Dr Ziqi Zhang

Information School

Senior Lecturer in Social Media

ziqi.zhang@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 2657

Room 323a, Regent Court (IS)

Full contact details

Dr Ziqi Zhang
Information School
Room 323a
Regent Court (IS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP

Profile

I am currently an academic member of staff of the Information School. Before joining the Information School in 2018, I was a computer science lecturer at the Computing and Technology Department, Nottingham Trent University (2016-18), and a researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (pre-2016).

My research addresses methods that enable machines to extract human knowledge from text, to represent such knowledge in a structured representation that is understandable and usable by machines. This covers areas of knowledge graphs, natural language processing, text mining, and social media analytics. My work features close collaboration with industry partners, to apply research output to real-world problem solving. For example, I worked with Archaeological Data Services from the University of York to create ArchSearch, an advanced search engine for archaeology grey literature backed by an archaoelogy knowledge graph. I worked with The Klood Ltd to create the first football rumour extraction engine based on Twitter, FootballWhispers.com. And I worked with Vamstar Ltd. to develop a knowledge graph of the healthcare sector supply chain, in order to improve public healthcare procurement. These projects are funded by a range of research councils and private bodies, such EPSRC, AHRC, and InnovateUK.

I am always looking for PhD students in the areas of knowledge graphs, text mining and social media analytics. And I am interested in collaboration with external partners in any capacity.

University responsibilities

Exams Officer

Research interests

My research addresses methods that enable machines to extract human knowledge from text, to represent such knowledge in a structured representation that is understandable and usable by machines. This ultimately enhances our capability of processing and sense-making of very large scale data, improving decision making. Specifically, this include but is not limited to:

Knowledge graph research: the automatic creation, augmentation, and mapping of structured ‘databases’ that support machine understandability and reasoning. Knowledge graphs are widely used today by search engines and industry applications. For example, Google uses knowledge graphs to improve its search results; pharmaceutical companies use knowledge graphs to discover unknown chemical compouds that can be used for drug development. Our project ‘Archaeotools’ was an example of developing knowledge graphs for the archaeology domain. This led to the ArchSearch service that currently powers one of the largest archaeology databse in the UK.
Information Extraction: developing computational methods to automatically transform unstructured, natural language text into structured representation that could support machine understandability and reasoning. This could include the extraction of terms, concepts, named entities, and relations between them from texts. I am particularly interested in the development and adaptation of IE methods in domain specific contexts, such as bibliometrics research, cultural heritage, and the legal domain.
Social media analysis: the application and adaptation of Information Extraction methods onto social media text analytics, to enable event discovery and monitoring. For example, I worked with Rotherham United Football Club to develop content moderation methods to tackle online hate. I worked with Diabetes.co.uk to develop computational methods for analysing user generated content in its forums. And I worked with a team of researchers to develop the first football rumour extraction engine using Twitter, FootballWhispers.com.
Semantic Web and Linked Data: the broader range of topics related to the vision of tomorrow’s Web where machine understandable data are put on the Web, shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.

