Papers by Hong Yu
GLGR: Question-aware Global-to-Local Graph Reasoning for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for multi-hop reasoning are lacking for local graph reasoning . existing approaches neglect local semantic structures in utterances . |
| Approach: | They propose a question-aware global-to-local graph reasoning approach that expands the canonical Interlocutor-Utterance graph by introducing a query node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on Molweni and FriendsQA. |
Low-Resource Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction by Data Augmentation with Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (COQE) aims to predict comparative opinion quintuples from comparative sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-resource approach to extract comparative opinion quintuples from comparative sentences . they propose augmentation using ChatGPT and a data-centric approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the existing pipeline-based method and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zonghai Yao, Nandyala Siddharth Kantu, Guanghao Wei, Hieu Tran, Zhangqi Duan, Sunjae Kwon, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | a new task is to generate lay definitions of medical terms in EHRs that are difficult to understand for patients. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of automatically generating lay definitions to simplify medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can match or surpass state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT with high-quality data. |
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chaoyue He, Xin Zhou, Yi Wu, Xinjia Yu, Yan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Di Wang, Shengfei Lyu, Hong Xu, Wang Xiaoqiao, Wei Liu, Chunyan Miao
| Challenge: | ESGenius is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models on ESG and sustainability knowledge. |
| Approach: | They introduce ESGenius, a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing ESG proficiency . they use a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol and a repository of foundational frameworks . |
| Outcome: | ESGenius is a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in ESG and sustainability-focused question answering. |
Self-Supervised Learning for Contextualized Extractive Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive summarization are usually trained from scratch with a cross-entropy loss . previous work builds an end-to-end system to learn to choose sentences without explicitly modeling document context . |
| Approach: | They propose three auxiliary pre-training tasks that learn to capture the document context in a self-supervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on a CNN/DM dataset. |
DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we construct a real-world Chinese dataset - DuReader_robust . |
| Approach: | They introduce a real-world Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness and generalization of MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalisation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to perform well on the challenge test set and may provide suggestions for future model development. |
Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on open-domain multi-hop question answering relies on off-the-shelf information retrieval techniques to retrieve answer passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a new subproblem for open-domain multi-hop question answering . they aim to recognize the anchor from a set of start passages with a reading comprehension model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the baseline method on the open-domain hotpotQA benchmark. |
Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can generate natural language texts for various domains and tasks, but their potential for clinical text mining is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a pragmatic taxonomy for AD sign and symptom progression based on expert knowledge and train a system to detect AD-related signs and symptoms from EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy outperforms existing methods using only the gold dataset and silver datasets. |
Negative Focus Detection via Contextual Attention Mechanism (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Negation is a universal but complicated linguistic phenomenon that reverses the polarity of a statement or its property into opposite. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which consists of a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory neural network and a Conditional Random Fields layer to capture contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the SEM’12 shared task corpus, yielding an absolute improvement of 2.11% over the state-of-the-art. |
A Fine-Grained Taxonomy of Replies to Hate Speech (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new corpus of responses to hate speech is developed to counter hate speech . authors work with real, user-generated hate speech and all the replies it elicits . counterspeech refers to a "direct response that counters hate speech" |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of responses to hate speech and a new corpus to analyze responses . they find that responses to user-generated hate speech are more effective than replies generated by a third party . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy of responses to hate speech and a new corpus provide insights into content real users reply with and which replies are empirically most effective. |
Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering (2025.naacl-long)
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Yu Zhao, Alessio Devoto, Giwon Hong, Xiaotang Du, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Hongru Wang, Xuanli He, Kam-Fai Wong, Pasquale Minervini
| Challenge: | Large language models store factual knowledge in their parameters but their parametric knowledge can conflict with the information provided in the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free representation engineering method that uses pre-trained sparse auto-encoders to control the knowledge selection behaviour of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can control the use of both knowledge sources to resolve knowledge conflict in open-domain question-answering tasks surpassing existing representation engineering methods (+10%) and contrastive decoding methods (+5%). |
MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills (2026.eacl-long)
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Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Current clinical LLM benchmarks fail to evaluate advanced clinical skills in AI and large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) using two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
Calibrating Structured Output Predictors for Natural Language Processing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Several modern machine-learning based NLP systems can provide a confidence score with their output predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a general calibration scheme for output entities of interest in NLP applications that can be used to calibrate confidence scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration scheme outperforms current calibration techniques for Named Entity Recognition, Part-of-speech tagging and Question Answering systems. |
Argumentation Mining on Essays at Multi Scales (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Argumentation mining on essays is a new task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale argumentation mining model which aims to identify the types and locations of argumentation components from essay text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on mining all types of argumentation components on the Persuasive Essay dataset. |
Synth-SBDH: A Synthetic Dataset of Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health for Clinical Text (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing SBDH datasets lack detailed annotations and are limited in their availability and coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic SBDH annotation dataset with detailed SBDH status, temporal information, and rationale across 15 categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms models with no Synth-SBDH training on three tasks using real-world clinical datasets from two distinct hospital settings. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
CLOMO: Counterfactual Logical Modification with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yinya Huang, Ruixin Hong, Hongming Zhang, Wei Shao, Zhicheng Yang, Dong Yu, Changshui Zhang, Xiaodan Liang, Linqi Song
| Challenge: | Existing studies on evaluating model reasoning are limited in both form and content. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to cultivate counterfactual thought processes within large language models and an evaluation metric to evaluate their natural language output instead of modeling the task as a multiple-choice problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric aligns well with human preference. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues (2021.naacl-main)
