Papers by David Lee
AlignFreeze: Navigating the Impact of Realignment on the Layers of Multilingual Models Across Diverse Languages (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Realignment techniques are often employed to enhance cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models, but can degrade performance in languages that differ significantly from the fine-tuned source language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that freezes either the lower half or upper half of the layers during realignment to prevent performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging performance in languages where realignment fails. |
Unlocking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Language Translation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are important in low-resource language (LRL) Neural Machine Translation (NMT) but their practical effectiveness varies significantly across different languages. |
| Approach: | They evaluated the performance of 8 parameters-efficient fine-tuning methods with 15 architectures using the SacreBLEU score. |
| Outcome: | The Houlsby+Inversion adapter outperforms the baseline architectures in both in-domain and out-domain tests and the Houlson+Inverter achieves the best performance overall. |
Practical Correlated Topic Modeling and Analysis via the Rectified Anchor Word Algorithm (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | spectral topic models lack reliability in real data and lack of practical implementations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spectral topic inference method to infer correlations between topics in real data and a matrix-based approach to inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms tensor-based methods and probabilistic methods in real data and provides a complete guide to correlated topic modeling. |
On the Empirical Complexity of Reasoning and Planning in LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Evidence shows that the relative performance of CoT, ToT, and their variants may vary from task to task. |
| Approach: | They propose to use chain-of-thought (CoT), tree-of thought (ToT), and related techniques to solve complex reasoning tasks with Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the linear structure of CoT on hard reasoning tasks. |
ProxyLM: Predicting Language Model Performance on Multilingual Tasks via Proxy Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Performance prediction is a method to estimate the performance of Language Models (LMs) on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task- and language-agnostic framework to predict the performance of Language Models (LMs) using proxy models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in root-mean-square error (RMSE) and other robustness tests on multilingual NLP tasks. |
Quantifying the Visual Concreteness of Words and Topics in Multimodal Datasets (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work suggests that concepts with concrete visual manifestations are easier to learn than abstract ones. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm for automatically computing the visual concreteness of words and topics within multimodal datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm predicts the capacity of machine learning algorithms to learn textual/visual relationships. |
Unsupervised Discovery of Multimodal Links in Multi-image, Multi-sentence Documents (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a structured training objective based on identifying whether collections of images and sentences co-occur in documents can suffice to predict links between specific images and specific sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose algorithms that discover image-sentence relationships without explicit annotation . they experiment on seven datasets of varying difficulty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms can predict links between images and sentences without explicit multimodal annotation. |
You don’t need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments (2024.naacl-long)
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Bangzhao Shu, Lechen Zhang, Minje Choi, Lavinia Dunagan, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Dallas Card, David Jurgens
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are popular for research in social sciences . currently, prompting LLMs is insufficient to accurately and reliably capture model perceptions, and we discuss potential alternatives to improve this. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 693 questions encompassing 39 different instruments of persona measurement on 115 persona axes and a set of questions containing minor variations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate answers and negate statements in a consistent and robust manner. |
Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation? (2022.findings-acl)
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En-Shiun Lee, Sarubi Thillainathan, Shravan Nayak, Surangika Ranathunga, David Adelani, Ruisi Su, Arya McCarthy
| Challenge: | Pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART and mT5 can be used to translate low-resource languages, but their practical application is unclear. |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical experiment in 10 languages to determine what can pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART do to translate low-resource languages? |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are robust to domain differences, but translations for unseen and typologically distant languages remain below 3.0 BLEU. |
CReSE: Benchmark Data and Automatic Evaluation Framework for Recommending Eligibility Criteria from Clinical Trial Information (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Eligibility criteria (EC) are defined as a set of conditions an individual must meet to participate in a clinical trial. |
| Approach: | They propose to recommend EC based on clinical trial information, including trial titles, and introduce an automatic evaluation framework to assess clinical validity of the EC recommendation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing language models pre-trained on the biomedical domain in EC clustering. |
WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines (2025.naacl-long)
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Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Wang Yutong, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo
