Papers by Andrew Yates
Corpus-Steered Query Expansion with Large Language Models (2024.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show query expansions generate hypothetical documents that answer queries as expansions. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus-steered query expansion to promote incorporation of knowledge embedded within the corpus. |
| Outcome: | et al. analyzed corpus-based Query Expansion (CSQE) using LLMs to generate hypothetical documents that answer the query. |
MultiTabQA: Generating Tabular Answers for Multi-Table Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent tabular question answering models only answer questions over a single table . multi-table operations often result in tabular outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that answers questions over multiple tables and generalizes to generate tabular answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art single table QA models on a multi-table QA setting. |
Improving the Generalizability of Depression Detection by Leveraging Clinical Questionnaires (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identify mental health conditions using social media are limited by the presence of symptoms described in a questionnaire used by clinicians. |
| Approach: | They propose to ground a model in PHQ9's symptoms to improve generalization . they also show that this approach can still perform competitively on in-domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can perform competitively on in-domain data while improving generalizability and generalisability. |
PRIDE: Predicting Relationships in Conversations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting interpersonal relationships from dialogues are limited to end-to-end learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural multi-label classifier that infers relationships from dialogues by external knowledge about speaker features and conversation style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on large-scale datasets with directed relationships of conversation participants. |
CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data (2026.acl-long)
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Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob Van Der Goot, Lanwenn ar C’horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, null Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray, Sarah K. K. Luger
| Challenge: | Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. |
| Approach: | They introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 109 languages and shows that existing evaluations overestimate accuracy for many languages in the web domain. |
Making Large Language Models Efficient Dense Retrievers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that fine-tuning large language models for dense retrieval yields strong performance, but their substantial parameter counts make them computationally inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for developing efficient retrievers that performs coarse-to-fine compression through a coarse-grained coarse-tuning strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces model size and inference cost while preserving performance of full-size models. |
NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural IR models do not have a mechanism for treating expansion terms differently from the original query terms, making it difficult to combine them with existing PRF approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models. |
DyVo: Dynamic Vocabularies for Learned Sparse Retrieval with Entities (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models use vocabularies from pre-trained transformers, which often split entities into nonsensical fragments. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance the LSR vocabulary with Wikipedia concepts and entities, enabling the model to resolve ambiguities more effectively and stay current with evolving knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models across three entity-rich document ranking datasets. |
Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond (2021.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial provides an overview of text ranking using neural network architectures known as transformers. |
| Approach: | This tutorial provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers. |
ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based methods often generate narrowly focused expansions that overlook these desiderata. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time query expansion framework that promotes exploration and result diversity . ThinkQE encourages deeper and comprehensive semantic exploration and a corpus-interaction strategy that iteratively refines expansions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior approaches on diverse web search benchmarks. |
BERT-QE: Contextualized Query Expansion for Document Re-ranking (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand query use pseudo relevance feedback (PRF) but they are under-equipped to evaluate the relevance of information pieces used for expansion. |
| Approach: | They propose a query expansion model that leverages the BERT model to select relevant document chunks for expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing models on the TREC Robust04 and GOV2 test collections. |
RedDust: a Large Reusable Dataset of Reddit User Traits (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Social media is a rich source of assertions about personal traits, but identifying personal traits from implicit assertions is difficult because of the users’ highly varied vocabulary and expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a large-scale annotated resource for user profiling for over 300k Reddit users across five attributes: profession, hobby, family status, age, and gender. |
| Outcome: | The proposed resource is the first annotated language resource about Reddit users at large scale. |
SMHD: a Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to label mental health conditions are based on high-precision diagnosis patterns and carefully selected control users. |
| Approach: | They propose to use high-precision diagnosis patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions and obtain high-quality labeled data without manual labelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is two orders of magnitude larger than the largest published similar resource. |
Enhancing Lexicon-Based Text Embeddings with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on general-purpose text embedding tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce the first lexicon-based embeddings that consolidates the vocabulary space through token embeddation clustering to handle the issue of token redundancy in LLM vocabularies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms dense embeddings on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) it also supports efficient dimension pruning without any specialized objectives like Matryoshka Representation Learning. |
Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language modeling are based on task-related instructions or prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) using meta-task prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality sentences without fine-tuning . it excels on STS benchmarks and in downstream tasks, surpassing models with similar prompts . |
DeClarE: Debunking Fake News and False Claims using Evidence-Aware Deep Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on automated fact-checking does not consider external evidence, but requires rich lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network model that aggregates external evidence and language . they also derive informative features for generating user-comprehensible explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model aggregates signals from external evidence articles, language and trustworthiness of their sources without human intervention. |
Representational Isomorphism and Alignment of Multilingual Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing isomorphism of sentence representations can facilitate representational alignments in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply a contrastive objective to LLMs with a small number of translation pairs to improve models' performance on Semantic Textual Similarity tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representation-level approach significantly improves on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks across languages even without a monolingual objective. |
Unsupervised Dense Retrieval with Relevance-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrievers have impressive performance, but their demand for abundant training data limits their application scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses unlabeled data to construct pseudo-positive examples from unlabelled data and then contrastively weighs the contrastive loss of different pairs according to the estimated relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the SOTA unsupervised Contriever model on BEIR and open-domain QA retrieval benchmarks and is a good few-shot learner. |
Table Question Answering for Low-resourced Indic Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on two Indic languages with no tableQA datasets and models on different aspects including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. |
CHARM: Inferring Personal Attributes from Conversations (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Personal Knowledge Bases (PKBs) capture individual user traits for customizing downstream applications like chatbots or recommenders. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages keyword extraction and document retrieval to predict attribute values that were never seen during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict attributes that were never seen during training. |
SERVAL: Surprisingly Effective Zero-Shot Visual Document Retrieval Powered by Large Vision and Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) relies on text-to-image retrieval using specialized bi-encoders . et al., 2022, 2024, 2021, 2023, 2026, 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060) document retrieval bridges human or artificial agents to the most relevant information, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot visual document retrieval method that uses bi-encoders . they propose 63.4% nDCG@5 for visual document capture and a reusable semantic proxy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the strongest specialised multi-vector visual document encoder on the ViDoRe-v2 benchmark and scales similarly on MIRACL-VISION with broader multilingual coverage. |
Controlled Retrieval-augmented Context Evaluation for Long-form RAG (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating context retrieved from external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a Controlled Retrieval-aUgmented conteXt evaluation framework to directly assess retrieval-augmented contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework uses human-written summaries to control the information scope of knowledge. |
STANCY: Stance Classification Based on Consistency Cues (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that stance classification is a critical step for information credibility and automated fact-checking. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network model for stance classification leveraging BERT representations and augmenting them with a novel consistency constraint. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on a Perspectrum dataset and shows that it is more accurate than existing methods. |