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Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Lin Li, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Traditionally, anaphora resolution and ellipses resolution are limited in dialogues . despite rapid progress in dialogue systems, several difficulties remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for modeling coreference resolution and query rewriting for complex, multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on a rewritten dialogue dataset. |
Enhancing Attributed Question Answering using Tailored Progressive Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Attributed Question Answering models are not yet leveraged to enhance their essential capabilities, including evidence identification, cross-source relation recognition and anti-distraction reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive progressive curriculum learning approach that optimizes both encoder-decoder and decoder-only AQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both encoder-decoder and decoder-only AQA models on the quotesum benchmark. |
Generating User-Engaging News Headlines (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation systems present the same headline to all users, making it difficult for them to understand the connection between their interests and the recommended article. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates user profiling to generate personalized headlines and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headline generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. |
Intrinsic Test of Unlearning Using Parametric Knowledge Traces (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for “unlearning” information captured in large language models rely on behavioral tests without monitoring residual knowledge in model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a general evaluation methodology that uses vocabulary projections to inspect concepts encoded in model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects changes in parametric traces of unlearned concepts and localizes them in two open-source LLMs. |
FASPell: A Fast, Adaptable, Simple, Powerful Chinese Spell Checker Based On DAE-Decoder Paradigm (D19-55)
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| Challenge: | Existing spell checkers for Chinese are based on denoising autoencoder and decoder paradigms that require a small amount of data to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese spell checker based on a new paradigm which consists of a denoising autoencoder and a decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed spell checker is faster, more Adaptable to simplified and traditional Chinese texts and has a much simpler structure to be as much Powerful in error detection and correction. |
Exploiting the Index Gradients for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in training Large Language Models, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak, an adversarial attack method. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial jailbreak algorithm that exploits the gradient information of the suffix tokens to accelerate the optimization process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 1.5x speedup while maintaining high attack success rates. |
NUT-RC: Noisy User-generated Text-oriented Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RC models focus on extractive or generative, but ignore integration of them. |
| Approach: | They propose a noisy user-generated text-oriented RC model that integrates extractive and generative RC models by a multi-task learning mechanism and an answer selection module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on Twitter. |
REAR: Reinforced Reasoning Optimization for Event Argument Extraction with Relation-Aware Support (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for EAE restrict integration of relation-level semantics, thereby overlooking the complementary cues from RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation-aware EAE Reinforced optimization framework that integrates relation-level cues from RE into the Large Language Model (LLM) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing decoder-only methods on the ACE-E, ACE+ and ERE benchmarks. |
Dynamic Data Selection for Curriculum Learning via Ability Estimation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing curriculum learning methods rely on heuristics to estimate difficulty of data . a major drawback is that they ignore competency of the model during training . |
| Approach: | They propose replacing difficulty heuristics with learned difficulty parameters . they propose a strategy that probes model ability at each training epoch . |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms heuristic-based learning models on the GLUE classification tasks. |
Unregulated Chinese-to-English Data Expansion Does NOT Work for Neural Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that cross-language data expansion results in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection on English ACE corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ED performance by 1.6% over the straight data combination. |
Can Large Language Models Understand Context? (2024.findings-eacl)
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Yilun Zhu, Joel Moniz, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Site Li, Yuan Zhang, Hong Yu, Bo-Hsiang Tseng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for Large Language Models (LLMs) have been inadequate to evaluate their ability to understand contextual features. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess large language models' ability to understand context by adapting existing datasets to suit their evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better under the in-context learning pretraining scenario than state-of-the-art models. |
LlamaCare: An Instruction Fine-Tuned Large Language Model for Clinical NLP (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable abilities in generating natural texts . applying LLMs to clinical domain still poses significant challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a method of instruction fine-tuning for adapting large language models to clinical domains . they generate instructions, inputs, and outputs covering a wide spectrum of clinical services . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline LLMs on clinical tasks . it requires domain adaptation, task-specific learning, and reliability . |
SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) is a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). |
| Approach: | They propose a data generation framework tailored for Dialog State Tracking that uses large language models to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves joint goal accuracy by 4-5% over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
Using active learning to expand training data for implicit discourse relation recognition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine semantic relations between text spans are limited in the field of discourse-level relation recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to expand the training data set using the corpus of explicitly-related arguments by arbitrarily dropping the overtly presented discourse connectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model expands the training data set using the corpus of explicitly-related arguments, by arbitrarily dropping the overtly presented discourse connectives. |
Large Language Models are In-context Teachers for Knowledge Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context teaching is a method of providing in-concept example rationales to a student to reason over unseen cases. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an LLM's self-elicited explanations as in-context demonstrations to prompt a student to reason over unseen cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human-crafted demonstrations on medical question answering and human-created models outperfect human-made demonstrations. |
PrinciplismQA: A Philosophy-Grounded Approach to Assessing LLM-Human Clinical Medical Ethics Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to integrate philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a philosophy-grounded approach to assess medical ethics alignment . PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning . |
| Outcome: | PrinciplismQA provides a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing medical ethics alignment. |
Fast and Accurate End-to-End Span-based Semantic Role Labeling as Word-based Graph Parsing (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Using end-to-end span-based SRL, we propose a word-based graph parsing task for word-level representation of spans . compared with word-driven SRL, span-Based SRL is more complex due to difficulties in determining argument boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to cast end-to-end span-based SRL as a word-based graph parsing task . they propose a constrained Viterbi procedure to ensure the legality of the output graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can parse 669/252 sentences per second without and with pre-trained models. |
