Papers by Donghong Ji
Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on neurons focus on emotion and rhetoric, neglecting their intrinsic connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric in large language models . they propose 'neuro-based' masking method that integrates multi-dimensional screening . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. |
NCRE: A Benchmark for Document-level Nominal Compound Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on detecting specific relations between entities, often constrained to specific fields and lacking general applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that concentrates on abstract relation extraction between noun phrases . they annotate a Chinese dataset and develop a model incorporating a rotary position-enhanced word pair detection schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is more efficient than previous methods. |
Zero-Shot Conversational Stance Detection: Dataset and Approaches (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing stance detection datasets are limited to a limited set of specific targets . current models are limited in their ability to detect large numbers of unseen targets based on a large number of unidentified targets. |
| Approach: | They propose a speaker interaction and target-aware prototypical contrastive learning model that can detect public opinion towards specific targets using social media data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in zero-shot conversational stance detection with only an F1-macro score of 43.81%. |
Enhancing Hyperbole and Metaphor Detection with Their Bidirectional Dynamic Interaction and Emotion Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hyperbole and metaphor detection focus on superficial text features, ignoring the associations of hyperbola and metaphor . Existing frameworks focus on identifying superficial text, focusing on superficial features . |
| Approach: | They propose an emotion-guided hyperbole and metaphor detection framework based on bidirectional dynamic interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on four datasets. |
MRN: A Locally and Globally Mention-Based Reasoning Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on document-level relation extraction focus on sentencelevel RE, but recent studies reveal that a large number of relations can actually be expressed through multiple sentences, which necessitates document- level RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that captures local and global contextual information as well as close and distant mention interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three widely used datasets, namely DocRED, CDR, and GDA. |
DALR: Dual-level Alignment Learning for Multimodal Sentence Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal sentence representation learning methods focus on aligning images and text at a coarse level, resulting in cross-modal misalignment bias and intra-modal semantic divergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-level alignment learning framework for multimodal sentence representation learning that promotes cross-modal and intra-modal alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on semantic textual similarity and transfer tasks on semantic similarity, ranking distillation and global intra-modal alignment learning. |
Modeling Local Contexts for Joint Dialogue Act Recognition and Sentiment Classification with Bi-channel Dynamic Convolutions (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel context-aware dynamic convolution network is proposed to better leverage the local contexts when dynamically generating convolution kernels. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic convolution network to leverage local contexts when generating convolution kernels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets. |
Harvesting Events from Multiple Sources: Towards a Cross-Document Event Extraction Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event extraction aims to extract structured information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-document event extraction pipeline that integrates event information from multiple documents and provides a comprehensive perspective on events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves about 72% F1 in end-to-end cross-document event extraction, setting up a benchmark for future research. |
PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on the analysis of contextual structure in dialogue and the interactions between different emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (PEMVs) based on emotion feature queues to optimize the spatial representation of text features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used benchmark datasets. |
Mimic and Conquer: Heterogeneous Tree Structure Distillation for Syntactic NLP (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating syntactic information into neural networks uses a single tree, such as a constituency or a dependency tree. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate heterogeneous structure knowledge into a unified sequential LSTM encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms tree encoders on four syntax-dependent tasks and is efficient and accurate. |
Retrofitting Structure-aware Transformer Language Model for End Tasks (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that structure-aware Transformer language model achieves improved perplexity, meanwhile inducing accurate syntactic phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit syntactic distance to encode phrasal constituency and dependency connection into Transformer language model and leverage it for structure integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant improvements for both semantic- and syntactic-dependent tasks. |
Better Combine Them Together! Integrating Syntactic Constituency and Dependency Representations for Semantic Role Labeling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use only one singleton syntax for semantic role labeling (SRL). |
| Approach: | They propose a TreeLSTM-based integration that integrates phrasal boundaries and semantic relations from dependency into a labelaware GCN solution for simultaneously modeling syntactic edges and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on span-based and dependency-based SRL. |
Cross-Document Cross-Lingual NLI via RST-Enhanced Graph Fusion and Interpretability Prediction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the development of many subdirections, Cross-Document Cross-Lingual NLI remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel paradigm that extends traditional NLI capabilities to multi-document, multilingual scenarios by integrating RST-enhanced graph fusion with interpretability-aware prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing models and document-level NLI to multi-document, multilingual scenarios. |
Improving Text Understanding via Deep Syntax-Semantics Communication (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that integrating syntactic tree models with sequential semantic models can bring improved task performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep neural communication model between syntax and semantics to improve the performance of text understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on syntax-dependent tasks by a large margin. |
TRIDENT: Enhancing Large Language Model Safety with Tri-Dimensional Diversified Red-Teaming Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but are vulnerable to harmful content and being exploited for malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures risk coverage across Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a task for discourse-level text scene graph parsing that merges sentence-level outputs for discourse input and propose 'DiscoSG' a dataset of 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesised multi-sentence caption-graph pairs is used to test the new task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves SPICE by 30% over the baseline while achieving 86 faster inference than existing models. |
Revisiting Structured Sentiment Analysis as Latent Dependency Graph Parsing (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) is a problem of bi-lexical dependency graph parsing due to the internal structures of spans neglected. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent spans as latent subtrees to model internal structures of spans and leverage TreeCRFs to extract the complete opinion tuple from a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs significantly better than all previous bi-lexical methods, achieving new state-of-the-art. |
End to End Chinese Lexical Fusion Recognition with Sememe Knowledge (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new task for coreference recognition is presented in linguistics . the fusion word is always out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in downstream paragraph-level tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese lexical fusion recognition task which could be regarded as one kind of coreference recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective and competitive for the proposed task. |
