Papers by Hongming Zhang
Multilingual and Multi-Aspect Hate Speech Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current research on hate speech analysis is oriented towards monolingual and single classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual multi-aspect hate speech analysis dataset to test current methods . they evaluate the dataset in various classification settings and discuss how to leverage annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to improve hate speech detection and classification in general. |
Recall with Reasoning: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Mamba’s Long-Context Memory and Extrapolation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context memory methods such as Mamba struggle with long-constituency when the length of the processed text exceeds the model's training length. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses chain-of-thought summarization to teach Mamba to actively recall and reason over long contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LONGMEMEVAL and HELMET show that RwR outperforms existing long-term memory methods while preserving short-context capabilities. |
Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Topic Regularization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pronoun coreference resolution focus on anaphora and cataphores . exophoric pronounos are common in daily communications, but can be disambiguated by general topics of the dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage local context and global topics of dialogues to solve out-of-text PCR problem by adding topic regularization. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that topic regularization can be used to solve the out-of-text PCR problem. |
CIKQA: Learning Commonsense Inference with a Unified Knowledge-in-the-loop QA Paradigm (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense reasoning datasets target different knowledge types, modalities, and formats, but how to help machines acquire and infer over commonsensical knowledge is still unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense reasoning benchmark to motivate commonsensing progress from two perspectives: (1) Evaluating whether models can distinguish knowledge quality by predicting if the knowledge is enough to answer the question or not. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in evaluating their generalization capabilities across tasks while demonstrating that distinguishing knowledge quality remains challenging for current models. |
Event Semantic Classification in Context (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | In this work, we focus on the semantic classification of events in context to help machines gain a deeper understanding of events. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate event semantics into downstream tasks to help machines understand events better. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the understanding of events in context. |
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. |
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks. |
StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Cheng Jiayang, Lin Qiu, Tsz Chan, Tianqing Fang, Weiqi Wang, Chunkit Chan, Dongyu Ru, Qipeng Guo, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning . despite its importance, there has been limited research on story analogies . |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale story-level analogy corpus with 24K story pairs . they find that the tasks are incredibly difficult for large language models such as ChatGPT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. |
Are All Steps Equally Important? Benchmarking Essentiality Detection in Event Processes (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of event processing do not understand the essentiality of step events towards a goal event. |
| Approach: | They propose to deconstruct a goal event into a discrete representation of finer-grained (step) events, which are not equally important to the goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand the essentiality of different step events towards a goal event. |
How do Words Contribute to Sentence Semantics? Revisiting Sentence Embeddings with a Perturbation Method (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on sentence representation learning focus on human annotation, but they neglect the critical property that essential contents should contribute to sentence semantics more than non-essential contents when encoding a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbation method for unsupervised semantic analysis that uses a sentence compression metric to adapt sentence compression datasets for automatic evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture the main semantics of sentences better than several SOTA unsupervised sentence embedding models. |
GeoHard: Towards Measuring Class-wise Hardness through Modelling Class Semantics (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in measuring hardness-wise properties of data guide language models in sample selection within low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use class-wise hardness to measure class-specific properties of data in the semantic embedding space by modeling class geometry in the . semantic embeddining space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses instance-level metrics by over 59 percent on Pearson‘s correlation on measuring class-wise hardness. |
Multiplex Word Embeddings for Selectional Preference Acquisition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings are limited in their ability to represent fixed vectors . instead, they incorporate relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables - a limitation that is addressed by a multiplex model . |
| Approach: | They propose a word embedding model which incorporates relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily extended according to various relations among words. |
Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations (2024.naacl-long)
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Sihao Chen, Hongming Zhang, Tong Chen, Ben Zhou, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Baolin Peng, Hongwei Wang, Dan Roth, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Sentence embeddings are typically learned to recognize the semantic relation between two text inputs. |
| Approach: | They introduce a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to produce contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. |
Z-LaVI: Zero-Shot Language Solver Fueled by Visual Imagination (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models suffer from reporting bias, describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text. |
| Approach: | They propose to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities by recalling existing images and synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks. |
WebRollback: Enhancing Web Agents with Explicit Rollback Mechanisms (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have adopted a greedy one-way search strategy to deal with dynamic web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a rollback mechanism into web agents to allow them to revert back to a previous state in navigation trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to revert back to a previous state in its navigation trajectory, allowing the models to directly control the search process. |
Self-Guided Function Calling in Large Language Models via Stepwise Experience Recall (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for function calling require expert effort and prompt engineering becomes inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs fine-grained, stepwise retrieval from a continually updated experience pool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of 6.1% on easy and 4.7% on hard questions. |