SEP-MLDC: A Simple and Effective Paradigm for Multi-Label Document Classification (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on optimizing document features, overlooking the potential of high-quality label features to enhance classification performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-label document classification paradigm that utilizes large language models to expand the label content and generate pseudo-samples for the tail categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. |
Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Hate speech (HS) online causes increased prejudice and discrimination, fostering an environment of hostility and social division. |
| Approach: | They analyze the Reddit Echoes of Hate dataset to assess the impact of counterspeech from the hater's perspective and focus on whether the counterspeak leads the reentry to be hateful. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the two-stage reaction predictor and the three-way classifier to predict haters' reactions to the reentry of the conversation and determines the type of resentment. |
Self-Supervised Prompt Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jinyu Xiang, Jiayi Zhang, Zhaoyang Yu, Xinbing Liang, Fengwei Teng, Jinhao Tu, Fashen Ren, Xiangru Tang, Sirui Hong, Chenglin Wu, Yuyu Luo
| Challenge: | Existing prompt optimization methods rely heavily on external references such as ground truth or by humans, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where such data is unavailable or costly to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-efficient framework that discovers effective prompts for both closed and open-ended tasks without external reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods with significantly lower costs and fewer samples. |
Revisiting the Architectures like Pointer Networks to Efficiently Improve the Next Word Distribution, Summarization Factuality, and Beyond (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for word probability distributions are limited and the output softmax layer is inherently limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the output softmax layer to compute the word probability distribution instead of using pointer networks to break the bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves factCC score by 2 points in CNN/DM and XSUM dataset, and MAUVE scores by 30% in bookSum paragraph-level dataset. |
Knowing When to Abstain: Medical LLMs Under Clinical Uncertainty (2026.eacl-long)
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Sravanthi Machcha, Sushrita Yerra, Sahil Gupta, Aishwarya Sahoo, Sharmin Sultana, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao
| Challenge: | Current evaluation of large language models prioritizes accuracy, but abstention is vital for trustworthy deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and evaluation protocol for abstention in medical multiple-choice question answering . they integrate conformal prediction, adversarial question perturbations, and explicit abstraction options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol improves reliability of medical multiple-choice question answering models by providing explicit abstention options. |
From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Benlu Wang, Iris Xia, Yifan Zhang, Junda Wang, null Feiyun Ouyang, Shuo Han, Arman Cohan, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess only the final answer with a wide numerical tolerance, overlooking systematic reasoning failures and potentially causing serious clinical misjudgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a new step-by-step evaluation pipeline that assesses formula selection, entity extraction, and arithmetic computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of large language models on medical benchmarks from 16.35% to 53.19%. |
AdaDHP: Fine-Grained Fine-Tuning via Dual Hadamard Product and Adaptive Parameter Selection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Increasing number of parameters can be challenging under resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method with fewer parameters and finer granularity that can adaptively select important parameters for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can fine-tune important parameters for each task, while maintaining the same weights. |
Sub-Word Alignment is Still Useful: A Vest-Pocket Method for Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource machine translation (MT) is challenging due to the scarcity of parallel data and lack of bilingual dictionaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage embedding duplication between aligned sub-words to extend the Parent-Child transfer learning method to improve low-resource machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves BLEU scores of 22.5, 28.0 and 18.1 respectively. |
Corrupted but Not Broken: Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Corrupted Data in Visual Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunhao Gou, Hansi Yang, Zhili Liu, Kai Chen, Yihan Zeng, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Qun Liu, Bo Han, James Kwok, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) aims to enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but its effectiveness is often compromised by corrupted datasets with issues such as hallucinated content and poor OCR quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a corruption-robust training paradigm that surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data. |
Using a Penalty-based Loss Re-estimation Method to Improve Implicit Discourse Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | inessential words are unintentionally misjudged as attention-worthy words and assigned heavier attention weights than should be. |
| Approach: | They propose a penalty-based method to regulate the attention learning process by integrating penalty coefficients into the computation of loss by means of overstability of attention weight distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the Penn Discourse TreeBank corpus and is competitive compared to the state-of-the-art methods. |
Taking Actions Separately: A Bidirectionally-Adaptive Transfer Learning Method for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train NMT models rely on sparse parallel data . a variety of PC variants yield significant improvements for low-resource NMT . |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer well-trained NMT models to low-resource languages by bidirectionally-adaptive learning strategy . they divide inner constituents of Parent encoder into two "teams" aiming to adapt to characteristics of low- and high-resourced languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on low-resource NMT models with a variety of PC variants. |
MedJEx: A Medical Jargon Extraction Model with Wiki’s Hyperlink Span and Contextualized Masked Language Model Score (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing natural language processing (NLP) methods for identifying medical jargon terms are difficult for patients to understand. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language processing application for identifying medical jargon terms from electronic health record notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on an auxiliary Wikipedia hyperlink span dataset and on the annotated MedJ dataset. |
DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor–Patient Communication at Discharge (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Discharge communication is a critical yet underexplored component of patient care, where the goal shifts from diagnosis to education. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates large language models’ ability to act as personalized discharge educators. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 18 LLMs show that model size does not always yield better education outcomes, highlighting trade-offs in strategy use and content prioritization. |
Word-level Commonsense Knowledge Selection for Event Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Event Detection (ED) is a task of automatically extracting multi-class trigger words . Xie and Tu, 2022, use a Context-specific Knowledge Selector to select commonsense knowledge of words based on living contexts . |
| Approach: | They use a Context-specific Knowledge Selector to select the exact commonsense knowledge of words from a large knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the F1-score of about 78.3% on the ACE-2005 dataset. |
Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction require a fixed set of relations . Existing methods assume a closed set of relationships and perform once-and-for-all training on a set of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the stochastic gradient methods with a replay memory to alleviate the forgetting problem by anchoring the sentence embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks. |
