Papers by Heng Ji
Training-free Deep Concept Injection Enables Language Models for Video Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train pretrained language models for zero-shot crossmodal tasks require crossmodal pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject visual concepts into the input text embedding space of a pretrained language model and build adaptation layers based on the intermediate representation of concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs zero-shot crossmodal tasks without crossmodal pretraining . it is based on the injection of visual concepts as input tokens and augmentation in intermediate features . the proposed model achieves competitive or even better results in zero- shot and fine-tuning settings . |
Translation between Molecules and Natural Language (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MolT5 pretrains models on unlabeled natural language text and molecule strings . bringing a new drug to market can cost over a billion dollars and take over ten years . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning framework for pretraining models on unlabeled natural language text and molecule strings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework pretrains models on unlabeled natural language text and molecule strings, and it generates high quality outputs. |
Bridging the Gap between Native Text and Translated Text through Adversarial Learning: A Case Study on Cross-Lingual Event Extraction (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research in cross-lingual learning has found that combining large-scale pretrained multilingual language models with machine translation can yield good performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a model architecture that jointly encodes a source language input sentence with its translation to the target language during training and takes a target language sentence with it as input during evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model architecture can integrate machine translation to improve event extraction while adding machine-translated data yields unstable performance due to representational gap. |
SafeSwitch: Steering Unsafe LLM Behavior via Internal Activation Signals (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to fully leverage their internal cognitive processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regulates unsafe outputs by utilizing the prober-based internal state monitor that actively detects harmful intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful outputs by approximately 80% while maintaining strong utility. |
Cross-media Structured Common Space for Multimedia Event Extraction (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | We propose a new task to extract events and their arguments from multimedia documents . traditional methods target text, images or videos, but multimedia content is distributed via multimedia . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that encodes structured representations of semantic information from textual and visual data into a common embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 4.0% and 9.8% absolute gains on text event argument role labeling and visual event extraction. |
Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs alignment focus on generalizing their behavior to generalized values such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. |
| Approach: | They train large language models to "interact to align" to implicitly infer user preferences . they use a multi-turn preference dataset to generate a personalized alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables dynamic, personalized alignment via interaction with a multi-turn preference dataset. |
Cross-lingual Structure Transfer for Relation and Event Extraction (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identify complex semantic structures are difficult to train from under-annotated sources. |
| Approach: | They exploit relation- and event-relevant language-universal features to train relation or event extractors from source annotations and apply them to target languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models trained on 3,000 manually annotated mentions. |
Measuring the Effect of Influential Messages on Varying Personas (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new task estimates the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message . a first benchmark dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed task . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to estimate the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task estimates the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message. |
GLEN: General-Purpose Event Detection for Thousands of Types (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ACE 2005 2 is the first large-scale event extraction dataset with 205K event mentions and 3,465 different types. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the DWD Overlay to map PropBank rolesets to a large distantlysupervised training dataset with partial labels to make event extraction more accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than baselines including InstructGPT and ACE 2005 2 despite being 18 years old . key limitations of ACE include its small event ontology of 33 types, small dataset size of around 600 documents and restricted domain (with a significant portion concentrated on military conflicts). |
VAULT: VAriable Unified Long Text Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) require complex model architecture for effectively modeling long texts with paragraph representation and classification, making inference computationally inefficient for production use. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Gaussian distribution-based paragraph representation for Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) that is light-weight and parallel-efficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable performance on Wikipedia-based (NQ) and TechNotes (TechQA) with a state-of-the-art (SOTA) complex document modeling approach while being 16 times faster, demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed model. |
Zero-Shot Classification by Logical Reasoning on Natural Language Explanations (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CLORE is superior to baselines on zero-shot classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for classification by logically parsing and reasoning on natural language explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on zero-shot classification tasks. |
Text2Mol: Cross-Modal Molecule Retrieval with Natural Language Queries (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing databases contain tens of millions of molecules; PubChem alone has 110 million compounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to retrieve molecules using natural language descriptions as queries . they construct a paired dataset of molecules and their corresponding text descriptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves results from 0.372 to 0.499 MRR. |
An Attentive Fine-Grained Entity Typing Model with Latent Type Representation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing fine-grained entity typing models are criticized for label independence assumption . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained entity typing model with a new attention mechanism and a hybrid type classifier to exploit type inter-dependency with latent type representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly advances the state-of-the-art on fine-grained entity typing. |
Joint Multimedia Event Extraction from Video and Article (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Brian Chen, Xudong Lin, Christopher Thomas, Manling Li, Shoya Yoshida, Lovish Chum, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract multimedia events from video and text are limited to video and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to jointly extract events from video and text documents . they propose 'self-supervised' cross-modal event coreference model and cross-mod transformer architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 6.0% and 5.8% absolute F-score gain on video-article pairs . the proposed method can resolve coreference and extract multimodal event frames more accurately than existing methods. |
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol. |
Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhong, Yang Liu, Da Yin, Yuning Mao, Yizhu Jiao, Pengfei Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for natural language generation are dominated by similarity-based metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional evaluator for natural language generation that integrates multiple dimensions into one evaluer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluator improves on three typical NLG tasks and improves with external knowledge. |
Veri-R1: Toward Precise and Faithful Claim Verification via Online Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to online claim verification rely on prompt engineering or pre-designed reasoning workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose an online reinforcement learning framework that enables an LLM to interact with a search engine and receive reward signals that explicitly shape its planning, retrieval, and reasoning behaviors. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Veri-R1 improves joint accuracy by 30% and doubles evidence score, often surpassing larger-scale model counterparts. |
PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Scheduling logistics associated with meetings can amount to hours each week . a lack of automation can cause a lot of errors and can be costly . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution that automates calendar conflict management . they propose 'pearl' that augments the language agent with an external preference memory . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution shows that existing agents perform poorly with high error rates. |
Event Time Extraction and Propagation via Graph Attention Networks (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on grounding events into a precise timeline has been limited due to the inherent ambiguity of language and the requirement for information propagation over inter-related events. |
| Approach: | They propose a 4-tuple temporal representation for entity slot filling to ground events into a timeline using a graph attention network approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields 7.0% match rate over contextualized embedding approaches and 16.3% higher match rate compared to sentence-level manual event time argument annotation. |
The Battlefront of Combating Misinformation and Coping with Media Bias (2022.aacl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a growing number of misinformation and misinformation is affecting our daily lives . a tutorial aims to address the challenges of detecting fake news and media bias . |
| Approach: | They provide an overview of the frontier in fighting misinformation . they propose to develop a robust fake news detection system to combat misinformation. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial examines the frontiers of fake news detection and media bias detection . it focuses on how to fact-check information pieces and uncover bias and agenda of news sources . |
Weakly-Supervised Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Joint Aspect-Sentiment Topic Embedding (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis of review text use only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly-supervised approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis which uses only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates quality joint topics and outperforms baselines significantly on benchmark datasets. |
Platforms for Non-speakers Annotating Names in Any Language (P18-4)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditionally, native speakers of a language have been asked to annotate a corpus in that language. |
| Approach: | They propose two annotation platforms that allow an English speaker to annotate names for any language without knowing the language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed annotations achieved state-of-the-art performance on two surprise languages and ten languages at TAC-KBP EDL2017. |
LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, large language models (LLMs) train on short text segments due to the computational overhead quadratic in the input lengths of their Transformer architectures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.7 decoding speed up and 7.5 memory saving over the original model. |
MM-PoisonRAG: Disrupting Multimodal RAG with Local and Global Knowledge Poisoning Attacks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hyeonjeong Ha, Qiusi Zhan, Jeonghwan Kim, Dimitrios Bralios, Saikrishna Sanniboina, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Daniel Kang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing research exposes multimodal large language models to knowledge poisoning attacks . localized poisoning attack achieves up to 56% success rate even under restricted access . globalized poison attack completely disrupts model generation to 0% accuracy with just one poisoned content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to study the vulnerability of multimodal RAG under knowledge poisoning attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits two new attack strategies on multimodal RAGs under knowledge poisoning. |
