Papers by Hou Pong Chan
Topic-Aware Neural Keyphrase Generation for Social Media Language (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract words from source posts to form keyphrases do not exploit latent topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence-based neural keyphrase generation framework . it allows absent keyphrases to be created, and it allows joint modeling of latent topic representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms extraction and generation models without exploiting latent topics. |
Controllable Summarization with Constrained Markov Decision Process (2021.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing controllable summarization models do not allow users to specify their preference for a particular attribute of the generated summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training framework based on Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) that includes a reward function and constraints to facilitate better summarization control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to control important attributes of summarization, including length, covered entities, and abstractiveness, while complying with a given attribute’s requirement. |
Measuring the Effect of Influential Messages on Varying Personas (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new task estimates the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message . a first benchmark dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed task . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to estimate the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task estimates the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message. |
MOCHA: A Multi-Task Training Approach for Coherent Text Generation from Cognitive Perspective (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have produced impressive results, but there is still a gap between human written texts and machine-generated outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task training strategy for long text generation grounded on the cognitive theory of writing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better results on three open-ended generation tasks than baselines. |
Exclusive Hierarchical Decoding for Deep Keyphrase Generation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate keyphrases ignore hierarchical compositionality of keyphrase set and generate duplicated keyphrase sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical decoding framework that explicitly models hierarchic compositionality of a keyphrase set and either a soft or a hard exclusion mechanism to enhance the diversity of the generated keyphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates less duplicated and more accurate keyphrases on a set of keyphrase sets. |
Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinement (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Yi Fung, Hou Pong Chan, Kevin Small, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on enhancing the retrieval stage and optimizing the representation of the database. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
Neural Keyphrase Generation via Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Rewards (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing generative models generate too few keyphrases, but they often generate too many . et al. (2017) propose a reinforcement learning approach for keyphrase generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning approach that encourages a model to generate sufficient keyphrases with an adaptive reward function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art generative models with conventional and new evaluation methods on real-world datasets. |
ManiTweet: A New Benchmark for Identifying Manipulation of News on Social Media (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the identification of social media posts that contain misrepresentations of information within associated news articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a data collection schema and curated a dataset called ManiTweet, consisting of 3.6K pairs of tweets and corresponding articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms large language models on the ManiTweet dataset and reveals intriguing connections between manipulation and the domain and factuality of news articles. |
Analyzing LLMs’ Knowledge Boundary Cognition Across Languages Through the Lens of Internal Representations (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Understanding the knowledge boundaries of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial to prevent hallucination, but research on the knowledge boundary perceptions of LLMs has predominantly focused on English. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free alignment method that effectively transfers knowledge boundary perception ability across languages, thereby helping reduce hallucination risk in low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination risk in low-resource languages by fine-tuning on bilingual question pair translation. |
Debate-to-Write: A Persona-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Argument Generation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Writing arguments requires integrating high-level beliefs from various perspectives . current language models generate outputs autoregressively, resulting in limited diversity and coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a persona-based multi-agent framework for argument writing that integrates beliefs from different perspectives into a coherent narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates more diverse arguments by both automatic and human evaluations. |
M-LongDoc: A Benchmark For Multimodal Super-Long Document Understanding And A Retrieval-Aware Tuning Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yew Ken Chia, Liying Cheng, Hou Pong Chan, Maojia Song, Chaoqun Liu, Mahani Aljunied, Soujanya Poria, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large multimodal models focus on short documents with less than 50 pages and are limited to extraction-based questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-aware tuning approach to improve the accuracy of multimodal document reading by 4.6%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of model responses by 4.6% compared to existing benchmarks on documents with hundreds of pages and longer documents with more complex content. |
An Integrated Approach for Keyphrase Generation via Exploring the Power of Retrieval and Extraction (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods on keyphrase generation are purely extractive or generative . however, extractive methods cannot predict absent keyphrases which are not in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that jointly learns an extractive model and a generative model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five keyphrase generation tasks. |
VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Multi-modal Models lack a robust visual processing capability that is often masked by evaluation metrics that prioritize final-answer accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-layer evaluation framework that scrutinizes the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps on state-of-the-art models. |
Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
PLANET: Dynamic Content Planning in Autoregressive Transformers for Long-form Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation still suffer from incoherence problems . Neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models generate fluent results . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel generation framework that leverages autoregressive self-attention mechanism to conduct content planning and surface realization dynamically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and generates more coherent texts with richer contents. |
Interpretable Automatic Fine-grained Inconsistency Detection in Text Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factual consistency evaluation approaches for text summarization provide binary predictions and limited insights into the weakness of summarizing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of fine-grained inconsistency detection to detect inconsistent summaries . they represent facts with semantic frames extracted by semantic role labeling and highlight related semantic frames to predict inconsistance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides evidence to support or refute the summary. |
FineReason: Evaluating and Improving LLMs’ Deliberate Reasoning through Reflective Puzzle Solving (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Guizhen Chen, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Hou Pong Chan, Chaoqun Liu, Lidong Bing, Deli Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight an important shift from the “System 1” way of quick reactions to the “system 2” style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-puzzle benchmark for systematic evaluation of large language models' reasoning capabilities that decomposes each puzzle into atomic steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on state checking and state transition tasks and demonstrates gains in reasoning by up to 5.1%. |
GeoPQA: Bridging the Visual Perception Gap in MLLMs for Geometric Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models, but the impact on multimodal LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that enhances visual perception and fosters reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves geometric reasoning by 9.7% and problem-solving by 9.1% compared to direct reasoning training approach. |
Multimedia Generative Script Learning for Task Planning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a specific goal . ability to capture historical states in visual modalities provides detailed information not covered by text . |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-oriented generative script learning task to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms baselines in three aspects of the current task. |
Zero-shot Faithful Factual Error Correction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using machines to correct factual errors is in high demand and requires a significant amount of human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot framework that asks questions about input claims and seeks correct answers from the given evidence to correct factual errors faithfully. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms fully-supervised methods on the FEVER and SciFact datasets and is more faithful. |
Thread Popularity Prediction and Tracking with a Permutation-invariant Model (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a task of thread popularity prediction and tracking aims to recommend a few popular comments to subscribed users when a batch of new comments arrive in a discussion thread. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep neural network architecture to model the expected cumulative reward of a recommendation (action) they employ a greedy procedure to approximate the action that maximizes the predicted Q-value . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on five real-world datasets. |
Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Hou Pong Chan, Yi Fung, Zhenhailong Wang, Lingyu Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | LVLMs are known for producing text that is factually inconsistent with visual input . factuality of generated captions for structured visuals has not been studied as much . |
| Approach: | They propose a typology of factual errors in captions generated by large vision-language models . they propose CHOCOLATE, a visual entailment model that outperforms current models based on this analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current models in evaluating caption factuality. |
Do LLMs Really Know What They Don’t Know? Internal States Mainly Reflect Knowledge Recall Rather Than Truthfulness (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) produce hallucinated and factually correct outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy categorizing hallucinations into Unassociated Hallucination (UH) and Associated Hallucinian (AH) they propose to use internal signals to distinguish hallucinos from factual errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes hallucinations into Unassociated Hallucination (UH) and Associated Hallucinications (AHs) based on the proposed taxonomic, the authors show that hidden states reflect whether the model is recalling parametric knowledge rather than the truthfulness of the output itself. |