Publications

Journal articles

Zhang Z & Song X (2023) An exploratory study on utilising the web of linked data for product data mining. SN Computer Science, 4(1).
Ren M, Zhang Z, Zhang J & Mora L (2022) Understanding the use of heterogenous data in tackling urban flooding: an integrative literature review. Water, 14(14).
Zhao Z, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2022) Utilizing subjectivity level to mitigate identity term bias in toxic comments classification. Online Social Networks and Media, 29, 100205-100205.
Zhang Z, Tam W & Cox A (2021) Towards automated analysis of research methods in library and information science. Quantitative Science Studies.
Guzmán EM, Zhang Z & Ahmed W (2021) Towards understanding a football club’s social media network: an exploratory case study of Manchester United. Information Discovery and Delivery, 49(1), 71-83.
Zhang Z & Bors G (2019) “Less is more”. Online Information Review, 44(1), 213-237.
Aljamel A, Osman T, Acampora G, Vitiello A & Zhang Z (2019) Smart information retrieval: Domain knowledge centric optimization approach. IEEE Access, 7, 4167-4183. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z & Ahmed W (2018) A comparison of information sharing behaviours across 379 health conditions on Twitter. International Journal of Public Health, 1-10. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z & Luo L (2018) Hate Speech Detection: A Solved Problem? The Challenging Case of Long Tail on Twitter. Semantic Web: interoperability, usability, applicability. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z, Gao J & Ciravegna F (2018) SemRe-Rank: Improving Automatic Term Extraction by Incorporating Semantic Relatedness with Personalised PageRank. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, 12(5). View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z (2017) Effective and efficient Semantic Table Interpretation using TableMiner+. Semantic Web, 8(6), 921-957. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z, Gentile AL, Blomqvist E, Augenstein I & Ciravegna F (2016) An unsupervised data-driven method to discover equivalent relations in large Linked Datasets. Semantic Web, 8(2), 197-223. View this article in WRRO
Gentile AL, Zhang Z & Ciravegna F (2015) Early Steps Towards Web Scale Information Extraction with LODIE. AI Magazine, 36(1), 55-64. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z, Gentile AL & Augenstein I (2014) "Linked data as background knowledge for information extraction on the web" by Ziqi Zhang, Anna Lisa Gentile and Isabelle Augenstein with Martin Vesely as coordinator. ACM SIGWEB Newsletter(Summer), 1-9.
ZHANG ZIQI, GENTILE ANNALISA & CIRAVEGNA FABIO (2012) Recent advances in methods of lexical semantic relatedness - a survey. Natural Language Engineering, FirstView, 1-69.
Gentile AL, Zhang Z, Xia L & Iria J (2010) Cultural knowledge for Named Entity Disambiguation: a graph-based Semantic Relatedness approach. Serdica Journal of Computing, 4, 217-242.
Jeffrey S, Richards J, Ciravegna F, Waller S, Chapman S & Zhang Z (2009) The Archaeotools project: faceted classification and natural language processing in an archaeological context.. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci, 367(1897), 2507-2519.
Da Moura Semedo C, Bath P & Zhang Z () Social Support in a Diabetes Online Community: A Mixed Methods Content Analysis (Preprint). JMIR Diabetes.

Chapters

Zhang Z & Paramita M (2019) Product Classification Using Microdata Annotations, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 716-732). Springer International Publishing
Zhang Z (2014) Towards Efficient and Effective Semantic Table Interpretation, The Semantic Web – ISWC 2014 (pp. 487-502). Springer International Publishing
Gentile AL, Zhang Z & Ciravegna F (2011) Combining Diverse Knowledge Based Features for Semantic Relatedness Measures In Brena RF & Guzman-Arenas A (Ed.), Quantitative Semantics and Soft Computing Methods for the Web (pp. 96-117). IGI Global
Zhang Z & Ciravegna F (2011) Named Entity Recognition for Ontology Population using Background Knowledge from Wikipedia IGI Global