Entailment-Preserving First-order Logic Representations in Natural Language Entailment (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | First-order logic (FOL) is often used to represent logical entailment, but determining natural language (NL) enanglement using FOL remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entailment-Preserving FOL representations task and a method which trains an NL-to-FOL translator by using the natural language entailment labels as verifiable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.8–2.7% improvement in EPR and 17.4–20.6% increase in E PR@16 compared to baselines in three datasets. |
The Future is not One-dimensional: Complex Event Schema Induction by Graph Modeling for Event Prediction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Event schemas encode knowledge of stereotypical structures of events and their connections . previous work on event schema induction focuses on atomic events or linear temporal sequences . |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal Complex Event Schema: a graph-based schema representation that encompasses events, arguments, temporal connections and argument relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on HITS@1 by 17.8%. |
Democratizing LLMs: An Exploration of Cost-Performance Trade-offs in Self-Refined Open-Source Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been experiencing seismic growth in size and capabilities, radically transforming the field of NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized variant of iterative self-critique and self-refinement devoid of external influence and a ranking metric to find the optimal model for a given task considering refined performance and cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves 8.2% from baseline and even with extremely small memory footprints, outperforms ChatGPT post-refinement. |
Computation Mechanism Behind LLM Position Generalization (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored how LLMs handle positional relevance, but how they handle it remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to enforce certain computational mechanisms to allow for the tolerance in position perturbations in large language models (LLMs) they also find a pattern in intermediate features that allows this effect to be observed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can understand text with position perturbations and generalize to longer sequences than those seen during training with the latest techniques. |
Seeded Hierarchical Clustering for Expert-Crafted Taxonomies (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Practitioners from many disciplines use expert-crafted taxonomies to make sense of large, unlabeled corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised algorithm for seeded hierarchical clustering that fits unlabeled data to taxonomies using a small set of labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
WebWISE: Unlocking Web Interface Control for LLMs via Sequential Exploration (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work to control software has used reinforcement learning (RL), requiring many demonstrations and trials to learn simple interaction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model to automatically perform web software tasks using click, scroll, and text in- put operations using filtered Document Object Models as observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on the MiniWob++ benchmark with only one in-context example. |
Entity-aware Image Caption Generation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing image captioning approaches generate generic descriptions of visual content and ignore background information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task which generates informative image captions using images and hashtags as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms unimodal baselines significantly with evaluation metrics on a dataset from Flickr. |
Language Model Pre-Training with Sparse Latent Typing (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn latent-level interpretable representations of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a new pre-training objective that enables the model to learn latent types . the objective allows the model a self-supervised way to extract sentence-level keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns interpretable latent type categories without external knowledge and improves downstream tasks. |
Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinement (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Yi Fung, Hou Pong Chan, Kevin Small, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on enhancing the retrieval stage and optimizing the representation of the database. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
Retrieval-Augmented Generative Question Answering for Event Argument Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract arguments from documents are based on generating and post-processing a complex target sequence (template). |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generative QA model that retrieves the most similar QA pair and augments it as prompt to the current example's context, then decodes the arguments as answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prior methods across fully supervised, domain transfer, and fewshot learning settings and compares with clustering-based sampling strategies. |
Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that use full attentions have quadratic computational and memory complexities, and are too costly for long documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient encoder-decoder attention with head-wise positional strides to effectively pinpoint salient information from the source. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process ten times more tokens than current models that use full attentions. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
Making Pre-trained Language Models both Task-solvers and Self-calibrators (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained language models can be effective for high-stake applications, but they become overconfident in their wrong predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use extra data to train pre-trained language models to effectively utilize training samples to make them both task-solvers and self-calibrators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used in three downstream applications, including selective classification, adversarial defense, and model cascading. |
Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhong, Siru Ouyang, Yizhu Jiao, Priyanka Kargupta, Leo Luo, Yanzhen Shen, Bobby Zhou, Xianrui Zhong, Xuan Liu, Hongxiang Li, Jinfeng Xiao, Minhao Jiang, Vivian Hu, Xuan Wang, Heng Ji, Martin Burke, Huimin Zhao, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Reaction Miner is a system designed to extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts chemical reactions directly from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
LORE: Continual Logit Rewriting Fosters Faithful Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using aspect-oriented summarization as a case study, we propose **LOgit REwriting**, a new controlled generation paradigm which can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM’s intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled generation paradigm which can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM's intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM's intentions while balancing that with accuracy. |
Weakly-Supervised Temporal Article Grounding (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Long Chen, Yulei Niu, Brian Chen, Xudong Lin, Guangxing Han, Christopher Thomas, Hammad Ayyubi, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing VG models make unrealistic assumptions about how to ground video segments . a recent study has shown that video grounding can be useful for downstream applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a new task: Weakly-Supervised temporal Article Grounding (WSAG) given an article and a relevant video, WSAG aims to localize all "groundable" sentences to the video. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is simple but effective, and it can be used in real-world applications. |
NewsClaims: A New Benchmark for Claim Detection from News with Attribute Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Revanth Gangi Reddy, Sai Chetan Chinthakindi, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Kathryn Conger, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Preslav Nakov, Eduard Hovy, Kevin Small, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Current claims detection methods focus on sentence analysis, ignoring other attributes . a key element of identifying misinformation is detecting the claims and the arguments that have been presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for attribute-aware claim detection in the news domain . they extend the problem to include extraction of additional attributes related to each claim . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs well on the test, but human performance is still poor. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
Zero- and Few-Shot Event Detection via Prompt-Based Meta Learning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection often fail to detect unseen or rare events due to the lack of domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta learning-based framework for zero-shot event detection that uses a prompt-based prompt and a trigger-aware soft verbalizer to efficiently project output to unseen tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs state-of-the-art in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios on benchmark datasets FewEvent and MAVEN. |
Why Does New Knowledge Create Messy Ripple Effects in LLMs? (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on post-training knowledge editing (KE) for language models to ensure that knowledge remains accurate and up-to-date. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GradSim indicator to detect when and why updated knowledge ripples in language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed indicator GradSim shows that LMs that fail to handle ripple effects have low GradSIM. |
Text Classification Using Label Names Only: A Language Model Self-Training Approach (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current text classification methods require a large number of labeled documents as training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses only the label name of each class to train classification models on unlabeled data without using any labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 90% accuracy on four benchmark datasets using label names as the only supervision . |
DeepMaven: Deep Question Answering on Long-Distance Movie/TV Show Videos with Multimedia Knowledge Extraction and Synthesis (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Long video content understanding poses a challenging set of research questions as it involves long-distance, cross-media reasoning and knowledge awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which extracts events, entities, and relations from the rich multimedia content in long videos to pre-construct movie knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs competitively for both the new DeepMovieQA and the pre-existing MovieQA dataset. |
ManiTweet: A New Benchmark for Identifying Manipulation of News on Social Media (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the identification of social media posts that contain misrepresentations of information within associated news articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a data collection schema and curated a dataset called ManiTweet, consisting of 3.6K pairs of tweets and corresponding articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms large language models on the ManiTweet dataset and reveals intriguing connections between manipulation and the domain and factuality of news articles. |
SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing literature-based hypothesis generation models focus on binary link prediction, limiting expressivity of hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses literature-based hypothesis generation as input . they use literature-derived literature as background and output natural language ideas . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the ability of language models to generate new scientific directions grounded in literature. |
MIMIR: A Customizable Agent Tuning Platform for Enhanced Scientific Applications (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangru Tang, Chunyuan Deng, Hanminwang Hanminwang, Haoran Wang, Yilun Zhao, Wenqi Shi, Yi Fung, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiannan Cao, Heng Ji, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into interactive agents capable of planning, tool use, and task execution across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform that leverages large language models to generate agent-tuning data for fine-tuneing smaller, specialized models. |
| Outcome: | MIMIR enables large models to simulate various roles and create interaction data, which can then be used to fine-tune open-source models like LLaMA2. |
