Papers by Alejandro Jaimes
Uchaguzi-2022: A Dataset of Citizen Reports on the 2022 Kenyan Election (2025.coling-main)
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Roberto Mondini, Neema Kotonya, Robert L Logan IV, Elizabeth M. Olson, Angela Oduor Lungati, Daniel Odongo, Tim Ombasa, Hemank Lamba, Aoife Cahill, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes
| Challenge: | Systematically organizing and geotagging large amounts of crowdsourced information requires substantial manual effort, often led by volunteers. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset of 14k citizen reports related to the 2022 Kenyan General Election . they investigate whether language models can assist in scalably categorizing and geotagging reports . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset aims to show whether language models can assist in categorizing and geotagging reports, thus highlighting its potential application in the AI for Social Good space. |
Explain then Rank: Scale Calibration of Neural Rankers Using Natural Language Explanations from LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural ranking models produce the final document scores, but they are often treated as transient information and only the relative orderings are preserved to produce a ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit large language models (LLMs) to provide relevance and uncertainty signals for these neural text rankers to produce scale-calibrated scores through Monte Carlo sampling of natural language explanations (NLEs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous calibration methods and LLM-based methods for ranking, calibration, and query performance prediction tasks. |
XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Temporal Expression Extraction (TEE) is essential for understanding time in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multilingual Temporal Expression Extraction that leverages pre-trained language models to prompt cross-language knowledge transfer from English to non-English languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing SOTA methods on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque by large margins. |
Event Extraction as Question Generation and Answering (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Event Extraction addresses the error propagation issue found in token-based classification approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a Question Generation (QG) model that generates questions that leverage contextual information instead of fixed templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous single-task-based models on the ACE05 English dataset. |
BUMP: A Benchmark of Unfaithful Minimal Pairs for Meta-Evaluation of Faithfulness Metrics (2023.acl-long)
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Liang Ma, Shuyang Cao, Robert L Logan IV, Di Lu, Shihao Ran, Ke Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, but they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are consistent, effective on human-written texts, and sensitive to different error types. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unfaithful minimal pairs to measure the consistency of automatic faithfulness metrics by comparing human-written summary pairs with a dataset of 889 human-writing, minimally different summary pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, and that the best performing metrics are sensitive to errors. |
A New Task and Dataset on Detecting Attacks on Human Rights Defenders (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for event extraction cannot extract information from textual sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourced annotations on 500 online news articles to train and evaluate baseline models to predict annotated characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes crowdsourced annotations on 500 online news articles and includes fine-grained information about the type and location of attacks, as well as information about victims. |
HumVI: A Multilingual Dataset for Detecting Violent Incidents Impacting Humanitarian Aid (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Hemank Lamba, Anton Abilov, Ke Zhang, Elizabeth Olson, Henry Dambanemuya, João Bárcia, David Batista, Christina Wille, Aoife Cahill, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes
| Challenge: | Humanitarian organizations can analyze data to discover trends, gather aggregated insights, manage security risks, and inform advocacy and funding proposals. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset comprising news articles in three languages containing instances of different types of violent incidents categorized by the humanitarian sector they impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to identify violent incidents and identify their impact on humanitarian operations. |
Journalistic Guidelines Aware News Image Captioning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that JoGANIC outperforms state-of-the-art methods for image caption generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate descriptive and informative captions for news article images . they leverage the structure of captions to improve the generation quality and guide their representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale datasets. |
CrisisLTLSum: A Benchmark for Local Crisis Event Timeline Extraction and Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Timeline extraction and abstractive summarization are critical tasks for leveraging large numbers of social media posts about events. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a semi-automated cluster-then-refine algorithm to extract local crisis event timelines from Twitter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better than human models on extraction and summarization tasks. |
Multi-View Source Ablation for Faithful Summarization (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | MuFaSSa is a metric for evaluating faithfulness of abstractive summaries . it uses different strategies to remove information from source document to form multiple ablated views . |
| Approach: | They propose a metric for evaluating faithfulness of abstractive summaries using multiple ablated views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing models on summarization tasks and human-annotated faithfulness labels. |
CEHA: A Dataset of Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa (2025.coling-main)
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Rui Bai, Di Lu, Shihao Ran, Elizabeth M. Olson, Hemank Lamba, Aoife Cahill, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes
| Challenge: | Existing datasets categorizing conflict events do not cover all of the fine-grained types of conflict relevant to areas like the Horn of Africa. |
| Approach: | They propose to use online news articles to categorize violent conflict events . they propose to extract event-relevance and event-types from 500 English event descriptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset categorizes conflict risk according to specific areas required by stakeholders in the Humanitarian-Peace-Development Nexus. |
Harnessing the power of LLMs: Evaluating human-AI text co-creation through the lens of news headline generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shattered the ceiling of human-like text generation. |
| Approach: | They compared human-AI interaction types in LLM-assisted news headline generation to determine whether humans can best leverage them for writing. |
| Outcome: | The guiding and selecting model outputs added the most benefit with the lowest cost (in time and effort) Furthermore, AI assistance did not harm participants’ perception of control compared to freeform editing. |