Generating Accurate Electronic Health Assessment from Medical Graph (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models based on medical domain-specific knowledge or patients’ prior diagnoses and clinical encounters were mainly based upon clinical diagnoses. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network model that incorporates clinical knowledge into an end-to-end corpus-learning system and builds on it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the BLEU and rouge score compared with baseline models and physicians’ evaluation showed that it generates high-quality assessments. |
Winnowing Knowledge for Multi-choice Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning models suffer from noises in retrieved knowledge . encoding methods that use commonsense knowledge are less effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which conducts interception and soft filtering to reduce noise . they use commonsense knowledge from Wikipedia and ConceptNet to encode questions and options . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on commonsense question answering tasks compared to baselines . it is able to conduct interception and soft filtering to shield the encoder from noise . |
Sentence Simplification with Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Sentence simplification aims to simplify the content and structure of complex sentences . prior work has focused on monolingual machine translation (MT) and tree-based MT (TBMT). |
| Approach: | They adapt an architecture with augmented memory capacities called Neural Semantic Encoders for sentence simplification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves on different datasets and improves human judgments. |
STEER: Semantic Turn Extension-Expansion Recognition for Voice Assistants (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Leon Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Aditya Kulkarni, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Tien Dung Tran, Nick Tzou, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing training datasets for steering use cases are limited due to the cold-start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a steering detection model that predicts whether a follow-up turn is a user’s attempt to steer the previous command. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on human-graded evaluation sets and shows that it can identify steering intent with over 95% accuracy. |
On Large Language Models’ Hallucination with Regard to Known Facts (2024.naacl-long)
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Che Jiang, Biqing Qi, Xiangyu Hong, Dayuan Fu, Yang Cheng, Fandong Meng, Mo Yu, Bowen Zhou, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models are successful in answering factoid questions but are also prone to hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose self-reporting to the model when faced with such limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifier can detect hallucinations with an 88% success rate and can be used to answer factoid questions with correct answer knowledge. |
Pairwise Prompt-Based Tuning with Parameter Efficient Fast Adaptation for Generalized Zero-Shot Intent Detection (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generalize from seen intents to unseen intents are not effective . Xian et al., 2019: a novel approach to generalized zero-shot intent detection is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a pairwise prompt-based tuning model with parameter efficient fast adaptation . they leverage hybrid contrastive learning in discriminant space and masked language modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to unseen intents with the help of seen intents . the proposed model is based on a pairwise prompt-based tuning model with fast adaptation . |
Incorporating Image Matching Into Knowledge Acquisition for Event-Oriented Relation Recognition (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Event relation recognition is a challenging language processing task because the query events are selected from different paragraphs in a document or even different documents, so there is lack of explicit clue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image processing to acquire similar event instances and use image matching to approximate calculation between events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to CNN while slightly better than LSTM on the ACE-R2 corpus. |
ObfusLM: Privacy-preserving Language Model Service against Embedding Inversion Attacks (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Lin, Ruining Yang, Yunlong Mao, Qizhi Zhang, Jue Hong, Quanwei Cai, Ye Wu, Huiqi Liu, Zhiyu Chen, Bing Duan, Sheng Zhong
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that obfuscation techniques for MLaaS are susceptible to embedding inversion attacks (EIAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a model obfuscation framework that protects client inputs from embedding inversion attacks by obliviously obbing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing works in utility by 10% with a nearly 80% resistance rate against embedding inversion attacks. |
The Reasoning-Memorization Interplay in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but struggle to generalize to unseen questions due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify a set of linear features in the model’s residual stream that govern the balance between genuine reasoning and memory recall. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be manipulated to activate the most relevant problem-solving capabilities during answer generation. |
Sherry: Hardware-Efficient 1.25-Bit Ternary Quantization via Fine-grained Sparsification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ternary quantization is a powerful solution for resource-constrained edge devices . current implementations suffer from a fundamental misalignment with commodity hardware . |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-efficient ternary quantization framework that packs weights into five bits to restore power-of-two alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces weights to -1, 0, +1 while preserving power-of-two alignment. |
Faithful Question Answering with Monte-Carlo Planning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer questions using large language models lack the ability to faithfully follow the intermediate reasoning steps from the known premises to the answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithful question-answering task that uses a Monte-Carlo planning algorithm to produce faithful reasoning steps from the known premises to the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can produce valid and faithful reasoning steps compared with large language models with a much smaller model size. |
Conversational Machine Comprehension: a Literature Review (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Conversational machine comprehension (CMC) is a research track in conversational AI. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize a generic framework for CMC models and highlight differences in recent approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model will be used as a compendium for future research. |
Smart “Chef”: Verifying the Effect of Role-based Paraphrasing for Aspect Term Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) is a task of automatically extracting aspect terms from sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically rewrite sentences from virtual experts with different roles . they leverage ChatGPT to determine virtual experts in the considered domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to expand the predictions obtained on the original sentences without retraining or fine-tuning the baseline extractors. |
A Closer Look at the Self-Verification Abilities of Large Language Models in Logical Reasoning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of large language models struggle with complex logical reasoning problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to identify their own errors to improve their models' performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can identify logical fallacies accurately and improve by themselves. |
Using Subtext to Enhance Generative IDRR (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Arguments contain subtexts, but they are connotative and need prompts to be recognized . a lightweight subtext generator is helpful when the prompt doesn't raise a complex CoT. |
| Approach: | They leverage LLaMA to generate subtexts for argument pairs and verify their effectiveness . they construct a baseline IDRR using the decoder-only backbone LLama . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves higher F1 scores on two benchmarks than previous models. |
Are We Done with MMLU? (2025.naacl-long)