Conference proceedings papers

Fallatah O, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2022) The Impact of Imbalanced Class Distribution on Knowledge Graphs Matching. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 3324 (pp 1-12)
Fallatah O, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2022) KGMatcher+ Results for OAEI 2022. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 3324 (pp 181-187)
Fallatah O, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2021) A hybrid approach for large knowledge graphs matching. Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Ontology Matching (OM 2021). Virtual Conference, 25 October 2021 - 25 October 2021. View this article in WRRO
Zhao Z, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2021) A Comparative Study of Using Pre-trained Language Models for Toxic Comment Classification. Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 View this article in WRRO
Fallatah O, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2021) KGMatcher Results for OAEI 2021. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 3063 (pp 160-166)
Zhang Z, Bizer C, Peeters R & Primpeli A (2020) MWPD2020: Semantic web challenge on mining the web of html-embedded product data. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2720
Fallatah O, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2020) A gold standard dataset for large knowledge graphs matching. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2788 (pp 24-35)
Zhang Z, Petrak J & Maynard D (2018) Adapted TextRank for Term Extraction: A generic method of improving automatic term extraction algorithms. Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 137 (pp 102-108), 10 September 2018 - 13 September 2018. View this article in WRRO
Robinson D, Zhang Z & Tepper J (2018) Hate speech detection on Twitter : feature engineering v.s. feature selection. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2018 Satellite Events (pp 46-49). Crete, Greece, 3 June 2018 - 7 June 2018. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z, Robinson D & Tepper J (2018) Detecting Hate Speech on Twitter Using a Convolution-GRU Based Deep Neural Network. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 10843 (pp 745-760), 3 June 2018 - 7 June 2018. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z, Nuzzolese AG & Gentile AL (2017) Entity deduplication on ScholarlyData. The Semantic Web, Vol. Part 1 (pp 85-100), 28 May 2017 - 1 June 2017. View this article in WRRO
Mazumdar S & Zhang Z (2016) Visualizing semantic table annotations with TableMiner. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1690
Mazumdar S & Zhang Z (2016) A tool for creating and visualizing semantic annotations on relational tables. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1699 (pp 2-10)
Zhang Z, Gao J & Ciravegna F (2016) JATE 2.0: Java Automatic Term Extraction with Apache Solr. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016 (pp 2262-2269) View this article in WRRO
Gentile AL, Zhang Z & ciravegna F (2014) Self Training Wrapper Induction with Linked Data. TSD2014. B'rno, 8 September 2014 - 12 September 2014.
(2014) The Semantic Web – ISWC 2014
Zhang Z (2014) Disambiguating Web tables using partial data. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1272 (pp 213-216)
Zhang Z (2014) Learning with Partial Data for Semantic Table Interpretation (pp 607-618)
Zhang Z, Cohn T & Ciravegna F (2013) Topic-oriented Words as Features for Named Entity Recognition. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLING)
Blomqvist E, Zhang Z, Gentile AL, Augenstein I & Ciravegna F (2013) Statistical knowledge patterns for characterising linked data. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1188
Gentile AL, Zhang Z, D'Amato C & Paulheim H (2013) LD4IE - Linked data for information extraction. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1057
Augenstein I, Gentile AL, Norton B, Zhang Z & Ciravegna F (2013) Mapping keywords to Linked Data resources for automatic query expansion. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 992 (pp 9-20)
Elbedweihy K, Wrigley SN, Ciravegna F & Zhang Z (2013) Using BabelNet in bridging the gap between natural language queries and linked data concepts. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1064
Augenstein I, Gentile AL, Norton B, Zhang Z & Ciravegna F (2013) Mapping Keywords to Linked Data Resources for Automatic Query Expansion (pp 101-112)
Gentile AL, Zhang Z & Ciravegna F (2013) Web scale information extraction with LODIE. AAAI Fall Symposium - Technical Report, Vol. FS-13-04 (pp 24-27)
Zhang Z, gentile AL, Ciravegna & Augenstein (2013) Unsupervised Wrapper Induction using Linked Data. K-cap 2013, 23 June 2013 - 26 June 2013.
Ciravegna F, Gentile A & Zhang Z (2012) LODIE - Linked Open Data for Web-scale Information Extraction. Semantic Web and Information Extraction workshop in EKAW2012
Zhang Z, Webster P, Uren V, Varga A & Ciravegna F (2012) Automatically Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Instructional Texts using Natural Language Processing. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). Istanbul View this article in WRRO
Gentile AL, Zhang & Ciravegna (2012) LODIE: Linked Open Data for Web-scale Information Extraction. Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Web and Information Extraction (SWAIE 2012). Galway, 8 October 2012 - 12 October 2012.
Dadzie A, Uren V, Zhang Z & Webster P (2011) An Integrated Environment for Semantic Knowledge Work. Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. Demo track at the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Zhang Z, Gentile A & Ciravegna F (2011) Harnessing different knowledge sources to measure semantic relatedness under a uniform model. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Dadzie A-S, Uren V, Zhang Z & Webster P (2011) An integrated environment for semantic knowledge work. Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management - CIKM '11, 24 October 2011 - 28 October 2011. View this article in WRRO
Zhang Z, Gentile AL & Ciravegna F (2011) Harnessing different knowledge sources to measure semantic relatedness under a uniform model. EMNLP '11 Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp 991-1002). Stroudsburg, 27 July 2011 - 29 July 2011.
Fernandez M, Zhang Z, Lopez V, Uren V & Motta E (2011) Ontology augmentation: Combining semantic web and text resources. KCAP 2011 - Proceedings of the 2011 Knowledge Capture Conference (pp 9-16)
Zhang Z, Chapman S & Ciravegna F (2010) A Methodology towards Effective and Efficient Manual Document Annotation: Addressing Annotator Discrepancy and Annotation Quality.. EKAW, Vol. 6317 (pp 301-315)
Zhang Z, Uren V & Ciravegna F (2010) A comprehensive solution to procedural knowledge acquisition using information extraction. KDIR 2010 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (pp 432-437)
Zhang Z, Iria J & Ciravegna F (2010) Improving Domain-specific Entity Recognition with Automatic Term Recognition and Feature Extraction.. LREC
Zhang Z, Gentile A, Xia L, Iria J & Chapman S (2010) A Random Graph Walk based Approach to Compute Semantic Relatedness Using Knowledge from Wikipedia. Language Resources and Evaluation
Gentile AL, Zhang Z, Xia L & Iria J (2009) Graph-based Semantic Relatedness for Named Entity Disambiguation. Proceedings of S3T 2009: International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies, 28-29 October 2009, Sofia, Bulgaria (pp 13-20-13-20)
Zhang Z, Lei X, Greenwood M & Iria J (2009) Too Many Mammals: Improving the Diversity of Automatically Recognized Terms. Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Zhang Z & Iria J (2009) A Novel Approach to Automatic Gazetteer Generation using Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACL’09 Workshop on Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources
Brewster C, Jupp S, Luciano J, Shotton D, Stevens RD & Zhang Z (2009) Issues in learning an ontology from text. BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 10(SUPPL. 5) View this article in WRRO
Jeffrey S, Richards J, Ciravegna F, Waller S, Chapman S & Zhang Z (2008) When ontology and reality collide: the Archaeotools project, facetted classification and natural language processing in an archaeological context.. 36th Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology On the Road to Reconstructing the Past
Zhang Z, Iria J, Brewster C & Ciravegna F (2008) A Comparative Evaluation of Term Recognition Algorithms.. LREC
Brewster C, Iria J, Zhang Z, Ciravegna F, Guthrie F & Wilks Y (2007) Dynamic Iterative Ontology Learning. Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2007 (RANLP-07)
Iria J, Xia L & Zhang Z (2007) WIT: Web People Search Disambiguation using Random Walks. Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (Semeval 2007),
Gentile A, Zhang Z, Lei X & Iria J () Semantic Relatedness approach for Named Entity Disambiguation. Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries
Zhang , Gentile AL, augenstein , Blomqvist E & ciravegna () Mining Equivalent Relations from Linked Data. http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P13/P13-2052.pdf. Sofia, Bulgaria, 4 August 2013 - 9 August 2013.
Zhang , Gentile AL, blomqvist E, augenstein & ciravegna () Statistical Knowledge Patterns: Identifying Synonymous Relations in Large Linked Datasets. International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2013. Sydney, Australia, 21 October 2013 - 25 October 2013.

