Papers by Hang Zhao
Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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Yiqun Hu, Yiyun Zhao, Jiarong Jiang, Wuwei Lan, Henghui Zhu, Anuj Chauhan, Alexander Hanbo Li, Lin Pan, Jun Wang, Chung-Wei Hang, Sheng Zhang, Jiang Guo, Mingwen Dong, Joseph Lilien, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers lack the data to perform well with augmented synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that imposes strong typing constraints and incorporates key relationships from schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the high-quality synthesized SQL and natural language question (NLQ) models have significant accuracy boosts and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on spider. |
Beta Distribution Guided Aspect-aware Graph for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis with Affective Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect category sentiment analysis do not necessarily occur in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Beta Distribution-guided aspect-aware graph construction based on external knowledge . they use aspect-related words as the pivots to derive aspect-relevant weights . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 6 benchmark datasets. |
Debiasing the Fine-Grained Classification Task in LLMs with Bias-Aware PEFT (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate label biases such as retraining, post-hoc adjustment, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning fail to address prediction propensity and discriminative ability biase. |
| Approach: | They propose a bias-aware optimization framework that incorporates two distinct label balance constraints with a PEFT strategy targeting an intermediate layer to mitigate this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms or matches the performance of full-parameter fine-tuning and LoRA, achieving superior results with lower perplexity. |
Uncertainty-Aware Unlikelihood Learning Improves Generative Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on what to generate but ignore what not to generate . a template-agnostic method boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously . |
| Approach: | They propose a template-agnostic method to control the token-level generation . they introduce Monte Carlo dropout to understand the built-in uncertainty of pre-trained language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously on four public datasets. |
Document-Level Relation Extraction via Pair-Aware and Entity-Enhanced Representation Learning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level relation extraction methods are sparse in relational entity pairs and the representation of entity pairs is insufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pair-Aware and Entity-Enhanced(PAEE) model to solve two challenges . they propose predicting potential relational entity pairs and assembling directional entity pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can obtain state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets . it can predict potential relational entity pairs and assemble directional entity pairs . |
ToxiCraft: A Novel Framework for Synthetic Generation of Harmful Information (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for detecting harmful content lack diversity and quality of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing toxic information from social media datasets . their framework generates a wide variety of synthetic, yet remarkably realistic, examples of toxic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate a wide variety of synthetic, yet remarkably realistic, examples of toxic information. |
Collective Event Detection via a Hierarchical and Bias Tagging Networks with Gated Multi-level Attention Mechanisms (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to ACE event detection treat multiple events in one sentence as independent ones and recognize them separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical and bias tagging network framework to detect multiple events in one sentence collectively and a gated multi-level attention mechanism to automatically extract and fuse the sentence-level and document-level information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a 2005 ACE dataset. |
DCFEE: A Document-level Chinese Financial Event Extraction System based on Automatically Labeled Training Data (P18-4)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract events from documents are limited due to the high cost of labeling . Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of a document-level Chinese financial event extraction system. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level Chinese financial event extraction framework which detects event mentions and extracts events from financial news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects event mentions and extracts events from financial news . it can generate large scale labeled data and extract events from entire document . |
Efficient Mind-Map Generation via Sequence-to-Graph and Reinforced Graph Refinement (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate mind-maps from text are difficult to capture the overall semantics of a document. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient mind-map generation network that converts a document into a graph via sequence-to-graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network reduces inference time by thousands of times compared with existing methods and reveals key semantic structures better than plain text. |
MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Yan, Fangzhi Xu, Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haiteng Zhao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for optimizing reasoning quality are limited by overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%. |
Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning for Aspect Category Detection (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot learning methods focus on single-label predictions, which can not work well for ACD since a sentence may contain multiple aspect categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot learning method that uses the prototypical network to learn aspects from a set of aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Junxian He, Jun Liu, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models . |
| Approach: | They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision. |
SciRAG: Adaptive, Citation-Aware, and Outline-Guided Retrieval and Synthesis for Scientific Literature (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation methods overlook citation graph structure, adapt poorly to complex queries, and yield fragmented, hard-to-verify syntheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that addresses these gaps by combining adaptive retrieval and symbolic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that SciRAG outperforms prior systems in factual accuracy and synthesis quality. |
Secoco: Self-Correcting Encoding for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) is a challenging field due to the wide variety of noises in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly deals with noisy inputs for robust neural machine translation by introducing self-correcting predictors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can correct noisy inputs and delete specific errors with the translation decoding process. |
Reconstructing Event Regions for Event Extraction via Graph Attention Networks (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for event extraction focus on sentence-level event extraction, but they lack a broader view of the document context. |
| Approach: | They build graphs with candidate event filler extractions enriched by sentential embeddings as nodes and use graph attention networks to identify event regions in a document and aggregate event information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on two languages and shows that it is faster than previous methods. |
Improving Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction via Template-Order Data Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) uses a template to extract aspect quadruplets from review sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained language model to select proper orders from a template order perspective to improve aspect sentiment quad prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in low-resource settings. |
Document-level Event Extraction via Parallel Prediction Networks (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event extraction (DEE) is indispensable when events are described throughout a document. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction model that can extract structured events from a text in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on a document-level event extraction task. |
Is Compound Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Addressed by LLMs? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict aspect-based elements from text . large language models (LLMs) have impressive abilities in handling human instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to handle complex ABSA tasks . they use constrained prompts to automatically organize the returned predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms supervised methods in some cases, but it is still lacking in other areas. |
𝜙-Decoding: Adaptive Foresight Sampling for Balanced Inference-Time Exploration and Exploitation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference-time optimization strategies address the shortsightedness of auto-regressive generation, but the vast search space leads to excessive exploration and insufficient exploitation. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that approximates two distributions via foresight and clustering to provide an efficient estimation of step value. |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding strategy outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency. |
BvSP: Broad-view Soft Prompting for Few-Shot Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Aspect sentiment quad prediction aims to predict aspects due to distinct data distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aggregates multiple templates with a broader view . they first construct a few-shot ASQP dataset that contains richer categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under four few-shot settings and other public datasets. |