Human-in-the-loop Schema Induction (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyi Zhang, Isaac Tham, Zhaoyi Hou, Jiaxuan Ren, Leon Zhou, Hainiu Xu, Li Zhang, Lara Martin, Rotem Dror, Sha Li, Heng Ji, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, Reece Suchocki, Chris Callison-Burch
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event-centric natural language understanding (NLU) have been limited to linear and temporal ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop schema induction system powered by GPT-3 . they show that it transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches and reduces human curation. |
The Shifted and The Overlooked: A Task-oriented Investigation of User-GPT Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Siru Ouyang, Shuohang Wang, Yang Liu, Ming Zhong, Yizhu Jiao, Dan Iter, Reid Pryzant, Chenguang Zhu, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They analyze a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations to identify a significant gap between academic research in NLP and the needs of real-world NLP applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations and identifies a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks commonly studied in academic research. |
Fine-grained Information Extraction from Biomedical Literature based on Knowledge-enriched Abstract Meaning Representation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Compared with general natural language texts, sentences from scientific papers usually possess wider contexts between knowledge elements. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel biomedical Information Extraction model to extract scientific entities and events from English research papers using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) they construct a sentence-level knowledge graph from an external knowledge base and encode it to improve the model's understanding of complex scientific concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract scientific entities and events from scientific literature and improve its understanding of complex scientific concepts. |
Joint Biomedical Entity and Relation Extraction with Knowledge-Enhanced Collective Inference (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction from biomedical texts do not utilize external knowledge . despite the exponential growth of biomedically published articles, many existing methods fall behind . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes external knowledge for entity and relation extraction . KECI uses an initial span graph to construct a knowledge graph containing relevant background knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results in two biomedical datasets . it achieves 4.59% and 4.91% improvement in F1 scores over the state- of-the art methods . |
ELISA-EDL: A Cross-lingual Entity Extraction, Linking and Localization System (N18-5)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ELISA-EDL is a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for Wikipedia languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for English speakers . it extracts entities from unstructured text in any of 282 Wikipedia languages and links them to English knowledge bases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entity mentions from Wikipedia and links them to English knowledge bases and visualizes locations related to disaster topics on a world heatmap. |
Social-Group-Agnostic Bias Mitigation via the Stereotype Content Model (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ali Omrani, Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari, Charles Yu, Preni Golazizian, Brendan Kennedy, Mohammad Atari, Heng Ji, Morteza Dehghani
| Challenge: | Existing methods for mitigating bias require social-group-specific word pairs for each social attribute (e.g., gender) Existing approaches require only one social attribute, rendering them impractical and costly . |
| Approach: | They propose that stereotype content models capture the underlying connection between bias and stereotypes by embedding only two psychological dimensions of warmth and competence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs comparably to group-specific debiasing on multiple bias benchmarks, but has theoretical and practical advantages over existing methods. |
Towards Better Generalization in Open-Domain Question Answering by Mitigating Context Memorization (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions using an external large-scale knowledge corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach to QA that focuses on retrieving relevant knowledge from an external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to completely different knowledge domains while adapting to updated versions of the same knowledge corpus and switching to completely new knowledge domain. |
SYNTHIA: Novel Concept Design with Affordance Composition (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hyeonjeong Ha, Xiaomeng Jin, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Khanh Duy Nguyen, Ansel Blume, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies on concept design using text-to-image models have enabled rapid ideation of novel visual concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating novel, functionally coherent designs based on desired affordances by decomposing concepts into parts and affordance . they also develop a curriculum learning scheme that fine-tunes T2I models to progressively learn affordance composition while maintaining visual novelty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for novelty and functional coherence in human evaluation. |
EVEDIT: Event-based Knowledge Editing for Deterministic Knowledge Propagation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple . current methods are limited to (substance, relation) triple, causing low confidence in their answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions to improve model confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model confidence by 55.6% while maintaining the naturalness of generation. |
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. |
| Approach: | They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. |
Cross-lingual Structure Transfer for Zero-resource Event Extraction (2020.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for information extraction only use name tagging . Currently, most successful cross-lingual transfer learning methods are limited to sequence labeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a share-and-transfer framework to transfer graph structures across languages . they propose to convert sentences in any language to language-universal graph structures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs comparable to state-of-the-art models on three languages without annotations. |
Knowledge-Enriched Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge-enriched text generation poses unique challenges in modeling and learning . a roadmap will outline the state-of-the-art methods to tackle these challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a roadmap to tackle the challenges of knowledge-enriched text generation . they will dive deep into various technical components to illustrate how to represent knowledge . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial outlines the state-of-the-art methods to tackle the problem . it aims to show how to represent knowledge, feed knowledge into a generation model, evaluate results . |
Document-Level Event Argument Extraction by Conditional Generation (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing event extraction models have been limited to the sentence level . this formulation signifies a misalignment between the information seeking behavior and the informative seeking behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level neural event argument extraction model by formulating the task as conditional generation following event templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 7.6% F1 and 5.7% F1 over the best baseline on the document-level event extraction dataset WikiEvents and 9.3% F1 on the informative argument extraction task. |
Event-Centric Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating the extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks. |
Fact Checking Beyond Training Set (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing fact checking systems are unsuitable for evaluating the veracity of everyday claims due to the availability of evidence resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial algorithm to make the retriever component robust against distribution shift. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is insensitive to the order of claims and evidence documents. |
Beyond Sample-Level Feedback: Using Reference-Level Feedback to Guide Data Synthesis (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | High-quality instruction-tuning data is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) but it imposes a quality ceiling where models trained on the data cannot outperform the LLM generating it. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that extracts desirable characteristics from carefully curated reference samples to guide the synthesis of higher-quality instruction-response pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms traditional sample-level feedback methods and generalizes across model architectures. |
EMCompress: Video-LLMs with Endomorphic Multimodal Compression (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Static, sparse frame sampling either dilutes evidence across task-irrelevant segments at significant cost or misses fine-grained temporal semantics altogether. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that compresses multimodal input while preserving answer invariance across reasonable downstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses prior methods by 0.40 F-1 with competitive query rewriting. |
External Knowledge Acquisition for End-to-End Document-Oriented Dialog Systems (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | End-to-end neural models for conversational AI often assume that a response can be generated by considering only the knowledge acquired during training. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture for document-oriented conversations with access to external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms baseline models on the Wizard of Wikipedia dataset by 10.3% and 7.4%. |
A Grounded Unsupervised Universal Part-of-Speech Tagger for Low-Resource Languages (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unsupervised part of speech (POS) tagging is often framed as a clustering problem, but taggers need to ground their clusters as well. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for low-resource unsupervised part of speech (POS) tagging that yields fully grounded output and requires no labeled training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves reasonable performance across languages, including Sinhalese and Kinyarwanda, with no labeled training data. |
PALT: Parameter-Lite Transfer of Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (LMs) are a powerful transfer learning approach for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-lite transfer learning approach for pretrained language models for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a knowledge graph completion benchmark by tuning 1% of the parameters. |
Code4Struct: Code Generation for Few-Shot Event Structure Prediction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on a mixture of text and code have demonstrated impressive capability in translating natural language (NL) into structured code. |
| Approach: | They propose to use programming language (PL) inheritance and type annotations to translate text into code to tackle structured prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 20-shot data by 29.5% absolute F1. |
Instruct and Extract: Instruction Tuning for On-Demand Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models with instruction-following capabilities are not suitable for long-tail ad hoc extraction use cases for non-expert users. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that follows instructions to extract the desired content from the associated text and present it in a structured tabular format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing open-source models of similar size in terms of information extraction. |
Open Relation and Event Type Discovery with Type Abstraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Conventional "closed-world" information extraction methods rely on human ontologies to define scope for extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a type abstraction approach where models are prompted to generalize and name the type . they use the similarity between inferred names to induce clusters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is complementary to token representations on relation extraction and event extraction datasets. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods focus on reactive feedback, where immediate human perception is leveraged to judge sampled model responses as preference data for post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 20% improvement on existing safety benchmarks and an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