Preprints

Zhao Z, Zhang Z & Hopfgartner F (2021) SS-BERT: Mitigating Identity Terms Bias in Toxic Comment Classification by Utilising the Notion of "Subjectivity" and "Identity Terms", arXiv.
Da Moura Semedo C, Bath P & Zhang Z () Social Support in a Diabetes Online Community: A Mixed Methods Content Analysis (Preprint), JMIR Publications Inc..

Research group

Current PhD students

Amnah Alluqman: computational assistant for online-shopping for visually impaired people
Daisy Da Moura Semedo: text mining in online health forums
Omaima Fallatah: knowledge graph matching
Jessica Fairbairn: computational methods for predicting hate speech propagation
Jenny Hayes: social activisim on the social media
Terence Egbelo: knowledge graph completion for drug discovery
Zhixue Zhao: computational methods for hate speech detection

Past PhD examinations

Aug 2021: Ruizhe Li , Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
Aug 2020: Jun Zhang, Informatin School, University of Sheffield

Teaching activities

I lead two modules:

INF Introduction to Data Science covers key concepts and theories related to data science
INF6024 Researching Social Media covers topics on research methods, data collection and analysis methods and research ethics in the context of social media research

Professional activities and memberships

External examiner for the Dublin City University
Member of the Alan Turing Institute’s Knowledge Graph network
Conference track co-chairs/senior committee members for the Extended Semantic Web Conference, the European Artificial Intelligence Conference
Guest editor for the Semantic Web Journal, Frontiers in Clinical Diabetes and Healthcare
Regular reviewer for conferences such as International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW), Internatonal Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), The Web Conference (WWW), Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
Regular reviewer for journals such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, IOS The Semantic Web Journal, Elsevier Information Processing and Management