Papers by Feng Ji
Task-Oriented Conversation Generation Using Heterogeneous Memory Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory networks do not perform well when leveraging heterogeneous information from different sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user utterances, dialogue history and background knowledge tuples to integrate external knowledge into a neural dialogue model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art data-driven task-oriented dialogue models on real-world datasets. |
A Deep Relevance Model for Zero-Shot Document Filtering (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document classification do not consider document filtering . existing methods do not include document filter. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep relevance model for zero-shot document filtering called DAZER . they use word embeddings to extract the relevance signals from word embeds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two document collections . it estimates the relevance between a document and a category by using seed words . |
REPT: Bridging Language Models and Machine Reading Comprehension via Retrieval-Based Pre-training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved great success on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) however, the poor support in evidence extraction hinders them from further advancing MRC. |
| Approach: | They propose a REtrieval-based pre-training approach that strengthens evidence extraction during pre-training by inherited downstream MRC tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach strengthens evidence extraction during pre-training, which is further inherited by downstream tasks. |
DeepMed: Building a Medical DeepResearch Agent via Multi-hop Med-Search Data and Turn-Controlled Agentic Training & Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihan Wang, Hao Wang, Shi Feng, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Yiqun Zhang, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhong Ji, Haihua Yang
| Challenge: | Medical reasoning models are constrained by parametric knowledge and can induce hallucinations and spurious attributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a multi-hop med-search QA synthesis method to apply the DR paradigm in medical contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger medical reasoning models on medical benchmarks. |
Improving Commonsense Question Answering by Graph-based Iterative Retrieval over Multiple Knowledge Sources (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to facilitate natural language understanding rarely involve commonsense or background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering method that integrates multiple knowledge sources to boost performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other competing methods on the CommonsenseQA dataset and achieves the new state-of-the-art. |
KACE: Generating Knowledge Aware Contrastive Explanations for Natural Language Inference (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches in NLP focus on “WHY A” rather than contrastive “WHA NOT B” Experimental results show that contrastive explanations are beneficial to fit the scenarios by clarifying the difference between the predicted answer and other possible wrong ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate contrastive explanations with counterfactual examples in NLI by identifying key phrases from input sentences and using them as key perturbations to generate counterfacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on SNLI and ETPA models by 91.9%. |
Transfer Learning for Context-Aware Question Matching in Information-seeking Conversations in E-commerce (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent researches focus on deep learning and reinforcement learning for multi-turn information seeking conversation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and effective multi-turn conversation model based on convolutional neural networks and extend it to adapt the knowledge learned from a resource-rich domain to enhance the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the existing model on an industrial chatbot called AliMe Assist. |
Transformation of Dense and Sparse Text Representations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to NLP to leverage sparsity have been limited due to the gap with dense representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Semantic Transformation method to bridge dense and sparse spaces and propose supervised NLP tasks to use both spaces. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with classification tasks and natural language inference tasks show that the proposed method is effective. |
TUNA: Comprehensive Fine-grained Temporal Understanding Evaluation on Dense Dynamic Videos (2025.acl-long)
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Fanheng Kong, Jingyuan Zhang, Hongzhi Zhang, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Linhao Yu, Xingguang Ji, Yu Tian, V. W., Fuzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for video understanding often focus on specific aspects, overlooking the holistic nature of video content. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-oriented benchmark for fine-grained understanding on dense dynamic videos with two complementary tasks: captioning and QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on diverse video scenarios and dynamic videos, with interpretable and robust evaluation criteria. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
Semantic Parsing with Syntax- and Table-Aware SQL Generation (P18-1)
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Yibo Sun, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Jianshu Ji, Guihong Cao, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches generate a SQL query word-by-word but results are incorrect or not executable due to mismatch between question words and table contents. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model to map natural language questions into SQL queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves state-of-the-art execution accuracy from 69.0% to 74.4% on a large question- SQL dataset. |
RoBGuard: Enhancing LLMs to Assess Risk of Bias in Clinical Trial Documents (2025.coling-main)
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Changkai Ji, Bowen Zhao, Zhuoyao Wang, Yingwen Wang, Yuejie Zhang, Ying Cheng, Rui Feng, Xiaobo Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to assess the risk of bias in RCTs focus on manually crafted prompts and a restricted set of simple questions, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing Large Language Models to assess the risk of bias in RCTs by reformulation, document parsing and multi-expert collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the RoB-Item and RoB domains. |
Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Ji Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding method exploits consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative decoding method that exploits the consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or databases. |
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. |
Simple and Effective Text Matching with Richer Alignment Features (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models only use a single inter-sequence alignment layer to make full use of this process. |
| Approach: | They propose to keep three key features available for inter-sequence alignment . they conduct experiments on four well-studied benchmark datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to perform on four well-studied datasets with fewer parameters and the inference speed is at least 6 times faster than similar models. |
Revisiting Self-Consistency from Dynamic Distributional Alignment Perspective on Answer Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yiwei Li, Ji Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies on self-consistency show that it improves reasoning abilities by aggregating diverse stochastic samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature to align with high probability modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fixed-diversity baselines on reasoning tasks and improves both average and best-case performance. |
Genre Separation Network with Adversarial Training for Cross-genre Relation Extraction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features require great human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two encoders to explicitly extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.7% on three distinct genres. |
Explaining Neural Network Predictions on Sentence Pairs via Learning Word-Group Masks (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to explain neural network models are computationally inefficient for text inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to implicitly detect word correlations by grouping correlated words from input text pairs together and measuring their contribution to corresponding NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is evaluated with two different model architectures across four datasets. |
Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 to address the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA by reconstructing tables into tuples and using prompt templates to create dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous work on complex table parsing datasets and leads to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. |
LexGenius: An Expert-Level Benchmark for Large Language Models in Legal General Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenjin Liu, Haoran Luo, Xin Feng, Xiang Ji, Lijuan Zhou, Rui Mao, Jiapu Wang, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for legal general intelligence (GI) are result-oriented and do not evaluate the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal benchmark for evaluating legal GI in large language models . they use recent legal cases and exam questions to create multiple-choice questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack a systematic evaluation of the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs) the results show that even the best LLMs lagging behind human legal professionals. |