Papers by David Tan
CHIME: LLM-Assisted Hierarchical Organization of Scientific Studies for Literature Review Support (2024.findings-acl)
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Chao-Chun Hsu, Erin Bransom, Jenna Sparks, Bailey Kuehl, Chenhao Tan, David Wadden, Lucy Wang, Aakanksha Naik
| Challenge: | Literature review requires researchers to synthesize a large amount of information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate hierarchical organizations from a set of studies . they use a human-in-the-loop process to correct errors in LLM-generated hierarchies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves assignment of studies to categories by 12.6 F1 points. |
How Far can 100 Samples Go? Unlocking Zero-Shot Translation with Tiny Multi-Parallel Data (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a common solution to zero-shot translation is to add as many related translation directions as possible to the training corpus. |
| Approach: | They show that a small amount of multi-parallel data can achieve significant zero-shot improvements . they say that the resulting non-English performance is close to the complete translation upper bound . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves +21.7 ChrF++ non-English translation improvements on EC30 dataset . the resulting non- English performance exceeds M2M100 by an average of 5.9 ChrF+ . |
What Gets Echoed? Understanding the “Pointers” in Explanations of Persuasive Arguments (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Explanations are central to everyday life, and are a topic of growing interest in the AI community. |
| Approach: | They propose a word-level prediction task to investigate how explanations selectively reuse information from what is being explained. |
| Outcome: | The proposed features have strong predictive power on the echoing of a word in an explanation, and enhance neural methods of generating explanations. |
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context (P19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2017): a dataset for cross-domain semantic parsing in context with 4,298 question sequences. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it has greater semantic diversity and can be generalized to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseened databases at test time. |
High Quality Rather than High Model Probability: Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Neural Metrics (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translations are ranked below human translations in professional evaluations . |
| Approach: | They apply minimum bayes risk decoding to optimize different metrics of translation quality . they show that model estimates and translation quality only vaguely correlate . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves human translations with different models and metric. |
Inferring Events from Time Series using Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on reasoning about time series in conjunction with natural language has largely overlooked event descriptions and focused on tasks involving just numeric data like trend analysis or anomaly detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating tasks that test a model’s ability to reason about events associated with time series data based on sports data and develop a benchmarking method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can infer unobserved events from time series data, even when providing minimal context. |
When Flores Bloomz Wrong: Cross-Direction Contamination in Machine Translation Evaluation (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be benchmark-contaminated, resulting in inflated scores that mask memorization as generalization. |
| Approach: | They use the FLORES-200 translation benchmark as a diagnostic to investigate cross-direction data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be cross-directional, boosting performance in unseen translation directions due to target-side memorization. |
Experts, Errors, and Context: A Large-Scale Study of Human Evaluation for Machine Translation (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | a large study of machine translation systems shows poor evaluation procedures can lead to erroneous conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation methodology grounded in explicit error analysis based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation methodology outperforms crowd workers in two languages . it shows that human-based metrics outperformed crowd workers . |
Adaptive Data Flywheel: Applying MAPE Control Loops to AI Agent Improvement (2026.eacl-industry)
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Aaditya Shukla, Sidney Knowles, Meenakshi Madugula, David Farris, Ryan Angilly, Santiago Pombo, Lu An, Anbang Xu, Abhinav Balasubramanian, Tan Yu, Jiaxiang Ren, Rama Akkiraju
| Challenge: | NVInfo AI is a generative AI agent that can be deployed in production without full-scale retraining or infrastructure overhauls. |
| Approach: | They propose to implement a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-driven data flywheel in NVInfo AI, a mixture-of-experts knowledge assistant, for 30,000 employees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system addresses failures in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and enables continuous learning. |
ROBBIE: Robust Bias Evaluation of Large Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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David Esiobu, Xiaoqing Tan, Saghar Hosseini, Megan Ung, Yuchen Zhang, Jude Fernandes, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Eleonora Presani, Adina Williams, Eric Smith
| Challenge: | generative large language models (LLMs) are becoming more performant and prevalent . we need tools to measure and improve their fairness, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose to compare 6 different prompt-based bias and toxicity metrics across 12 demographic axes and 5 families of generative large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be tested on more datasets to better characterize and mitigate biases . the study compared 6 prompt-based bias and toxicity metrics across 12 demographic axes and 5 families of generative large language models. |