Schema-Guided Culture-Aware Complex Event Simulation with Multi-Agent Role-Play (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Sha Li, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Khanh Nguyen, Qingyun Wang, Yi Fung, Chi Han, Jiawei Han, Kartik Natarajan, Clare Voss, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Complex news events require swift responses from government and society, authors say . relying on historical events to project the future is insufficient, they say - a simulator for complex news events is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable complex news event simulator guided by event schema and user-provided assumptions . they incorporate a geo-diverse commonsense and cultural norm-aware knowledge enhancement component . |
| Outcome: | The proposed simulator achieves higher coherence and appropriateness than existing models. |
BERT might be Overkill: A Tiny but Effective Biomedical Entity Linker based on Residual Convolutional Neural Networks (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Biomedical entity linking is a task of linking entities in biomedical documents to referent entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient convolutional neural network with residual connections for biomedical entity linking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or even better linking accuracy on five public datasets while having about 60 times fewer parameters. |
Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned with Weakly Labeled Data (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for name tagging in low-resource languages or domains require extensive human efforts for training annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for name tagging based on weakly labeled (WL) data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in five low-resource languages and fine-grained food domains and shows that it is more efficient and efficient than existing models. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
Improving Consistency for Text Summarization with Energy Functions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Sreyashi Nag, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Heng Ji, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Current abstractive summarization models generate inconsistent content due to the inherently noisy dataset and the discrepancy between maximum likelihood estimation based training objectives and consistency measurements. |
| Approach: | They propose a new consistency taxonomy that categorizes inconsistent content into faithfulness, factuality, and self-supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on XSUM and CNN/DM datasets show that EnergySum mitigates the trade-off between accuracy and consistency. |
Syntax-aware Multi-task Graph Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Relation Extraction (D19-62)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | 80% of the data sets for relation extraction tasks are negative instances, resulting in a lack of syntactic information between two entity mentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolutional networks model that incorporates dependency parsing and contextualized embedding to capture comprehensive contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art F-score on the 2013 drug-drug interaction extraction task. |
Cross-document Misinformation Detection based on Event Graph Reasoning (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for misinformation detection are limited to judging each document in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of cross-document misinformation detection that detects fake news from a cluster of topically related news documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by up to 7 F1 points on this task. |
SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Avirup Sil, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) lack self-awareness to balance reasoning and tool use, increasing computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enhances an agent’s self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%. |
ActionIE: Action Extraction from Scientific Literature with Programming Languages (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xianrui Zhong, Yufeng Du, Siru Ouyang, Ming Zhong, Tingfeng Luo, Qirong Ho, Hao Peng, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | a method that extracts experimental procedures from human language into actionable sequences in robotics language is challenging given the complexity of the instructions and context-dependent nature of the instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that converts actions written in natural language into Python code that can be easily translated into robotics language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extract experimental procedures from human language into actionable sequences in robotics language. |
Lifelong Event Detection with Knowledge Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional supervised Information Extraction (IE) methods can extract structured knowledge elements from unstructured data, but it is limited to a pre-defined target ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a new lifelong event detection framework that is generalizable to other IE tasks and updates old knowledge with new event types’ mentions using a self-training loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines with a 5.1% gain in the F1 score and can boost the F2 score for over 30% on some new long-tail rare event types with few training instances. |
Monte Carlo Thought Search: Large Language Model Querying for Complex Scientific Reasoning in Catalyst Design (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a goal-driven combinatorial search using large language models has not been explored in detail. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search-based approach that improves beyond state-of-the-art chain-of thought prompting variants to augment scientific reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves over the best baseline by 25.8% and can augment scientist’s reasoning and discovery process with novel insights. |
TT-SI: Self-Improving LLM Agents with Test-Time Training (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for language model fine-tuning are expensive and inefficient . existing methods rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time self-improvement algorithm that generates a sample that model struggles with . they also explore Test-Time Distillation, which leverages 'stronger supervisors' |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across benchmarks. |
MACAROON: Training Vision-Language Models To Be Your Engaged Partners (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) generate detailed responses even when questions are ambiguous or unanswerable, leading to hallucinations and bias issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-tiered hierarchy for questions of invalid, ambiguous, and personalizable nature to measure the proactive engagement capabilities of LVLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates contrastive response pairs for unlabeled questions, achieving 0.84 AAR, while maintaining comparable performance on general tasks. |
Deep Learning on Graphs for Natural Language Processing (2021.naacl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for non-Euclidean data modeling and are used in many graph-related NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will cover applying deep learning on graph techniques to NLP using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) Graph4NLP is the first library for researchers and practitioners for easy use of GNNs for various NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will cover the latest developments in deep learning on graph techniques and their applications in various NLP tasks. |
Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs that only enhance reasoning abilities, but which lack factual hallucination and slow-thinking capabilities, argues that SPP is a cognitive synergist. |
| Approach: | They propose a Solo Performance Prompting (SPP) that transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces factual hallucination and maintains strong reasoning abilities on three challenging tasks . |
Near-imperceptible Neural Linguistic Steganography via Self-Adjusting Arithmetic Coding (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Linguistic steganography studies how to hide secret messages in natural language cover texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which encodes secret messages using self-adjusting arithmetic coding based on a neural language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four datasets by 15.3% and 38.9% in terms of bits/word and KL metrics. |
Infogent: An Agent-Based Framework for Web Information Aggregation (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing web navigation tasks evaluate web agents on task completion basis . however, information aggregation tasks have received relatively little attention . |
| Approach: | They propose a web navigation framework that uses three components for web information aggregation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework beats existing SOTA search framework by 7% under Direct API-Driven Access on FRAMES and improves over an existing information-seeking web agent by 4.3% under Interactive Visual Access on AssistantBench. |
COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation (2021.naacl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Xuan Wang, Nikolaus Parulian, Guangxing Han, Jiawei Ma, Jingxuan Tu, Ying Lin, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Yingjun Guan, Bangzheng Li, Ruisong Li, Xiangchen Song, Yi Fung, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han, Shih-Fu Chang, James Pustejovsky, Jasmine Rah, David Liem, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Clare Voss, Cynthia Schneider, Boyan Onyshkevych
| Challenge: | a new framework to digest relevant biomedical knowledge is needed to combat COVID-19 . quantity of research results is a bottleneck, and false information promoted in publications . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers has developed a framework to extract multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature to combat COVID-19. |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature . it provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence . the framework is based on a case study of drug repurposing . |
Finer: Investigating and Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Concept Recognition in Large Vision Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multiple granularity attribute-centric benchmark and training mixture to evaluate LVLMs’ fine-grained visual comprehension ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V and demonstrates that they struggle to generate descriptive visual attributes based on a concept that appears within an input image despite their prominent zero-shot image captioning ability. |
A Joint Neural Model for Information Extraction with Global Features (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing joint neural models for Information Extraction use local task-specific classifiers to predict labels for individual instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint neural framework that extracts the optimal IE result as a graph from an input sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art on all subtasks and does not use any language-specific feature. |
FIRST: Faster Improved Listwise Reranking with Single Token Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing listwise LLMs lack efficiency as they provide ranking output in the form of a generated ordered sequence of candidate passage identifiers. |
| Approach: | They propose a listwise LLM reranking approach that leverages the first generated identifier to obtain a ranked ordering of the candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach accelerates inference by 50% while maintaining robust ranking performance with gains across BEIR benchmark. |
Event Schema Induction with Double Graph Autoencoders (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that a new method for learning event schemas from historical events is effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a new event schema induction framework which captures global dependencies among nodes in event graphs. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed model can learn event schemas with global consistency. |
Zemi: Learning Zero-Shot Semi-Parametric Language Models from Multiple Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing semi-parametric language models lack the capacity to perform zero-shot tasks . large language models have shown impressive zero-shoot ability, but huge model size costs . semi-parametric language model can be used to augment a smaller language model with retrieved background knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-parametric language model for zero-shot task generalization that augments a smaller language model with retrieved related background knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms T0-3B by 16% across seven diverse evaluation tasks while being 3.8x smaller in scale. |
Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Bingxuan Li, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Bingxiang He, Qinyu Luo, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Generative world models could be used to enhance agents' cognition . agents are expected to operate in settings where tasks unfold over long horizons and involve intricate chains of interdependent decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models as external simulators to enhance cognition . they find that agents rarely invoke simulation and misuse predicted rollouts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could be used to predict future states rather than short-horizon reasoning . the model could also be used for real-world planning and robotics . |
COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Manling Li, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ziqi Wang, Yi-shyuan Chiang, Tuan Lai, Pengfei Yu, Zixuan Zhang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | a new system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 related news . the system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a COVID-19 Claim Radar system that extracts supporting and refuting claims . the system leverages Wikidata as the hub to consolidate coreferential knowledge elements . |
| Outcome: | The system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 pandemic information . it leverages Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements . |
Keep Meeting Summaries on Topic: Abstractive Multi-Modal Meeting Summarization (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive summarization of meetings are unfocused and lack content coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal hierarchical attention model that prioritizes segmentation and summarization . they propose to use multi-level hierarchies to narrow down the focus into topically-relevant segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art with BLEU and ROUGE measures. |
EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that events can greatly improve the quality of KG embeddings on multiple downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-enhanced KG embedding model that incorporates events into KGs . they first incorporate event nodes by building a heterogeneous network with event argument links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates event nodes into the original knowledge graphs . it can be used to fuse event information into the KG embeddings on multiple tasks . |
Visualizing Group Dynamics based on Multiparty Meeting Understanding (D18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | During a discussion, participants might adjust their own opinions and tune their attitudes towards others’ opinions based on the unfolding interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-party meeting opinion mining system that visualizes real-time opinion extraction and group dynamics using bipartite graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts opinions from speech and visualizes an influence factor for each participant using current and previous utterances in real time. |
Unlearning Bias in Language Models by Partitioning Gradients (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that large-scale pretrained language models exhibit issues relating to racism, sexism, religion bias, and toxicity in general. |
| Approach: | They propose a gray-box method for debiasing pretrained masked language models using partitioned contrastive gradient unlearning (PCGU) aims to optimize only the weights that contribute most to a specific domain of bias by computing a first-order approximation based on the gradients of contrastive sentence pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is low-cost and can pinpoint the sources of social bias in large pretrained language models. |
RESIN-EDITOR: A Schema-guided Hierarchical Event Graph Visualizer and Editor (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Khanh Duy Nguyen, Zixuan Zhang, Reece Suchocki, Sha Li, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, Jiawei Han, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing IE tools for atomic events are limited when applied to such complex events. |
| Approach: | They propose to use event schemas to guide the organization of complex events and to edit hierarchical graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms existing IE visualization tools in both IE result analysis and general model improvements. |
R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say ‘I Don’t Know’ (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hanning Zhang, Shizhe Diao, Yong Lin, Yi Fung, Qing Lian, Xingyao Wang, Yangyi Chen, Heng Ji, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning force the model to complete a sentence no matter whether it knows the knowledge or not. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to tuning large language models to refrain from answering questions beyond its parametric knowledge by identifying the disparity in parametric and parametric information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves a model’s ability to answer known questions and refrain from answering unknown questions. |
Semi-supervised New Event Type Induction and Event Detection (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing event extraction studies assume a set of event types and corresponding annotations are given, which could be expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised task of event type induction to learn seen and unseen types . they use seen type annotations to optimize the process and enforce the reconstruction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on supervised event detection and discovers high-quality new types. |
Connecting the Dots: Event Graph Schema Induction with Path Language Modeling (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to automate event extraction focus on uncertainty, re-occurring events and multiple hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new Event Graph Schema where two event types are connected through multiple paths involving entities that fill important roles in a coherent story. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is highly effective at inducing salient and coherent schemas. |
A Close Look into the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) may fail in giving reliable estimates of their predictive uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They conduct fine-grained control experiments to study the dynamic change in PLMs’ calibration performance in training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce PLMs’ confidence in wrong predictions. |
Cross-lingual Joint Entity and Word Embedding to Improve Entity Linking and Parallel Sentence Mining (D19-61)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entities can be used as effective signals to generate less ambiguous semantic representations and align multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia . it provides reliable alignment on word/entity level and sentence level, and thus can be used for unsupervised cross-linguistic entity linking. |
Improving Question Answering with External Knowledge (D19-58)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ARC-Easy, ARC Challenge, and OpenBookQA use Wikipedia to augment training data . performance degrades when additional instances exhibit higher difficulty than original training data. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods for exploiting external knowledge for QA in science . they enrich the original corpus with relevant text snippets from an open-domain resource . the second method simply increases the amount of training data by appending additional in-domain instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve gains in accuracy of 8.1%, 13.0%, and 12.8% on science QA tasks. |
Improving Candidate Retrieval with Entity Profile Generation for Wikidata Entity Linking (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on Wikipedia-derived KBs, but there is little work on EL over Wikidata . EL systems have found applications in many tasks such as question answering . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to linking entity mentions to referent entities in a knowledge base . they use a sequence-to-sequence model to generate the profile of the target entity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on three Wikidata-based datasets and strong performance on TACKBP-2010. |
Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism (P18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a paper abstract writing system can automatically generate an abstract from a title . a typical recurrent neural network (RNN) based approach easily loses focus. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper abstract writing system that automatically generates an abstract from a title. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system passes Turing tests by junior domain experts and non-experts at a rate up to 80%. |
MultiAgentBench : Evaluating the Collaboration and Competition of LLM agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kunlun Zhu, Hongyi Du, Zhaochen Hong, Xiaocheng Yang, Shuyi Guo, Zhe Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Cheng Qian, Robert Tang, Heng Ji, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities as autonomous agents, yet existing benchmarks focus on single-agent tasks or are confined to narrow domains, failing to capture the dynamics of multi-agent coordination and competition. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based multi-agent systems across diverse, interactive scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures task completion and quality of collaboration and competition using novel, milestone-based key performance indicators. |
HySPA: Hybrid Span Generation for Scalable Text-to-Graph Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract information graphs are difficult to scale to datasets with longer input texts because of their secondorder space/time complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hybrid SPan GenerAtor that invertibly maps the information graph to an alternating sequence of nodes and edge types and generates them via a hybrid span decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the ACE05 dataset. |
Error Analysis of Uyghur Name Tagging: Language-specific Techniques and Remaining Challenges (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | despite efforts at name tagging, there is limited understanding on the performance ceiling . despite the high-resource language, there are very few natural language processing tools available . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a machine learning model to identify Uyghur name tagger errors . they conclude that such a model is unlikely to be effective for Uygur, or low-resource languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is unlikely to be effective for Uyghur, or low-resource languages in general, the authors argue . they show that the proposed model can be used for high-res languages with superficial features . |
InfoSurgeon: Cross-Media Fine-grained Information Consistency Checking for Fake News Detection (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Fung, Christopher Thomas, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Sandeep Polisetty, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang, Kathleen McKeown, Mohit Bansal, Avi Sil
| Challenge: | a novel approach to detect fake news is needed due to training data scarcity . current methods focus on document-level fake news detection using lexical features and semantic embeddings . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel benchmark for fake news detection at the knowledge element level . they propose synthesis method which manipulates knowledge elements to generate noisy training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in detecting misinformation . it yields fine-grained explanations and outperformed the current methods . |
PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiateng Liu, Lin Ai, Zizhou Liu, Payam Karisani, Zheng Hui, Yi Fung, Preslav Nakov, Julia Hirschberg, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing research on propaganda detection does not capture the motives behind the content or its broader impact. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dissects propaganda into techniques, arousal appeals, and underlying intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in a wide range of scenarios and can be used to identify and categorize propaganda techniques. |
Utilizing Relative Event Time to Enhance Event-Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event-event temporal relation extraction are sparse on event-time information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for event-event temporal relation classification and an auxiliary task, relative event time prediction, which predicts the event time as real numbers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the RoBERTa-based baseline and achieves state-of-the-art performance on MATRES dataset. |
A Zero-Shot Claim Detection Framework Using Question Answering (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing claims detection frameworks are portability to emerging events and low-resource training data settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a claim detection framework that leverages zero-shot Question Answering to solve sub-tasks such as topic filtering, claim object detection, and claimer detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the NewsClaims benchmark. |
