Photo of Chunhua

LinkedIn
Google Scholar
Chunhua Liu (刘春花 · chūn 春=spring, huā 花=flower)
Postdoc Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in NLP
Melbourne Connect
Computing and Information Systems
The University of Melbourne
Natural Language Processing group
Software Engineering group

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in NLP at The University of Melbourne, working with Prof Eduard Hovy and Dr Lea Frermann on cultural and value alignment in language models. My research develops human-centred NLP systems that reliably adapt to the diverse meanings, values, and behaviours of people across cultures and societies.

My current primary research themes are:
  • Cultural alignment of language models — grounding LLMs in diverse cultural and moral values (ACL 2025, ACL 2026)
  • Understanding diversity in human meaning — studying how word meanings and semantic associations vary across cultures using cognitive psychology methods (WAX, CogSci 2026)
  • Human–AI communication and persuasion — examining how LLMs adapt to people and how that power can be misused or steered
I also collaborate widely, including on:

Previously, I spent a year as a postdoc with A/Prof Patanamon Thongtanunam on empirical software engineering, focusing on automated code review. I was also very fortunate to complete my PhD under Prof Trevor Cohn and Dr Lea Frermann on commonsense reasoning via human word associations (see my PhD thesis). Much of my PhD work bridges cognitive science and NLP, grounded in the the Small World of Words project in collaboration with Dr Simon De Deyne. Before this, I completed my undergraduate and master's degrees with Prof Dong Yu at BLCU, where my NLP research began.

I am actively seeking academic positions (lecturer, senior lecturer, research scientist) in NLP and related areas. Feel free to reach out via email (chunhua.liu1{at}unimelb.edu.au) or LinkedIn.

News