu Zhang, Jiaang Li, Qiwei Peng, Raphael Tang, Li Zhou, Weijia Zhang, et al.
   EMNLP 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
   [pdf]

3. QFMTS: Generating Query-Focused Summaries over Multi-Table Inputs
   Weijia Zhang, Vaishali Pal, Jia-Hong Huang, Evangelos Kanoulas, Maarten de Rijke
   ECAI 2024: Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
   [pdf]

4. Beyond Relevant Documents: A Knowledge-Intensive Approach for Query-Focused Summarization using Large Language Models
   Weijia Zhang, Jia-Hong Huang, Svitlana Vakulenko, Yumo Xu, Thilina Rajapakse, Evangelos Kanoulas
   ICPR 2024: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Pattern Recognition
   [pdf]

5. Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics
   Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Yifei Yuan, Jiahuan Pei, Jia-hong Huang, Evangelos Kanoulas
   INLG 2024 (Oral): Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference
   [pdf]

6. A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics and Humans in Citation Evaluation
   Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Jiahuan Pei, Yifei Yuan, Jia-Hong Huang, Evangelos Kanoulas
   LLM4Eval@SIGIR 2024: The First Workshop on Large Language Model for Evaluation in Information Retrieval
   [pdf]

7. Tackling Query-Focused Summarization as A Knowledge-Intensive Task: A Pilot Study
   Weijia Zhang, Svitlana Vakulenko, Thilina Rajapakse, Yumo Xu, Evangelos Kanoulas
   Gen-IR@SIGIR 2023: The First Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval
   [pdf]

8. A Deep Neural Information Fusion Architecture for Textual Network Embeddings
   Zenan Xu, Qinliang Su, Xiaojun Quan, Weijia Zhang
   EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
   [pdf]

Contact

• Email: weijia.zhangplus AT gmail.com