| Challenge: | Vision Language Models struggle with cultural-specific knowledge, especially in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects and a training dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better with correct location context, but struggles with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. |
Predicting Machine Translation Performance on Low-Resource Languages: The Role of Domain Similarity (2024.findings-eacl)
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Eric Khiu, Hasti Toossi, Jinyu Liu, Jiaxu Li, David Anugraha, Juan Flores, Leandro Roman, A. Seza Doğruöz, En-Shiun Lee
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for predicting the performance of NLP models for low-resource languages (LRLs) focus on high-resourced languages, overlooking LRLs and domain shifts. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of domain similarity on predicting performance of machine translation models in low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The results show that domain similarity has the most important impact on predicting the performance of Machine Translation models. |
A Pretrainer’s Guide to Training Data: Measuring the Effects of Data Age, Domain Coverage, Quality, & Toxicity (2024.naacl-long)
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Shayne Longpre, Gregory Yauney, Emily Reif, Katherine Lee, Adam Roberts, Barret Zoph, Denny Zhou, Jason Wei, Kevin Robinson, David Mimno, Daphne Ippolito
| Challenge: | a large number of pretraining data design practices are under-documented, authors say . authors: strong performance of modern language models depends on selfsupervised pretraining . |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain models on data curated at different collection times . they find temporal shift between evaluation data and pretraining data leads to performance degradation . |
| Outcome: | The results validate, quantify, and expose many undocumented intuitions about text pretraining . authors say this practice has outperformed other models in the field . |
URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base (2025.coling-main)
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Aditya Armaan Khan, Mason Stephen Shipton, David Anugraha, Kaiyao Duan, Phuong H. Hoang, Eric Khiu, A. Seza Doğruöz, Annie Lee
| Challenge: | URIEL is limited in terms of linguistic inclusion and overall usability . URIel+ provides robust, customizable distance calculations to better suit the needs of users. |
| Approach: | They propose a new version of URIEL and a query tool that provides a standardized approach to representing languages as geographical, phylogenetic, and typological vectors. |
| Outcome: | URIEL+ expands the user experience with robust, customizable distance calculations to better suit the needs of users. |
NLP for Social Good: A Survey and Outlook of Challenges, Opportunities and Responsible Deployment (2026.eacl-long)
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Antonia Karamolegkou, Angana Borah, Eunjung Cho, Sagnik Ray Choudhury, Martina Galletti, Pranav Gupta, Oana Ignat, Priyanka Kargupta, Neema Kotonya, Hemank Lamba, Sun-Joo Lee, Arushi Mangla, Ishani Mondal, Fatima Zahra Moudakir, Deniz Nazar, Poli Nemkova, Dina Pisarevskaya, Naquee Rizwan, Nazanin Sabri, Keenan Samway, Dominik Stammbach, Anna Steinberg Schulten, David Tomás, Steven R Wilson, Bowen Yi, Jessica H Zhu, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Anders Søgaard, Alexander Fraser, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Joel R. Tetreault, Daryna Dementieva
| Challenge: | This paper surveys work in "NLP for Social Good" across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas. |
| Approach: | This paper analyzes work in "NLP for Social Good" across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas. |
| Outcome: | The paper analyzes work in "NLP for Social Good" across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas. |
When ”A Helpful Assistant” Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Commercial AI systems often define the role of the LLM in system prompts. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic evaluation of personas in system prompts by adding 162 roles covering 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model does not improve performance in the system prompt setting where no persona is added. |
Fˆ2-Softmax: Diversifying Neural Text Generation via Frequency Factorized Softmax (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation do not fully reflect the rich diversity of human language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use F2-Softmax and MefMax to train a balanced frequency distribution using a frequency class-based method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the diversity and quality of generated texts. |
MERLIN: Multi-Stage Curriculum Alignment for Multilingual Encoder-LLM Integration in Cross-Lingual Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
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Kosei Uemura, David Guzmán, Quang Phuoc Nguyen, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, En-Shiun Annie Lee, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with multilingual encoders raise accuracy for low-resource languages (LRLs) but performance of LLMs in low- and high-resourced languages remains a problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-stacking framework that iteratively refines in 2-stages based on a curriculum strategy and adapts only a small set of DoRA weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves exact-match accuracy by +12.9 pp over MindMerger and outperforms GPT-4o-mini by 15.2 pp on the AfriMGSM benchmark. |
SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects (2024.eacl-long)
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David Adelani, Hannah Liu, Xiaoyu Shen, Nikita Vassilyev, Jesujoba Alabi, Yanke Mao, Haonan Gao, En-Shiun Lee
| Challenge: | despite progress in building multilingual language models evaluation is limited to a few languages with available datasets . despite this, we create a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). |
| Approach: | They create a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset addresses the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for many languages, it is the first publicly available evaluation dataset. |