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets. |
Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | GUI agents powered by vision-language models struggle with real-world tasks due to their complex nature and limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight vision-language model that leverages web tutorials at inferencetime to synthesize GUI agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline GUI agents and surpasses other inference baselines by 2.6% to 13.3% across two model sizes. |
Joint Coreference Resolution and Character Linking for Multiparty Conversation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Character linking is the task of linking mentioned people in conversations to the real world . human use of pronouns or normal entities makes it difficult to link mentioned people to real people . a critical step towards understanding conversations is grounding mentioned people - a goal of the natural language processing community . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate richer context from the coreference relations among different mentions to help the linking task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous models on both tasks. |
Zero-shot Event Extraction via Transfer Learning: Challenges and Insights (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction require expensive annotation and are not extensible to new event ontologies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use textual entailment and/or question answering queries to extract a zero-shot event from a set of TE and/ or QA queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves acceptable results on ACE-2005 and ERE, but there is still a large gap from supervised approaches. |
Event-Centric Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-tutorials)
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| 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. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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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. |
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups. |
WinoWhy: A Deep Diagnosis of Essential Commonsense Knowledge for Answering Winograd Schema Challenge (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new task is developed to categorize essential commonsense knowledge for the Winograd Schema Challenge . a previous work focused on the classification of commonsensical knowledge by pre-trained models . |
| Approach: | They propose a task that categorizes essential commonsense knowledge for the Winograd Schema Challenge . they leverage the collected reasons to identify plausible reasons from wrong ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to shed light on commonsense knowledge needed for better reasoning . it is based on the collected reasons and a new task called WinoWhy . |
AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhaowei Wang, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing language models only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an entailment graph that collects abstract knowledge for 3 components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks. |
NegotiationToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind on Negotiation Surrounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Chunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim, Zheye Deng, Wei Fan, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Hongming Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Theory of mind evaluations currently focus on testing models using machine-generated data or game settings prone to shortcuts and spurious correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to stress-test machine ToM in real-world negotiation surrounding covered multi-dimensional mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark builds upon the Belief-Desire-Intention theory and conducts the necessary empirical experiments to evaluate large language models. |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Zhisong Zhang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research . |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. |
OpenFact: Factuality Enhanced Open Knowledge Extraction (2023.tacl-1)
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Linfeng Song, Ante Wang, Xiaoman Pan, Hongming Zhang, Dian Yu, Lifeng Jin, Haitao Mi, Jinsong Su, Yue Zhang, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing OIE systems organize knowledge into subject-relation-object (SRO) triplets, and they use templates to extract such knowledge triplet. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to handle expressiveness and groundedness in OpenFact . they propose to use templates, extra constraints, and adopt human efforts to ensure that most triplets contain enough details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves expressiveness and groundedness of OpenFact . it is more accurate and denser than OPIEC-Linked, which is grounded to Wikidata . |
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. |
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. |
Towards Open-Domain Topic Classification (2022.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised classification models are insensitive to class names, but are no longer effective in open-domain tasks where the taxonomy is unbounded. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic classification system that accepts user-defined taxonomy in real time . they train a pretrained language model on a new Wikipedia dataset and train it on Wikipedia . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves over existing zero-shot models and performs competitively with weakly-supervised models trained on in-domain data. |
CoCoLM: Complex Commonsense Enhanced Language Model with Discourse Relations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated strong knowledge representation ability, but struggle with complex commonsense knowledge that involves multiple eventualities. |
| Approach: | They propose to help pre-trained language models better incorporate complex commonsense knowledge that involves multiple eventualities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn to use the memorized knowledge for different tasks and achieve outstanding performance on many downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
Benchmarking Commonsense Knowledge Base Population with an Effective Evaluation Dataset (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations on the population task are either not accurate (automatic evaluation with randomly sampled negative examples) or of small scale (human annotation). |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning over commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs) that are free-text and have a human annotation set to probe commonsensical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a human-annotated evaluation set and is compared with existing models on the population task. |
Efficient Zero-shot Event Extraction with Context-Definition Alignment (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Conventional supervised methods cannot generalize to event types out of the pre-defined ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two separate transformer models to model the definition semantics of an event type name into the same embedding space and then minimize their embeddable distance via contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous zero-shot EE methods with fast inference speed due to the disjoint design. |