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Aryo Pradipta Gema, Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Giwon Hong, Alessio Devoto, Alberto Carlo Maria Mancino, Rohit Saxena, Xuanli He, Yu Zhao, Xiaotang Du, Mohammad Reza Ghasemi Madani, Claire Barale, Robert McHardy, Joshua Harris, Jean Kaddour, Emile Van Krieken, Pasquale Minervini
| Challenge: | MMLU is widely adopted but its ground truth errors obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for identifying dataset errors using a novel error annotation protocol and a subset of 5,700 manually re-annotated questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on 5,700 re-annotated questions from the MMLU benchmark. |
Interview Evaluation: A Novel Approach for Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Question Answering Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for CQA use pre-collected human-human conversations . previous methods use model-predicted dialogue history instead of ground truth . |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic evaluation approach that uses the model's dialogue history to evaluate models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing models and their evaluations on QuAC and CoQA. |
GBT: Generative Boosting Training Approach for Paraphrase Identification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase Identification (PI) is a fundamental natural language understanding task with non-trivial challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Boosting Training approach for Paraphrase Identification (PI) they use a seq2seq model to perform DA on misclassified instances periodically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art PI models on English and Chinese PI tasks with good efficiency and effectiveness. |
ODD: A Benchmark Dataset for the Natural Language Processing Based Opioid Related Aberrant Behavior Detection (2024.naacl-long)
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Sunjae Kwon, Xun Wang, Weisong Liu, Emily Druhl, Minhee Sung, Joel Reisman, Wenjun Li, Robert Kerns, William Becker, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Opioid related aberrant behaviors (ORABs) present novel risk factors for opioid overdose. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a biomedical natural language processing benchmark dataset to classify ORABs from patients’ EHR notes into nine categories: confirmed aberrant behavior, suggested aberrant behaviors, Opioids, indication, diagnosed opioid dependency, Benzodiazepines, medication changes, and Central Nervous System-related. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms two state-of-the-art models in most categories and the gains are especially higher among uncommon classes. |
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | NoteChat is a cooperative multi-agent framework for generating patient-physician dialogues . evaluator finds it outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . clinical documentation is largely done by physicians at both steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models to generate patient-physician dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . it can engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout . |
Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent retrieval-augmented generation approaches have demonstrated strong capability in handling complex queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a branching-based rollout technique that improves training stability . they find different retrievers exhibit distinct optimal query styles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves training stability and improves retrieval-aware systems. |
Adversarial Feature Adaptation for Cross-lingual Relation Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation classification exploit monolingual data due to lack of annotated data in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial feature adaptation approach for cross-lingual relation classification using a generative adversarial network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields an improvement of 5.7% over the state-of-the-art. |
HTMR: Hybrid Token Masking Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Event Argument Extraction with Multi-Perspective Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work formulates EAE with large language models as a structured conditional generation task and applies Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to optimize sequence-level event structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that selectively updates policy gradients on high-entropy forking tokens and event-critical tokens that define event structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms full-token and high-entropy only methods and transfers effectively as a plug-and-play approach to other tasks such as named entity recognition and relation classification. |
ConsistencyChecker: Tree-based Evaluation of LLM Generalization Capabilities (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Traditional self-consistency methods fail to capture subtle semantic errors in multi-step tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-based evaluation framework that measures LLMs’ ability to preserve semantic consistency during reversible transformations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures generalization abilities across models from 1.5B to 72B and can be used to benchmark LLMs without constructing new datasets. |
Demonstration Retrieval-Augmented Generative Event Argument Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method outperforms all strong baselines and can be generalized to various datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative EAE that uses event knowledge-injected generator and demonstration retriever to generate event arguments from training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and can be generalized to various datasets. |
CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not noticed the safety risks of large language models . authors evaluated 1,400 questions in multi-turn dialogue coreference . |
| Approach: | They are the first to evaluate LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference . they created a dataset of 1,400 questions and tested five open-source models . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that model safety decreases in multi-turn dialogue coreference scenarios . the highest success rate was with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was with mistral-7B-Instruct model . |
MCQG-SRefine: Multiple Choice Question Generation and Evaluation with Iterative Self-Critique, Correction, and Comparison Feedback (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generating multiple-choice questions (MCQG) for professional exams is challenging due to outdated knowledge, hallucination issues, and prompt sensitivity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for converting medical cases into high-quality USMLE-style questions using a self-refine-based framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves human expert satisfaction regarding quality and difficulty of medical questions. |
Evaluating Evaluation Metrics – The Mirage of Hallucination Detection (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Atharva Kulkarni, Yuan Zhang, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Xiou Ge, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Swabha Swayamdipta, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | a large-scale empirical evaluation of hallucination detection metrics is conducted . hallucinosity is a significant obstacle to the reliability and widespread adoption of language models . |
| Approach: | They conduct large-scale empirical evaluation of hallucination detection metrics . they compare hallucinian language models, language models and decoding methods . |
| Outcome: | The results show that the evaluations of hallucination detection metrics fail to align with human judgments, they say . they also show that evaluations with LLM-based evaluation yield the best overall results . |
Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for classical Chinese poetry generation only allow users to use keywords to interfere with the meaning of generated poems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate classical Chinese poems from vernacular . their model uses unsupervised machine translation to generate Chinese poems . human evaluation shows it can generate high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems - authors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the perplexity and BLEU of the proposed model compared with typical models and human evaluation shows it generates high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems. |
On the token distance modeling ability of higher RoPE attention dimension (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on extending the context length of language models based on Rotary position embedding (RoPE) has shown promising results in capturing longer-range contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a hidden dimension of an attention head to investigate its contribution to capturing long-distance dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture long-distance dependencies by extending the attention of a particular dimension of an attention head. |