Effective Token Graph Modeling using a Novel Labeling Strategy for Structured Sentiment Analysis (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured sentiment analysis is a dependency parsing problem, with imbalanced label distributions and large text spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel labeling strategy which contains two sets of token pair labels . they propose tuple extraction problem with a more balanced label distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 5 benchmark datasets in four languages. |
HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion detection in conversations is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC . they utilize a low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three benchmark datasets. |
OneEE: A One-Stage Framework for Fast Overlapping and Nested Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event extraction (EE) is an essential task of information extraction, which aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a tagging scheme and a model to form EE as word-word relation recognition using parallel grid tapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 3 overlapped and nested EE benchmarks and faster than baselines. |
Enhancing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution by Discourse Structure and Semantic Information (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models lack the ability to capture long-distance dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model structural and semantic information of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on English and Chinese datasets by large margins. |
Entity-centered Cross-document Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Fengqi Wang, Fei Li, Hao Fei, Jingye Li, Shengqiong Wu, Fangfang Su, Wenxuan Shi, Donghong Ji, Bo Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction only use text snippets surrounding target entities in multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-extraction model that uses cross-path entity relation attention to detect the semantic relations between entities in a given text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the dataset CodRED by 10%. |
FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhuang Li, Yuyang Chai, Terry Yue Zhuo, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Quan Hung Tran
| Challenge: | Existing parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from errors and inconsistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that re-annotates image captions using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR and a metric to measure scene graph similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms existing parsers in terms of faithfulness and consistency on multiple benchmark datasets. |
High-order Refining for End-to-end Chinese Semantic Role Labeling (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current semantic role labeling methods are limited to short-term features and local decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-order refining mechanism to perform interaction between all predicate-argument pairs via attention calculation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on Chinese SRL data, including CoNLL09 and Universal Proposition Bank, while relieving the long-range dependency issues. |
Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019 . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains . they then propose 'neuro network' model which uses short-term memories and syntax information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams. |
Uncertainty-Calibrated Elastic Alignment for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modalities (2026.findings-acl)
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Kang He, Yuzhe Ding, Rao Fu, Yukang Feng, Kaipeng Zhang, Yiming Liu, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis are often dynamically incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a new uncertainty-calibrated elastic alignment framework to address these issues by employing probabilistic imputation to capture cross-modal ambiguity and leverage the estimated uncertainty to drive elastic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in multiple benchmarks and consistently outperformed existing models. |
ODL-TempLLM: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal reasoning is crucial for large language models to understand event concurrency and complex temporal interactions in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-guided and description logic–constrained temporal reasoning paradigm that shifts focus from internal inference to the explicit modeling of temporal structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.07–31.83 F1 points and 1.00–30.73 EM points, exhibiting strong generalization and highlighting the potential of explicit temporal reasoning. |
Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with High-Quality Translated Training Corpus (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to semantic role labeling (SRL) are focusing on the English language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for semantic role labeling that uses corpus translation to build training datasets from SRL annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is highly effective and can improve the target-language performance significantly. |
A Span-Based Model for Joint Overlapped and Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) focus on overlapped or discontinuous entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based named entity recognition model that can recognize both overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. |
Dynamic Emotion and Personality Profiling for Multimodal Deception Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for deception detection lack sample-level dynamic annotations for emotions and personality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-model multi-prompt annotation scheme and a strict label quality evaluation standard for deception, emotion, and personality annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on the MDPE and DDEP datasets. |
AMR Parsing with Latent Structural Information (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) capture sentence-level semantics structural representations to broad-coverage natural sentences. |
| Approach: | They investigate parsing AMR with explicit dependency structures and interpretable latent structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves best results on both AMR 2.0 and AMR 1.0 . the proposed model has been adopted in downstream NLP tasks, including text summarization and question answering. |
Joint Alignment of Multi-Task Feature and Label Spaces for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ECPE fail to model specific features and interactive features in between, or suffer from inconsistency of label prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to align ECPE with a feature-task alignment mechanism to model emotion-&cause-specific features and the shared interactive feature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on all ECA subtasks. |
DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Yuhan Wu, Jinsong Zhang, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Yijiang Liu, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | a new task of conversational aspect-based sentiment analysis (DiaASQ) is designed to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis to detect the quadrangle of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset in Chinese and English . it improves the end-to-end quadruple prediction and integrates rich feature representations . |
Refining and Synthesis: A Simple yet Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Cross-Domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) data augmentation has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to data sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to augment ABSA data using pseudo labels for target domain . they refine generated labeled data using a natural language inference filter . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 7 strong baselines on 4 kinds of ABSA tasks. |
What Factors Influence LLMs’ Judgments? A Case Study on Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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Lei Chen, Bobo Li, Li Zheng, Haining Wang, Zixiang Meng, Runfeng Shi, Hao Fei, Jun Zhou, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that Large Language Models perform at a level comparable to humans with advantages of speed and cost-effectiveness in different fields. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce four unexplored factors and a new dimension of question difficulty to provide a more comprehensive understanding of LLMs’ judgments across varying question intricacies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dimensions of question difficulty and answer quantity provide valuable insights into optimizing LLMs’ performance as judges. |
Dependency Graph Enhanced Dual-transformer Structure for Aspect-based Sentiment Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment classification is a popular task aimed at identifying the corresponding emotion of a given aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency graph enhanced dual-transformer network to support mutual reinforcement between the flat representation learning and graph-based representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five datasets with a large margin. |