Rare and Zero-shot Word Sense Disambiguation using Z-Reweighting (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a problem in the natural language processing community. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adjust training on imbalanced word sense dataset . they propose to achieve performance gain on standard English all words benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves performance gain on the standard English all words benchmark. |
Global Constraints with Prompting for Zero-Shot Event Argument Classification (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot trigger extraction models require annotations, which is not practical for open-domain applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use global constraints with prompting to tackle event argument classification without annotation and task-specific training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best zero-shot baselines by 12.5% and 10.9% F1 on ACE and ERE with given argument spans and by 4.3% and 3.3% F1 without given argument spas. |
On the Dimensionality of Sentence Embeddings (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on improving the quality of sentence embeddings, but the exploration of sentence dimension is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-step training method where the encoder and pooler are optimized separately to mitigate the overall performance loss in low-dimension scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of low-dimensional sentence embeddings on seven STS tasks and seven sentence classification tasks. |
Assimilation and Accommodation: Task-Adaptive Hierarchical Abstraction for Solving Web Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on summarizing workflows, i.e., common sub-routines, which introduce excessive low-level details that distract models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that derives task-adaptive hierarchical abstraction from experience to enhance web task reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance with competitive cost-efficiency on Mind2web and Webarena. |
Joint Constrained Learning for Event-Event Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Understanding natural language involves recognizing how multiple event mentions structurally and temporally interact with each other. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint constrained learning framework that enforces logical constraints within and across multiple temporal and subevent relations of events by converting constraints into differentiable learning objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on benchmarks for temporal relation extraction and event hierarchy construction. |
Leveraging Topic Relatedness for Argument Persuasion (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies of argumentation focus on the effects of factors such as source, audience, and language style, but the impact of exploiting the relationships among controversial topics is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to model topic relatedness among controversial topics using topic embedding features and topic semantics features extracted from the arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves predicting persuasiveness and generalizes to rare topics in a few-shot setting. |
Query2Particles: Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Particle Embeddings (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer complex logical queries on incomplete knowledge graphs with missing edges are needed to solve the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a query embedding method that encodes queries and entities to the same embeddable space and then selects the answer entities based on similarities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can answer complex logical queries on incomplete knowledge graphs with missing edges. |
DivScene: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation with Large Vision Language Models in Diverse Scenes (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhaowei Wang, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Ye Tian, Yue Yang, Kaixin Ma, Xiaoman Pan, Yangqiu Song, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in tasks like visual question answering and document understanding. |
| Approach: | They introduce DivScene, a large-scale dataset with 4,614 houses across 81 scene types and 5,707 kinds of target objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a much greater diversity of target objects and scene types than existing datasets, enabling a comprehensive task evaluation. |
SP-10K: A Large-scale Evaluation Set for Selectional Preference Acquisition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Selectional Preference (SP) is a common phenomenon in human language and has been shown to be useful in many natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale evaluation set that provides human ratings for the plausibility of 10,000 SP pairs over five SP relations, covering 2,500 most frequent verbs, nouns, and adjectives in American English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation sets provide human ratings for plausibility of 10,000 SP pairs over five SP relations covering 2,500 most frequent verbs, nouns, and adjectives in American English. |
COLA: Contextualized Commonsense Causal Reasoning from the Causal Inference Perspective (2023.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Wang, Quyet V. Do, Hongming Zhang, Jiayao Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to detect commonsense causation from the causal inference perspective are inadequate to seize commonsensical causations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to detect commonsense causation between two events in context . they propose 'contextualized commons sense causal reasoning' framework that uses covariates to remove confounding effects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect commonsense causality more accurately than baselines. |
Learning Constraints and Descriptive Segmentation for Subevent Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Event mentions in text correspond to real-world events of varying degrees of granularity . task of subevent detection aims to resolve this granulem issue by recognizing membership of events . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of event-based text segmentation as an auxiliary task to improve learning for subevent detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on subevent detection, HiEve and IC datasets while achieving decent performance on EventSeg prediction. |
SubeventWriter: Iterative Sub-event Sequence Generation with Coherence Controller (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we propose a new task of sub-event generation for an unseen process . we use a framework to generate coherent sub-Event sequences for unseened processes . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of sub-event generation for an unseen process to evaluate the understanding of the coherence of subevent actions and objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate coherent sub-event sequences for unseen processes . it can also decode more coherent subevents, demonstrating its effectiveness . |
MixGR: Enhancing Retriever Generalization for Scientific Domain through Complementary Granularity (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show the importance of document retrieval in the scientific domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach to measure query-document similarity using atomic components in queries and documents to combine them into a united score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous document retrieval methods by 24.7%, 9.8%, and 6.9% on nDCG@5 with unsupervised, supervised, and LLM-based retrievers. |
WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Tianqing Fang, Jianshu Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Zhisong Zhang, Jingyan Zhou, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Web agents powered by Large Language Models lack the ability to perform in uncertain web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to reconstruct web agents' reasoning skills into chain-of-thought rationales by fine-tuning their LLM backbone into a web-based model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the agent self-improving benchmark OpenWebVoyager, demonstrating that it can be used to improve the agent's reasoning skills. |
AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation (2024.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Wang, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Tianqing Fang, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that LLMs are deficient in abstract ability, and how to improve it remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework AbsInstruct to enhance LLMs’ abstract ability through instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance LLMs’ abstraction ability with strong generalization performance while maintaining their general instruction-following abilities. |
WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Co-evolving World Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Agent self-improvement, where agents train their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) on self-sampled trajectories, shows promising results but often stagnates in web environments due to limited exploration and under-utilization of pretrained web knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-evolving Large Language Model (LLM) that predicts the next observation based on current observation and action within the web environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that agents can perform better in real-world web environments without using any distillation from more powerful close-sourced models. |
MICO: A Multi-alternative Contrastive Learning Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Representation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to commonsense reasoning include fine-tuning large pre-trained language models or injecting the entire knowledge base for CKGC. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn commonsense knowledge representation by using a multi-alternative contrastive learning framework on COmmonsense Knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework is effective in commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Attention Entropy is a Key Factor: An Analysis of Parallel Context Encoding with Full-attention-based Pre-trained Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang, Xinting Huang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Chenlong Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks due to their remarkable ability in context modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel context encoding to reduce attention entropy by incorporating attention sinks and selective mechanisms to reduce irregular attention . they also propose to incorporate attention sink mechanisms into the parallel encoded context to reduce the irregular attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lower irregular attention entropy and narrow performance gaps. |
Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn sentence embeddings do not capture the semantic similarity of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates compositional sentence operations into the embedding space and optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks. |
What You See is What You Get: Visual Pronoun Coreference Resolution in Dialogues (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a core task of natural language understanding is to ground a pronoun to a visual object it refers to . problem arises when people use pronounos to refer to something they can see without prior introduction . a novel visual-aware PCR model is proposed to solve this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-aware PCR model to ground a pronoun to a visible object . they propose PCR using a large-scale dialogue dataset to investigate this problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can help resolve pronouns in conversational contexts. |
Getting Sick After Seeing a Doctor? Diagnosing and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Event Temporal Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Event temporal reasoning aims at identifying the temporal relations between two or more events from narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose to detect knowledge conflicts in event temporal reasoning using bias indicators such as event relation prior bias, tense bias, narrative bias, and dependency bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to Pre-trained Language Models and Large Language Model (LLMs) as additional training data or demonstrations for In- Context Learning. |
Back to Square One: Artifact Detection, Training and Commonsense Disentanglement in the Winograd Schema (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have boosted performance on some WS benchmarks, but the source of improvement is not clear. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses twin sentences for evaluation and two new baselines that account for artifacts in WS benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation method is suboptimal for the Winograd Schema . it uses twin sentences to account for commonsense reasoning abilities . |
Analogous Process Structure Induction for Sub-event Sequence Prediction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event understanding is focusing on procedural (or horizontal) tasks such as predicting the next event given an observed sequence. |
| Approach: | They propose an Analogous Process Structure Induction framework which leverages analogies among processes and conceptualization of sub-event instances to predict the whole sub- sequence of previously unseen open-domain processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict the whole sub-event sequence of previously unseen open-domain processes. |
Salience Allocation as Guidance for Abstractive Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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Fei Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Hongming Zhang, Lifeng Jin, Sangwoo Cho, Wenlin Yao, Xiaoyang Wang, Muhao Chen, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models implicitly learn to capture the salient information from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses salience expectation to guide abstractive summarization by averaging salient content to a fixed threshold. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be easily adapted to documents with various abstractiveness and achieves high performance. |
SocREval: Large Language Models with the Socratic Method for Reference-free Reasoning Evaluation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-free reasoning evaluation metrics rely on human-annotated reasoning chains as references, but require fine-tuning with human-derived chains before evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use GPT-4 to automatically evaluate reasoning chain quality by leveraging the Socratic method. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach significantly improves existing reference-free reasoning evaluation metrics. |