Understanding Deep Learning Performance through an Examination of Test Set Difficulty: A Psychometric Case Study (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate deep learning models that are not considered for test set accuracy are difficult to interpret. |
| Approach: | They examine the impact of a test set question’s difficulty to determine if there is a relationship between difficulty and performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn examples of varying difficulty at different rates if it does well on hard examples and poor on easy items because a dataset is all easy, but has "solved" anything? |
Improving Formality Style Transfer with Context-Aware Rule Injection (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models pre-trained on large-scale corpora often do not work well for user-generated data where the language styles differ significantly from the mainstream text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for formality style transfer by injecting multiple rules into an end-to-end BERT-based encoder and decoder model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing rule-based FST approaches on tweet sentiment analysis tasks. |
Self-regulation: Employing a Generative Adversarial Network to Improve Event Detection (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that neural networks can be used for event detection but can be contaminated by spurious features. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-regulated learning approach by utilizing a generative adversarial network to generate spurious features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is highly effective and adaptable on the ACE 2005 and TAC-KBP 2015 corpora. |
Versatile Framework for Song Generation with Prompt-based Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, Jingyu Lu, Rongjie Huang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Zhiqing Hong, Ziyue Jiang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for song generation fail to generate vocals with prompt-based control and proper alignment. |
| Approach: | VersBand is a multi-task song generation framework for synthesizing high-quality songs with prompt-based control. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that VersBand performs better than baseline models across multiple song generation tasks. |
From Language to Driving: A Dual-Loop SLM-Enhanced Framework for Multi-Planner Scheduling via a Domain-Specific Language (2026.acl-long)
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Jiawei Liu, Xun Gong, Muli Yang, Xingrui Yu, Fen Fang, Xulei Yang, Ivor Tsang, Yunfeng hu, Hong Chen, Qing Guo
| Challenge: | Recent large language model-based AD research offers new avenues to address this challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a small language model (SLM) for high-level semantic reasoning and schedule generation, while an inner loop performs low-level, high-frequency schedule execution and vehicle control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction completion rates while maintaining high safety and compliance relative to multiple baselines. |
BENTO: A Visual Platform for Building Clinical NLP Pipelines Based on CodaLab (2020.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | CodaLab has limited support for creating reusable tools that can be easily applied to different datasets and composed into pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow management platform with a graphic user interface built on top of CodaLab to facilitate the process of building clinical NLP pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow management platform, BENTO, is designed for clinical NLP tasks and can be easily used by researchers and developers. |
Learning Latent Parameters without Human Response Patterns: Item Response Theory with Artificial Crowds (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Incorporating Item Response Theory (IRT) into NLP tasks can provide valuable information about model performance and behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose to use IRT models generated from artificial crowds of DNNs to learn IRT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learning method outperforms baseline methods for two NLP tasks. |
SGCM: Salience-Guided Context Modeling for Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying relevant sentences to answers is crucial for reasoning the possible questions before generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a salience-guided approach to enhance Paragraph-level Question Generation by identifying salient sentences that manifest relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves Rouge-L, BLEU4, BERTScore, Q-BLUE-3 and F1-scores compared to baseline on FairytaleQA. |
Vision Meets Definitions: Unsupervised Visual Word Sense Disambiguation Incorporating Gloss Information (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD) is a task to find the image that most accurately depicts the correct sense of the target word for the given context. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach that incorporates sense definitions when sense information of the answer is not provided. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of the existing definition generation method in OOD examples. |
Knowledge Injected Prompt Based Fine-tuning for Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding are limited due to the high-dimensional space of multi-label assignment and the long-tail challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based fine-tuning technique with label semantics to solve this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset of code assignment in 14.5% of cases. |
CVAE-based Re-anchoring for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training implicit discourse relation classifiers suffers from data sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a re-anchoring strategy to reduce the risk of erroneous sampling . they use Conditional VAE to estimate the risk and migrate the anchor to reduce it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the baseline classifier performance on PDTB v2.0 . |
Don’t Eclipse Your Arts Due to Small Discrepancies: Boundary Repositioning with a Pointer Network for Aspect Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing aspect extraction methods suffer from boundary errors, but they hurt performance severely. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pointer network to reposition the boundaries of extracted aspects . they conduct experiments on laptop and restaurant benchmark datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets . it achieves substantial improvements over baseline and outperformed existing methods . |
Can AI Revise Research Papers with Human Review Feedback? An Empirical Study and Benchmark (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are fundamentally reshaping the scientific landscape, transitioning the role of AI from passive tools to active partners within a new paradigm of Human-AI collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of Large Language Models to improve papers with human feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark tests the skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) on paper interpretation, experimental implementation, and paper formulation, using authors’ camera-ready versions as natural human baselines. |
SYNFAC-EDIT: Synthetic Imitation Edit Feedback for Factual Alignment in Clinical Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that leverages >100B parameter GPT variants to act as synthetic experts to generate edit feedback without additional human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline aims to improve the quality of clinical note summarizations by generating edit feedback without human annotations. |
Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019 . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains . they then propose 'neuro network' model which uses short-term memories and syntax information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams. |
Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianpeng Cheng, Devang Agrawal, Héctor Martínez Alonso, Shruti Bhargava, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Dain Kaplan, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Lin Li, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Jason D. Williams, Hong Yu, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Anders Johannsen
| Challenge: | Language understanding for task-based dialog systems is often termed "dialog state tracking" (DST) whereas semantic parsing is the task of converting a single-turn utterance to a graphstructured meaning representation, DST is more complex. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dialog state tracking that incorporates semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on state-of-the-art approaches for dialog state tracking (DST) it incorporates semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. |
Generation of Patient After-Visit Summaries to Support Physicians (2022.coling-1)