Chem-FINESE: Validating Fine-Grained Few-shot Entity Extraction through Text Reconstruction (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for fine-grained few-shot entity extraction are difficult to implement in the chemical domain due to the information overload of scientific papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence based few-shot entity extraction approach . it uses a seq2seq entity extractor and a self-validation module to reconstruct original input sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 8.26% and 6.84% performance gains on two datasets. |
Timeline Summarization based on Event Graph Compression via Time-Aware Optimal Transport (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for timeline summarization ignore the events’ intra-structures and inter-structure connections. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent news articles as an event-graph, thus compressing the whole graph to its salient sub-graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on the state-of-the-art on three real-world datasets, including two public benchmarks and a Timeline100 dataset. |
A Language-First Approach for Procedure Planning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Developing intelligent agents requires the ability to produce plans on the fly based on visual observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-first procedure planning framework with a modularized design . they first align current and goal observations with corresponding steps and then use a pre-trained LM to predict intermediate steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches state-of-the-art procedures on COIN and CrossTask benchmarks. |
Cross-lingual Multi-Level Adversarial Transfer to Enhance Low-Resource Name Tagging (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Low-resource language name tagging is an important but challenging task. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture that leverages multi-level adversarial transfer to improve name tagging for low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous approaches on CoNLL data sets. |
Joint Detection and Coreference Resolution of Entities and Events with Document-level Context Aggregation (2021.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on extracting information from sentences or paragraphs has a difficulty analyzing longer contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a jointly trained model that can be used for various information extraction tasks at the document level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves entity and event typing and typing on documents from the ACE05-E+ dataset. |
Defining a New NLP Playground (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Sha Li, Chi Han, Pengfei Yu, Carl Edwards, Manling Li, Xingyao Wang, Yi Fung, Charles Yu, Joel Tetreault, Eduard Hovy, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history. |
| Approach: | They propose 20+ PhD-dissertation-worthy research directions to define a new NLP playground by combining theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed research will cover theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications. |
Interpretable Automatic Fine-grained Inconsistency Detection in Text Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factual consistency evaluation approaches for text summarization provide binary predictions and limited insights into the weakness of summarizing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of fine-grained inconsistency detection to detect inconsistent summaries . they represent facts with semantic frames extracted by semantic role labeling and highlight related semantic frames to predict inconsistance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides evidence to support or refute the summary. |
TextEE: Benchmark, Reevaluation, Reflections, and Future Challenges in Event Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kuan-Hao Huang, I-Hung Hsu, Tanmay Parekh, Zhiyu Xie, Zixuan Zhang, Prem Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that event extraction evaluations may not accurately reflect the true performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a standardized, fair, and reproducible benchmark for event extraction . they use standardized scripts and splits for 16 datasets spanning eight domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. |
Self-Correction is More than Refinement: A Learning Framework for Visual and Language Reasoning Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities, but they invariably generate flawed responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-correction approach that instructs VLMs to refine their outputs by allowing them to learn from their self-generated self-reference data without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables VLMs to learn from their self-generated self-correction data without relying on external feedback, facilitating self-improvement. |
DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current language models lack the structured deliberation needed for high-stakes tasks such as healthcare and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision-making framework that guides models to reason over structured representations of actions, attributes, and constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 30% accuracy gains over strong prompting baselines and enhances alignment in outcomes. |
Minimize Exposure Bias of Seq2Seq Models in Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu, Aysa Xuemo Fan, Heng Ji, Daojian Zeng, Fei Cheng, Daisuke Kawahara, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation triplets from plain text introduce exposure bias . prior work has focused on pipeline methods that ignore intrinsic interactions between subtasks and propagate classification errors through the tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reduces the decoding length to three within a triplet and removes the order among triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overfits to both datasets while showing better generalization. |
Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingjie Li, Xiang Li, Chenlei Guo, Xing Fan, Ruhi Sarikaya, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Large language model agents rely on in-context policy documents to act as effective user assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic benchmark generator with Controllable Complexity in agent policy across four levels to evaluate agents under increasing complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline in data-sparse and high-complexity settings. |
Text2DB: Integration-Aware Information Extraction with Large Language Model Agents (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current methods for information extraction (IE) focus on integrating IE output with the database . a long-overlooked question is what counts as "relevant knowledge" |
| Approach: | They propose a task that emphasizes integration of IE output and the database . they introduce a benchmark and an LLM agent framework for this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task integrates IE output and the target database (or knowledge base) it meets common demands such as data infilling, row population, and column addition . |
New Frontiers of Information Extraction (2022.naacl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) is the process of automatically extracting structural information from unstructured or semi-structured data. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to recent advances in IE by answering several important research questions. |
| Outcome: | The tutorial will address several important research questions and outline directions for further investigation. |
Dynamic Global Memory for Document-level Argument Extraction (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on document-level event argument extraction is restricted by sequence length constraints and ignores global context between events. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a document memory store to extract contextual event information and leverage it to implicitly and explicitly help with decoding of arguments for later events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior methods and is more robust to adversarially annotated examples with constrained decoding design. |
ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Qian, Hongyi Du, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Avirup Sil, ChengXiang Zhai, Kathleen McKeown, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models fail to reflect real-world complexity . existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-life problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features real-world-inspired, open-ended problems from competitions . they propose 'ModelingBench' that supports multiple valid solutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and produces well-grounded, creative solutions. |
LETI: Learning to Generate from Textual Interactions (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing techniques fine-tune on input-output pairs or with numerical rewards that gauge the output quality are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune pre-trained language models with binary labels and a Python interpreter to get textual feedback from the inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the base model on unseen problems and achieves comparable or better performance on humanEval. |
Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Name Retrieval for Low-Resource Languages (D19-61)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a novel name retrieval method is proposed for languages with no annotations or training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which relies on zero annotation or resources from the target language . they pre-train an orthographic encoder using Wikipedia inter-lingual links from dozens of languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows 11.6% improvement over state-of-the-art methods. |
Towards Robust Neural Retrieval with Source Domain Synthetic Pre-Finetuning (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Revanth Gangi Reddy, Vikas Yadav, Md Arafat Sultan, Martin Franz, Vittorio Castelli, Heng Ji, Avirup Sil
| Challenge: | Existing neural IR systems rely on lexical matching for query-passage alignment, while masked language models use a dual encoder architecture to encode passages and questions into continuous vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance the out-of-domain generalization of Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) through synthetic data augmentation only in the source domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in in-domain and zero-shot evaluations on Wikipedia-based datasets. |
Zero-Shot Transfer Learning for Event Extraction (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing supervised event extraction methods rely on manual annotations and features specific to each event type. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that maps event mentions to a specific type in an event ontology . they use existing annotations to extract event types from unstructured text data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to new unseen event types without manual annotations. |
Sketching as a Tool for Understanding and Accelerating Self-attention for Long Sequences (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for long sequences are not efficient due to the quadratic space and time complexity of the self-attention modules. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce the quadratic complexity to linear (modulo logarithmic factors) by low-dimensional projection and row selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform transformer-based models with smaller time/space footprint on the Long Range Arena benchmark. |
Social Commonsense-Guided Search Query Generation for Open-Domain Knowledge-Powered Conversations (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open-domain dialog generates search queries that help obtain relevant knowledge for holding informative conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate social commonsense reasoning into internet search queries . they use a commonsensible dialog system to establish connections related to the conversation topic . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes limitations of existing query generation techniques based on explicit dialog information and produces more relevant, specific, and compelling queries. |
Multi-lingual Entity Discovery and Linking (P18-5)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial reviews the framework of cross-lingual EL and motivates it as a broad paradigm for the Information Extraction task. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review the framework of cross-lingual EL and motivate it as a broad paradigm for the Information Extraction task. |
| Outcome: | The aim of this tutorial is to review the framework of cross-lingual EL and motivate it as a broad paradigm for the Information Extraction task. |
Reliability-aware Dynamic Feature Composition for Name Tagging (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Word embeddings are used to encode semantic information, but their quality is not consistent across the vocabulary due to the long-tail distribution of word frequency. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliability-aware name tagging model that uses word frequency to indicate word quality . they propose to use word frequency-based reliability signals to dynamically select and compose features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on OntoNotes 5.0 and up to 5% gain on cross-genre data sets. |