Incorporating Context and External Knowledge for Pronoun Coreference Resolution (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pronoun coreference resolution rely on manual definitions and features to resolve pronounous coreferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-layer model for pronoun coreference resolution that leverages both context and external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin. |
Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation with Unified Sense Representation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing researches on word sense disambiguation focus on English only. |
| Approach: | They propose to build knowledge and supervised based multilingual word sense disambiguation systems on a multilingual lexicon describing the same set of concepts across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand the fine-grained semantics of words under specific contexts. |
PCR4ALL: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Pronoun Coreference Resolution in English (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing PCR systems are not reliable in real applications due to weak semantic meanings of pronouns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and toolbox that evaluates performance of PCR systems from different perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark and toolbox evaluates the performance of PCR systems from different perspectives. |
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. |
When Hearst Is not Enough: Improving Hypernymy Detection from Corpus with Distributional Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a taxonomy is a semantic hierarchy of words or concepts organized w.r.t. their hypernymy relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for hypernymy detection using large textual corpora . they quantify the non-negligible existence of specific sparsity cases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies the non-negligible existence of specific sparsity cases on several benchmark datasets. |
Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory for LLM Agent Planning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance LLM with offline experiences or online trajectory analysis focus on single-granularity memory derived from dynamic environmental interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that grounds coarse-to-fine memories with LLM to enable flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on AlfWorld, Webshop and ScienceWorld show that the proposed framework outperforms baselines and comprehensively optimizes memory-enhanced LLM Agent system. |
Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a learned dense retrieval model is often overlooked when using a corpus for inference, resulting in a design choice of retrieval unit . granularity of retrievals is important for both retrieval and downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval unit for dense retrieval that uses propositions to index corpus . propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval unit outperforms passage-level units on retrieval and downstream tasks. |
CEO: Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Ontology Induction (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing event-centric NLP models restrict their generalization capabilities by limiting the pre-defined ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a Corpus-based Event Ontology induction model to relax the restriction imposed by pre-defined ontologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can induce a hierarchical event ontology with meaningful names on eleven open-domain corpora, making it more trustworthy and easier to be further curated. |
Knowledge-aware Pronoun Coreference Resolution (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pronoun coreference resolution only use triplets, the most common format for knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages different types of knowledge to resolve pronoun coreference with a neural model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on two datasets from different domains. |
Zero-shot Label-Aware Event Trigger and Argument Classification (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event extraction relies on labor-intensive annotation, ignoring semantic meaning of event types' labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot event extraction approach that first identifies events with existing tools and then maps them to a given taxonomy of event types in a no-shot manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach doubles the performance of previous approaches on a ACE-2005 dataset . it leverages label representations induced by pre-trained language models and maps events to the target types . |
PIVOINE: Instruction Tuning for Open-world Entity Profiling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction focus on a closed-world setting, but PIVOINE is a promising solution to tackle the open-world problem of entity profiling. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an LLM that performs Open-world Entity Profiling with instruction tuning to extract desirable entity profiles . they construct INSTRUCTOPENWIKI, a substantial instruction-tuning dataset for Open-World Entity Profiles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and ChatGPT-based baselines on unseen and out-of-ontology cases. |
On-the-fly Denoising for Data Augmentation in Natural Language Understanding (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve data augmentation performance may introduce noisy data that impairs training. |
| Approach: | They propose an on-the-fly denoising technique that learns from soft augmented labels provided by an organic teacher model trained on the cleaner original dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on text classification and question-answering tasks on general augmentation techniques and prevents overfitting on noisy labels. |
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. |
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Standard RALMs often neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to improve robustness of RALMs by generating sequential reading notes for each retrieved document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard RALMs on four open-domain QA benchmarks. |
Extracting or Guessing? Improving Faithfulness of Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for event temporal relation extraction are based on data-driven machine learning . however, TEMPREL extraction is not accurate under distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct counterfactual analysis to attenuate the effects of two types of training biases: the event trigger bias and the frequent label bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts TempRel and timelines more faithfully compared to SOTA methods . it is based on two perspectives: one is to extract genuinely based upon contextual description . the other is to provide proper uncertainty estimation and abstain from extraction when no relation is described in the text . |
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. |
PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Commonsense Knowledge Base (CSKB) Population aims at reasoning over unseen entities and assertions on CSKBs, but it requires out-of-domain generalization ability as the source CSMB for training is of a relatively smaller scale (1M) . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning framework that uses a teacher model to provide pseudo labels on the unlabeled candidate dataset for a student model to learn from. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve the backbone model KG-BERT (RoBERTa-large) by 3.3 points on the overall performance and especially, 5.3 points on out-of-domain performance. |