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Pengshan Cai, Fei Liu, Adarsha Bajracharya, Joe Sills, Alok Kapoor, Weisong Liu, Dan Berlowitz, David Levy, Richeek Pradhan, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | After-visit summary is a summary note given to patients after their clinical visit. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the generation of after-visit summaries and introduce a feedback mechanism that alerts physicians when an automatic summary fails to capture important details of the clinical notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on a large clinical dataset that contains electronic health record (EHR) notes and their associated summaries. |
COF: Adaptive Chain of Feedback for Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (COQE) aims to extract all comparative sentiment quintuples from product review text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-unaware adaptive chain-of-feedback method to extract quintuples from product review text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three benchmarks. |
RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hieu Tran, Zonghai Yao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Yifan Zhang, Shuo Han, null Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing work aims to improve reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for knowledge-intensive tasks such as medical and commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar) that enhances reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension to the mutual reasoning framework improves reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropic variations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks. |
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing latent reasoning methods that use chain of thought (CoT) are limited to selecting one discrete token at each reasoning step, which potentially induces information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that injects controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves richer information for more comprehensive reasoning and is compatible with Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
LEAF: Learning and Evaluation Augmented by Fact-Checking to Improve Factualness in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle with factual accuracy in knowledge-intensive domains like healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving LLM factuality in medical question answering . RAFE, Fact-Check-then-RAG and Learning from Fact Check are components . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LEAF outperforms Factcheck-GPT in detecting inaccuracies and corrects errors without labeling . the framework provides a scalable solution for industrial applications requiring high factuality scores. |
Pru-CoT: Towards Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Pruning Chain-of-Thought (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing heuristics fail to capture global causal logic due to rigid rules and limited search spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts the essential logical structure from reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Pru-CoT models generate more compact reasoning paths compared to models trained on verbose data. |
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Kai Lv, Shuo Zhang, Tianle Gu, Shuhao Xing, Jiawei Hong, Keyu Chen, Xiaoran Liu, Yuqing Yang, Honglin Guo, Tengxiao Liu, Yu Sun, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. |
DuQM: A Chinese Dataset of Linguistically Perturbed Natural Questions for Evaluating the Robustness of Question Matching Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a comprehensive evaluation of QM models should be conducted on natural texts, not on artificial adversarial examples . ral models are often not robust to adversarials, which means they predict unexpected outputs . |
| Approach: | They use a Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness of QM models . they show that the effect of artificial adversarial examples does not work on natural texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more robust than other models on natural questions with 32 linguistic perturbations. |
MedCOD: Enhancing English-to-Spanish Medical Translation of Large Language Models Using Enriched Chain-of-Dictionary Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | MedCOD integrates domain-specific structured knowledge into large language models . evaluators evaluated four open-source LLMs with structured prompts . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates domain-specific structured knowledge into large language models . they constructed a parallel corpus of 2,999 English-Spanish MedlinePlus articles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation quality across four open-source LLMs. |
Enhancing SQL Table Acquisition with Reverse Engineering for Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL oriented table acquisition suffers from heterogeneous semantic gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reverse Engineering based table acquisition approach that reversely generates potentially-matched questions conditioned on table schemas instead of forward table search using queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves competitive performance on two benchmarks, including SpiderUnion and BirdUnion. |
TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset (P19-1)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Social media is becoming an important realtime information source, especially during natural disasters and emergencies. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale dataset for question answering over social media data . they gather tweets used by journalists and ask human annotators to write questions upon them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that neural models that perform well on formal texts are limited in their performance . the proposed model is still lagging behind human performance with a large margin . |
Capturing Conversational Interaction for Question Answering via Global History Reasoning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have studied history-dependent reasoning for question answering . utilizing global conversation history for enhancement is gaining interest . |
| Approach: | They propose to establish long-distance dependency among global utterances in multi-turn conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on QuAC by 1%, yielding the F1 score of 73.7%. |
An Inversion Attack Against Obfuscated Embedding Matrix in Language Model Inference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored transforming user inputs to obfuscated embedded vectors, so that the data will not be eavesdropped by service providers. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform user inputs to obfuscated embedded vectors so that the data will not be eavesdropped by service providers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed inversion attack can recover user input 100% from the obfuscated vectors without a solid and deliberate security design and analysis . |
OpenRubrics: Towards Scalable Synthetic Rubric Generation for Reward Modeling and LLM Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture multifaceted nature of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a rubric-based reward model that uses a large collection of prompt, rubric pairs to generate a scalar score or preference label for each response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 8.4% across multiple benchmarks. |
METGEN: A Module-Based Entailment Tree Generation Framework for Answer Explanation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on QA explanation proposes to explain the answers with entailment trees composed of multiple enlargement steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a Module-based Entailment Tree GENeration framework that has multiple modules and a reasoning controller. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on the standard benchmark with only 9% of the parameters. |
Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities by Instruction Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for implicit discourse relation recognition are based on generative models, but some studies suggest they do not perform as well as generic encoder-only models for NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification method that is solely based on generative models and utilize Chain-of-Thoughts to partition the inference process into a sequence of three successive stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a natural language understanding task. |
Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach makes ambiguity observable without exhaustive annotations . ambiguities are already encoded in models, but not reliably expressed in outputs despite hidden states . |
Referring to Screen Texts with Voice Assistants (2023.acl-industry)
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Shruti Bhargava, Anand Dhoot, Ing-marie Jonsson, Hoang Long Nguyen, Alkesh Patel, Hong Yu, Vincent Renkens