Semi-supervised New Event Type Induction and Description via Contrastive Loss-Enforced Batch Attention (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction use annotated event types but are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised approach to learning new event types using a masked contrastive loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method learns similarities between clusters by enforcing an attention mechanism over the data minibatch. |
Adversarial Robustness for Large Language NER models using Disentanglement and Word Attributions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are becoming more challenging due to the introduction of complex tagsets, which often leads to the failure of existing NER systems in accurately recognizing these entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack which relies on disentanglement and word attribution techniques to learn an embedding and identifying important words across both components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the F1 score over the original LLM model by 8% and 18% on CoNLL-2003 and Ontonotes 5.0 datasets respectively. |
CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English due to data scarcity issue in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-checking framework augmented with cross-lingual retrieval that aggregates evidence retrieved from multiple languages through a cross-linguistic retriever. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.23% absolute F1 improvement over previous systems on a X-Fact dataset. |
Abstract Meaning Representation Guided Graph Encoding and Decoding for Joint Information Extraction (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (IE) and Information Extraction (IE), both focus on extracting the main information from natural language texts. |
| Approach: | They propose an AMR-guided framework for joint information extraction using a pre-trained AMR parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on all IE subtasks. |
Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision-language models have demonstrated strong efficacy as visual assistants . however, evaluation of their reasoning capabilities requires a costly benchmark . |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to measure the reasoning consistency of vision-language models . they propose supervised fine-tuning of VLMs and feedback from LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces cost while ensuring the generation of a high-quality dataset. |
Decoding the Silent Majority: Inducing Belief Augmented Social Graph with Large Language Model for Response Forecasting (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to forecast news media responses have limited exploration of how to best process and utilize these important features. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a large language model to induce a belief-centered graph on top of an existent social network, along with graph-based propagation to capture social dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art in experimental evaluations for both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in response forecasting. |
Schema-based Data Augmentation for Event Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods rely on language models to train event extraction models. |
| Approach: | They propose a schema-based data augmentation method that utilizes event schemas to guide the data generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality generated data and significantly improves model performance. |
Agenda-Driven Question Generation: A Case Study in the Courtroom Domain (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing automated question generation methods focus on unstructured text and lack agenda and background documents as context. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage large language models for CourtQG by fine-tuning them on two auxiliary tasks, agenda explanation and question type prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates better questions according to standard metrics when compared to several baselines. |
CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the **C**ross-Lingual Self-**Aligning ability of **L**anguage **M**odels to align knowledge across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in both zero-shot and retrieval-augmented settings. |
GAIA: A Fine-grained Multimedia Knowledge Extraction System (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Manling Li, Alireza Zareian, Ying Lin, Xiaoman Pan, Spencer Whitehead, Brian Chen, Bo Wu, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang, Clare Voss, Daniel Napierski, Marjorie Freedman
| Challenge: | Open source knowledge extraction tools are used for many real-world applications, but there is no comprehensive system for KE. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimedia knowledge extraction system that takes multimedia data from various sources and languages as input and creates a coherent, structured knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The system achieves top performance at the recent NIST TAC SM-KBP2019 evaluation. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
NORMSAGE: Multi-Lingual Multi-Cultural Norm Discovery from Conversations On-the-Fly (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to understand acceptable behavior have focused on a single culture and manually built datasets from non-conversational settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically extract culture-specific norms from multi-lingual conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts culture-specific norms from multi-lingual conversations. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Type Induction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods require predefined event types and their annotations to learn event extractors. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent each event type as a cluster of predicate sense, object head> pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can discover salient and high-quality event types on three datasets from different domains. |
Visual Attention Model for Name Tagging in Multimodal Social Media (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Name tagging is a key task for language understanding, but is often limited by the short textual components. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model architecture based on visual attention that outperforms other methods . they use multimodal datasets to analyze the name tagging task on social media . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and significantly outperformed existing methods. |
Shorten the Long Tail for Rare Entity and Event Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for the long-tailed learning problem seek to manipulate the training data by re-balancing, augmentation or introducing extra prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform infrequent candidate mention representation with the average mention representation in the training dataset to handle the generalization challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize to rare or unseen expressions of entities or events, especially for rare types without sufficient training examples. |
A Context-Dependent Gated Module for Incorporating Symbolic Semantics into Event Coreference Resolution (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event coreference resolution use symbolic features, but they are noisy and contain errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-dependent gated module to adaptively control the information flows from the input symbolic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two datasets: ACE 2005 and KBP 2016 . |
ViStruct: Visual Structural Knowledge Extraction via Curriculum Guided Code-Vision Representation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art vision-language models have limited performance in structural knowledge extraction, such as relations between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the inherent structure of programming language to depict visual structural information in a well-organized structured format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves visual structural knowledge extraction on visual structure prediction tasks. |
OpenPI-C: A Better Benchmark and Stronger Baseline for Open-Vocabulary State Tracking (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on state tracking assumes both entities and state space are known, which limits their applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage model that refines the state change prediction conditioned on entities predicted from the first stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the cleaned dataset and the evaluation metric on the proposed model. |
Biomedical Event Extraction based on Knowledge-driven Tree-LSTM (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Biomedical event extraction requires domain-specific knowledge and deep understanding of complex contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base-driven tree-structured long short-term memory networks framework . tree-LSTM framework incorporates dependency structures and entity properties from ontologies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the BioNLP shared task with Genia dataset and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Named Entity Recognition Under Domain Shift via Metric Learning for Life Sciences (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition fail in scientific domains such as biomedicine and chemistry. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to transfer knowledge from the biomedical domain to the target domain . they use pseudo labeling and contrastive learning to enhance discrimination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models by up to 5% . the proposed model is based on a biomedical domain model and a chemical domain model . |
Fine-grained Coordinated Cross-lingual Text Stream Alignment for Endless Language Knowledge Acquisition (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a novel information network decipherment paradigm is proposed for fine-grained coordinated cross-lingual text stream alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Burst Information Networks as media to represent text streams . they propose a simple yet effective information network decipherment algorithm with diverse clues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on bilingual lexicon extraction from coordinated text streams and can harvest high-quality alignments from large amounts of streaming data for endless language knowledge mining. |
Open-Domain Hierarchical Event Schema Induction by Incremental Prompting and Verification (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent methods for event schema induction use information extraction systems to construct event graph instances from documents . compared to the previous state-of-the-art closed-domain schema inducing model, human assessors were able to cover 10% more events when translating the schemas into coherent stories . |
| Approach: | They propose to treat event schemas as commonsense knowledge that can be derived from large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method simplifies the schema induction process and improves readability. |
Learning Shared Semantic Space for Speech-to-Text Translation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (ST) has been treated as an independent task . however, the modality gap has rendered MT data and its end-to end models incompatible with their ST counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose to bridge the representation gap between text and audio inputs by projecting audio and text features to a common semantic representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on two ST benchmarks and achieves 27.1 BLEU on MuST-C EN-DE. |
Multimedia Generative Script Learning for Task Planning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a specific goal . ability to capture historical states in visual modalities provides detailed information not covered by text . |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-oriented generative script learning task to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms baselines in three aspects of the current task. |
Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization with Cross-Document Graph-based Information Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) and summarization (summarization) are closely related, but both aims to abstract the most salient information into a generated text summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to use structured IE graphs to enhance the abstractive summarization task by using cross-document IE output to incorporate an alignment loss between IE nodes and their text spans to reduce inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate summaries that are more factual while not losing abstractiveness. |
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuji Zhang, Sha Li, Cheng Qian, Jiateng Liu, Pengfei Yu, Chi Han, Yi R. Fung, Kathleen McKeown, ChengXiang Zhai, Manling Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). |
Genre Separation Network with Adversarial Training for Cross-genre Relation Extraction (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Generative Models for Product Attribute Extraction (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | generative models are used for product attribute extraction, a new field in information extraction and e-commerce. |
