Papers by Graham Horwood
MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent smaller language models rely on synthetic data generated using larger Language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating synthetic data that enhances diversity through meta-prompting . they use 25 million tokens of synthetic data generated by a language model orchestrated by multiple “expert” LLM agents to collaboratively generate data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the base LLM in Finance and Biomedicine with 25 million tokens of synthetic data. |
SPENCE: A Syntactic Probe for Detecting Contamination in NL2SQL Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) benchmarks, yet their reported accuracy may be inflated by contamination from benchmark queries or structurally similar patterns seen during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactic probing framework for detecting and quantifying such contamination in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates syntactic variants of test queries for four widely used NL2SQL datasets. |
Contrastive Training Improves Zero-Shot Classification of Semi-structured Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2020 focus on semi-structured document classification in a zero-shot setting . positional, layout, and style information play a vital role in interpreting such documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a matching-based approach that relies on a pairwise contrastive objective for pretraining and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves Macro F1 in the zero-shot learning setting. |
FlexDoc: Parameterized Sampling for Diverse Multilingual Synthetic Documents for Training Document Understanding Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Karan Dua, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Puneet Mittal, Ranjeet Gupta, Amit Agarwal, Praneet Pabolu, Srikant Panda, Hansa Meghwani, Graham Horwood, Fahad Shah
| Challenge: | Document understanding models require large, diverse, and well-annotated datasets that can cost millions of dollars to collect and maintain. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable synthetic data generation framework that combines Stochastic Schemas and Parameterized Sampling to produce realistic, multilingual semi-structured documents with rich annotations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on key information extraction tasks show that the proposed framework improves the absolute F1 score by up to 11% while reducing annotation effort by over 90% compared to traditional hard-template methods. |
Contrastive Representation Learning for Cross-Document Coreference Resolution of Events and Entities (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying related entities and events within and across documents is fundamental to natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to entity and event coreference resolution using contrastive representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on key metrics on the ECB+ corpus and is competitive on others. |