| Challenge: | a new approach to voice assistants is limited in their ability to understand context of the user. |
| Approach: | They propose a general purpose model that allows users to refer to phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, urls, and dates on their phone screens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is lightweight, offering flexibility, better interpretability and efficient run time memory. |
CopyNE: Better Contextual ASR by Copying Named Entities (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transcribe contextual named entities (NEs) treat entities as tokens and generate them token-by-token, which may result in incomplete transcriptions of entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that can copy entities from the NE dictionary and reduce errors during entity transcription. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism can copy entities from the NE dictionary, reducing errors during entity transcription, ensuring the completeness of the entity. |
Explainable Question Answering based on Semantic Graph by Global Differentiable Learning and Dynamic Adaptive Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-hop Question Answering have improved the implicit reasoning ability, but the black box nature of pure neural networks has hindered the construction of explainable intelligent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a global differentiation strategy to explore optimal reasoning paths from latent probability space and a Dynamic Adaptive Reasoner to enhance generalization of unseen questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 17% improvements in F1-score against BreakRC and shows better interpretability. |
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhili Liu, Yunhao Gou, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Jiahui Gao, Fei Mi, Yu Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, James Kwok
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model. |
Robust Singing Voice Transcription Serves Synthesis (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current AST methods struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that converts singing recordings into note sequences for automatic annotation of singing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets. |
LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior research on Twitter has provided positive evidence of its utility in developing supplementary health surveillance systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to surveil public health, focusing on mental health outcomes by using tweets from 765 neighborhoods in the USA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy over the previous framework, and extrapolates CDC’s estimates to proxy unreported neighborhoods. |
Interactively-Propagative Attention Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for discourse relation recognition use self-attention and interactive-attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They develop a propagative attention learning model using a cross-coupled two-channel network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the baseline models on a Penn Discourse Treebank. |
A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases (KBs) can explicitly facilitate the QA process. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical reasoning model pretraining NumGNN and NumTransformer, guided by explicit self-supervision signals, to enhance numerical reasoning ability for IR-based KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KBQA benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets and models target hate speech but ignore context . Existing models target either hate speech or hate and counter speech but disregard context - a new study shows that context is critical to identify hate and anti-hate speech. |
| Approach: | They propose to use context to identify hate and counter speech in a reddit conversation thread. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves when and why context is taken into account. |
ScAN: Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Dataset (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Suicidal behaviors, including suicide attempts (SA) and suicide ideations (SI), are leading risk factors for death by suicide. |
| Approach: | They first built a Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events (ScAN) dataset, a subset of the publicly available MIMIC III dataset spanning over 12k+ EHR notes with 19k+ annotated SA and SI events information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on the publicly available MIMIC III Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Retriever (ScANER) dataset and achieves a macro-weighted F1 score of 0.83 for identifying suicidal behavioral evidences and a micro-weighting score of 0.8 and 0.60 for classification of SA and SI for the patient’s hospital-stay. |
Chatbot To Help Patients Understand Their Health (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Won Seok Jang, Hieu Tran, Manav Shaileshkumar Mistry, Sai Kiran Gandluri, Yifan Zhang, Sharmin Sultana, Sunjae Kwon, Yuan Zhang, Zonghai Yao, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | NoteAid-Chatbot is a conversational AI designed to help patients better understand their health . |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning paradigm that leverages a multi-agent large language model and reinforcement learning framework without relying on costly human-generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses non-expert human training methods. |
DUSK: Do Not Unlearn Shared Knowledge (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work suggests that machine learning models are indistinguishable from models trained on retain sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate machine unlearning under realistic knowledge overlap . they construct documents containing both shared and unique knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is indistinguishable from a model retrained on the retain set while only forget-specific content is removed. |
Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstract reasoning is a key to generalization in human reasoning, but eliciting language models to perform reasoning with abstraction remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a new structured reasoning format called Abstraction-of-Thought (AoT) this approach elicits language models to first contemplate on the abstract level before incorporating concrete details . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning on 23 unseen tasks. |
Learning as Conversation: Dialogue Systems Reinforced for Information Acquisition (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel AI-empowered chat bot for learning as conversation can be applied to various domains without in-domain dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task where a user does not read a passage but gains information and knowledge through conversation with a teacher bot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be transferred to various domains without in-domain dialogue data and can carry out conversations both informative and attentive to users. |
VenusFactory: An Integrated System for Protein Engineering with Data Retrieval and Language Model Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-demo)
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Yang Tan, Chen Liu, Jingyuan Gao, Wu Banghao, Mingchen Li, Ruilin Wang, Lingrong Zhang, Huiqun Yu, Guisheng Fan, Liang Hong, Bingxin Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained protein language models have been used in protein engineering, but their adoption is limited due to data collection, task benchmarking, and application challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile engine that integrates biological data retrieval, standardized task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed engine integrates biological data retrieval, task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
MetaLogic: Logical Reasoning Explanations with Fine-Grained Structure (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current explanation datasets often employ synthetic data with simple reasoning structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive logical reasoning explanation form that incorporates three main components to better fit the human cognitive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models on real-life scenarios, but is more challenging for the current models. |
Chinese Spoken Named Entity Recognition in Real-world Scenarios: Dataset and Approaches (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current Chinese Spoken NER datasets are laboratory-controlled and are limited in topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese Spoken NER datasets to extract entities from speech to help voice assistants better grasp the intent behind user's questions and instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve on self-training-asr and mapping then distilling, and even compared with GPT4.0, they achieve better results. |