Personal profile
Biography
Dr. Lizhen Qu is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, a founding member of the AIM lab, and an expert in robust and privacy-preserving neuro-symbolic methods for natural language processing (NLP) and multimodal applications. His work seamlessly integrates deep learning, logical reasoning, and causality. In particular, his team were the first to investigate the negative impact of spurious correlations in dialogue research using causality theories and proposed algorithms to improve the robustness and generalizability of models across domains. In addition, he has conducted extensive research on a wide range of NLP applications, with a special focus on legal AI, digital health, and social NLP. Prior to his current role, he served as a research scientist at Data61/CSIRO, and completed his PhD at Saarland University and the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics. He also actively contributes to the NLP community, serving as an Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR), OpenReview Co-Chair for ACL 2025, and Workshop Co-Chair for IJCNLP-AACL 2025.
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being
Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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TMLGenAI: Trustworthy Generative AI: Towards Safe and Aligned Foundation Models
Phung, D. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Vu, T. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Qu, L. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Le, T. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Haffari, R. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Webb, G. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Nicholson, A. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Ke, Q. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Cai, J. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Bui, T. (Chief Investigator (CI))
11/06/24 → 30/06/26
Project: Research
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HARNESS: Hierarchical Abstractions and Reasoning for Neuro-Symbolic Systems
Rezatofighi, H. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Garcia De La Banda Garcia, M. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Li, Y.-F. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Stuckey, P. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Gasevic, D. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Gutierrez, J. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Qu, L. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Ignatiev , A. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Swiecki, Z. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Vered, M. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Chen, G. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Haffari, R. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Say, B. (Chief Investigator (CI))
20/06/23 → 20/02/27
Project: Research
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CSIRO Next Generation Graduates Program: AI in Mental Health
McNaney, R. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Olivier, P. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Yap, M. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Cai, J. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Wu, L. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Watterson, J. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Haffari, R. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Qu, L. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Wilson Rajaratnam, S. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Wang, T. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Sharp, G. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Alvarez-Jimenez, M. (Chief Investigator (CI)), D'Alfonso, S. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Kostakos, V. (Chief Investigator (CI))
Pola Practice Pty Ltd, Crank Group Pty Ltd
5/04/23 → 31/12/27
Project: Research
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Accessible Data Exploration and Analysis for Blind People
Marriott, K. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Butler, M. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Zukerman, I. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Qu, L. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Lee, B. (Partner Investigator (PI))
ARC - Australian Research Council
28/02/23 → 27/02/27
Project: Research
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Cross-lingual text summarisation with a plan
Li, Y.-F. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Haffari, R. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Qu, L. (Chief Investigator (CI))
1/06/22 → 31/08/22
Project: Research
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Audio Is the Achilles’ Heel: Red Teaming Audio Large Multimodal Models
Yang, H., Qu, L., Shareghi, E. & Haffari, R., 2025, NAACL 2025, Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Proceedings of the Conference Volume 1: Long Papers. Chiruzzo, L., Ritter, A. & Wang, L. (eds.). Kerrville TX USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), p. 9292–9306 15 p. 2025.naacl-long.470Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference Paper › Research › peer-review
Open Access -
Automating IRAC analysis in Malaysian contract law using a semi-structured knowledge base
Kang, X., Qu, L., Soon, L.-K., Li, Z. & Trakic, A., 7 Jul 2025, (Accepted/In press) In: Artificial Intelligence and Law. 44 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
Open Access1 Link opens in a new tab Citation (Scopus) -
NEUSIS: A Compositional Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Autonomous Perception, Reasoning, and Planning in Complex UAV Search Missions
Cai, Z., Cardenas, C. R., Leo, K., Zhang, C., Backman, K., Li, H., Li, B., Ghorbanali, M., Datta, S., Qu, L., Gutierrez, J., Ignatiev, A., Li, Y.-F., Vered, M., Stuckey, P. J., De La Banda, M. G. & Rezatofighi, H., Sept 2025, In: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 10, 9, p. 9502-9509 8 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
1 Link opens in a new tab Citation (Scopus) -
Scalable Frame-Based Construction of Sociocultural Norm Bases for Socially Aware Dialogues
Qu, S., Wang, W., Zhou, X., Zhan, H., Li, Z., Qu, L., Luo, L., Li, Y. F. & Haffari, G., 7 Nov 2025, In: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications. 21, 11, 17 p., 317.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
1 Link opens in a new tab Citation (Scopus) -
When Refreshable Tactile Displays Meet Conversational Agents: Investigating Accessible Data Presentation and Analysis with Touch and Speech
Reinders, S., Butler, M., Zukerman, I., Lee, B., Qu, L. & Marriott, K., Jan 2025, In: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 31, 1, p. 864-874 11 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
9 Link opens in a new tab Citations (Scopus)