| Approach: | They analyze generative models for product attribute extraction and demonstrate their utility . they perform experiments on Amazon and MAVE product attribute datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate implicit attribute values, which state-of-the-art models are unable to extract. |
Multi-lingual Common Semantic Space Construction via Cluster-consistent Word Embedding (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new approach to multilingual word embedding is needed to achieve this goal . a multilingual common semantic space is a language-agnostic semantic continuous space . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual common semantic space where words from multiple languages are mapped into a shared space so that resources and knowledge can be shared across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 14.6% absolute F-score gain over state-of-the-art methods on cross-lingual direct transfer. |
EA2E: Improving Consistency with Event Awareness for Document-Level Argument Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on document-level event argument extraction models each individual event in isolation and therefore causes inconsistency among extracted arguments across events. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-aware argument extraction model with augmented context to improve consistency . they hypothesize that participants tend to play consistent roles across multiple events in a document . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves consistency and accuracy of arguments extracted from documents. |
PaperRobot: Incremental Draft Generation of Scientific Ideas (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a paper robot can read existing papers and create new nodes or links in the knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the creation of new ideas by predicting links from the background KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paper automates three tasks: read existing papers, create new ideas, predict links . the paper generated abstracts, conclusion and future work sections, and new titles are chosen over human-written ones up to 30%, 24% and 12% of the time. |
Compositional Reasoning via Joint Image and Language Decomposition (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches typically decompose only language queries, treating images as monolithic inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes both images and questions into visual sub-domains with corresponding sub-questions. |
| Outcome: | REDI achieves absolute accuracy improvements of 8.9%, 8.2%, and 16.0% over existing models. |
Zero-shot Faithful Factual Error Correction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using machines to correct factual errors is in high demand and requires a significant amount of human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot framework that asks questions about input claims and seeks correct answers from the given evidence to correct factual errors faithfully. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms fully-supervised methods on the FEVER and SciFact datasets and is more faithful. |
Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing scripts for everyday tasks are presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. |
| Approach: | They propose to use loosely aligned videos to train a non-sequential graph script induction task by using a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% . it can predict future steps given a partial step sequence and generate explicit graph scripts . |
Incorporating Task-Specific Concept Knowledge into Script Learning (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on Goal-Oriented Scripts ignore usage context and personal preferences . proposed tasks are restrictive and rely on overly simplified assumptions . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to Goal-Oriented Script Completion that uses concept prompting and script-oriented contrastive learning to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on a WikiHow-based dataset. |
Rescorla-Wagner Steering of LLMs for Undesired Behaviors over Disproportionate Inappropriate Context (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | Incorporating external context can enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). however, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Poisoned Context Testbed to pair queries with real-world contexts . they propose 'rw-Steering' to internalize inappropriate signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses undesirable behavior curve. |
Enhancing Knowledge Selection for Grounded Dialogues via Document Semantic Graphs (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing conversation models treat knowledge selection as a sentence ranking problem where each sentence is handled individually, ignoring the internal semantic connection between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically convert background knowledge documents into document semantic graphs and perform knowledge selection over such graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the knowledge selection task and the response generation task on HollE and generalizes on unseen topics in WoW. |
Towards a Human-Computer Collaborative Scientific Paper Lifecycle: A Pilot Study and Hands-On Tutorial (2024.lrec-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide an overview of the scientific paper lifecycle . large language models (LLMs) have increasingly played an important role in academic writing . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide an overview of the scientific paper lifecycle using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The tutorial will provide an overview of the scientific paper lifecycle, including scientific literature understanding, experiment development, manuscript draft writing, and finally draft evaluation. |
Incorporating Background Knowledge into Video Description Generation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video captioning focus on generating generic descriptions that lack contextual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses video meta-data to retrieve topically related news documents for a video and extracts the events and named entities from these documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a news video dataset and is evaluated on it. |
Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Hou Pong Chan, Yi Fung, Zhenhailong Wang, Lingyu Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | LVLMs are known for producing text that is factually inconsistent with visual input . factuality of generated captions for structured visuals has not been studied as much . |
| Approach: | They propose a typology of factual errors in captions generated by large vision-language models . they propose CHOCOLATE, a visual entailment model that outperforms current models based on this analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current models in evaluating caption factuality. |
AGRaME: Any-Granularity Ranking with Multi-Vector Embeddings (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing ranking algorithms restrict granularity to full passages or require a specific dense index for each desired level of granules. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-vector ranking approach that leverages multi-vctor embeddings to rank at varying levels of granularity while maintaining encoding at a single (coarser) level of grail. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses prompt-driven citation generation by incorporating proposition-level ranking to post-hoc citation addition. |
Health-ORSC-Bench: A Benchmark for Measuring Over-Refusal and Safety Completion in Health Context (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment benchmarks fail to evaluate Safe Completion: the model’s ability to maximise helpfulness on dual-use or borderline queries without crossing into actionable harm. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark to measure Over-Refusal and Safe Completion quality in healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The framework evaluates 30 state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-5 and Claude-4. |
Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition models require abundant high-quality annotations to train . distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, making supervised learning ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-robust learning scheme for training named entity recognition models using only distantly-labeled data and a self-training method that uses contextualized augmentations created by pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing supervised NER models on three datasets by significant margins. |
Language + Molecules (2024.eacl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In the last year, instruction-following language models have surged in popularity. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to applying natural language-driven solutions to chemistry problems. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to this area of research. it requires no knowledge outside mainstream NLP, and it will enable participants to begin exploring relevant research. |
Faking Fake News for Real Fake News Detection: Propaganda-Loaded Training Data Generation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | despite advances in detecting fake news, there is a sizable gap between machine-generated and human-authored fake news . a nave solution is to collect human-written news articles that contain inaccurate information by crawling untrustworthy news media. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating training examples informed by the styles and strategies of human-authored propaganda. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves detection of human-written disinformation by 3.62–7.69% on two public datasets. |
Stage-wise Fine-tuning for Graph-to-Text Generation (2021.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph-to-text generation has benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs) but they fail to fully utilize the structure information of the input graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured graph-to-text model with a two-step fine-tuning mechanism which first fine-tracks model on Wikipedia before adapting to graph- to-text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of the English WebNLG 2017 dataset by using tree-level embeddings to capture the inter-dependency structures of the input graph. |
Enhanced Chart Understanding via Visual Language Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to understand chart plots are difficult to apply to visual-language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the chartQA benchmark by over 8% performance gains. |
Model Extrapolation Expedites Alignment (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve LLM alignment training require expensive computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a model extrapolation method to expedite LLMs’ alignment with human preferences by amplifying parameter changes based on a first-order approximation without any additional training overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a fully-trained model on leading benchmarks and significantly outperformed open-source models. |
Multilingual Entity, Relation, Event and Human Value Extraction (N19-4)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing systems that extract knowledge elements from multiple languages and documents do not aggregate knowledge from multiple documents and languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual knowledge extraction system that performs entity discovery and linking, relation extraction, event extraction, and coreference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs entity discovery and linking, relation extraction, event extraction, and coreference. |
A Multi-lingual Multi-task Architecture for Low-resource Sequence Labeling (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that multi-task learning can boost the performance of related tasks such as MT and abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-lingual multi-task architecture to develop supervised models with a minimal amount of labeled data for sequence labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves 4.3%-50.5% absolute gains compared to mono-lingual model . the proposed model is particularly effective in low-resource settings . |
CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their ability is limited by API availability and the instability of implicit reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLMs to create their own tools using documentation and code realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing chain-of-thought, program-of thought, and tool-using baselines on MATH and TabMWP benchmarks. |
Open-Vocabulary Argument Role Prediction For Event Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on event extraction depend on pre-defined argument roles . despite great progress, many studies still rely on hand-crafted ontologies . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework for customizing argument roles for event extraction . they propose a human-annotated event extraction dataset with 143 customized argument roles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on an event extraction dataset. |