Papers by Irwin King

48 papers
Topic-Aware Neural Keyphrase Generation for Social Media Language (P19-1)

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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)

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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.
Rethinking Machine Ethics – Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories? (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to making moral judgments are mostly bottom-up and lack explainability.
Approach: They propose a top-down framework to steer Large Language Models to perform moral reasoning with well-established moral theories.
Outcome: The proposed framework can integrate various moral theories on moral datasets.
VOLTA: Improving Generative Diversity by Variational Mutual Information Maximizing Autoencoder (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: generative diversity is a critical yet underexplored issue in natural language generation . previous approaches to enhance diversity of Transformer models have been limited by their latent variables .
Approach: They propose a framework that bridges Transformer with VAE to enhance generative diversity.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves generative diversity while maintaining generative quality.
Exclusive Hierarchical Decoding for Deep Keyphrase Generation (2020.acl-main)

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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.
VD-BERT: A Unified Vision and Dialog Transformer with BERT (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Prior work focused on attention mechanisms to model complex interactions in visual dialog . a new framework for visual dialog is based on pretrained BERT language models .
Approach: They propose a framework for a vision-dialog Transformer that leverages pretrained BERT language models for Visual Dialog tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves the top position on the visual dialog leaderboard without pretraining on external vision-language data.
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences . existing methods neither preserve semantic consistency of original sentences nor preserve syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations.
Approach: They propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures.
Outcome: The proposed technique can bring 2.0% F1 improvements in three datasets under low-resource setting.
Neural Keyphrase Generation via Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Rewards (P19-1)

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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.
Cross-Media Keyphrase Prediction: A Unified Framework with Multi-Modality Multi-Head Attention and Image Wordings (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on text modeling, ignoring the rich features embedded in the matching images.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-modal multi-head attention model to capture cross-media interactions and image wordings to bridge the two modalities.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art based on text modeling and image matching .
Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialogues (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems focus on a single knowledge source or ignore the dependency between multiple knowledge sources.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates multiple knowledge sources and dependencies between them.
Outcome: The proposed framework can produce persona-consistent and knowledge-enhanced responses on a knowledge-grounded dialogue dataset.
WaterSeeker: Pioneering Efficient Detection of Watermarked Segments in Large Documents (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on distinguishing fully watermarked text from non-watermarked text, overlooking real-world scenarios where LLMs generate only brief segments within longer documents.
Approach: They propose a method to detect watermarked segments in large documents using an anomaly extraction method and a local traversal.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency.
VoxEval: Benchmarking the Knowledge Understanding Capabilities of End-to-End Spoken Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing question-answering benchmarks fail to evaluate SLMs’ knowledge understanding due to their inability to support end-to-end speech evaluation and account for varied input audio conditions.
Approach: They propose a new question-answering benchmark that assesses SLMs’ knowledge understanding through pure speech interactions.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark maintains speech format for both inputs and outputs, evaluates model robustness across diverse input audio conditions, and pioneers the assessment of complex tasks like mathematical reasoning in spoken format.
Dialogue Generation on Infrequent Sentence Functions via Structured Meta-Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose of a sentence in a conversation.
Approach: They propose a structured meta-learning approach for dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves informativeness and relevance of dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions while preserving knowledge generalization for similar sentence functions.
BinaryBERT: Pushing the Limit of BERT Quantization (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance improvement in various tasks, but the improvement generally comes at the cost of increasing model size and computation.
Approach: They propose a binary quantization technique which initializes binaryBERT by splitting from a ternary network.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 24x smaller.
An Entropy-based Text Watermarking Detection Method (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing text watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) are effective in identifying machine-generated texts, but they are not effective in low-entropy scenarios.
Approach: They propose an Entropy-based text watermarking detection method that takes into account the influence of token entropy to better reflect the degree of watermark detection.
Outcome: The proposed method is training-free and fully automated.
An Integrated Approach for Keyphrase Generation via Exploring the Power of Retrieval and Extraction (N19-1)

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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.
Explicit Memory Tracker with Coarse-to-Fine Reasoning for Conversational Machine Reading (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to answer user questions are limited in their decision making due to struggles in extracting question-related rules and reasoning about them.
Approach: They propose a conversational machine reading framework that uses a Explicit Memory Tracker to track whether conditions in the rule text have already been satisfied to make a decision.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the ShARC benchmark and is more interpretable by visualizing the entailment-oriented reasoning process as the conversation flows.
Astra: Efficient Transformer Architecture and Contrastive Dynamics Learning for Embodied Instruction Following (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing vision-language-action models rely on causal attention for processing sequences composed of interleaved segments from different modalities.
Approach: They propose a Transformer architecture featuring trajectory attention and learnable action queries that efficiently process segmented multimodal trajectories and predict actions for imitation learning.
Outcome: The proposed architecture performs better on three large-scale robot manipulation benchmarks than previous models.
Data Rejuvenation: Exploiting Inactive Training Examples for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large-scale training datasets make training neural machine translation models difficult.
Approach: They propose to identify inactive training examples which contribute less to the model performance and introduce data rejuvenation to improve NMT models' training.
Outcome: The proposed framework stabilizes and accelerates the training process of NMT models, resulting in models with better generalization capability.
Momentum Contrastive Pre-training for Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extractive Question Answering generate cloze-like queries different from natural questions in syntax structure, which could overfit pre-trained models to simple keyword matching.
Approach: They propose a method to align the answer probability between cloze-like and natural query-passage sample pairs.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on three benchmarking QA datasets on supervised and zero-shot scenarios.
Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising solution for end-to-end speech interaction.
Approach: They propose to build a framework that allows users to input text and translate it into speech . they propose to use a text-only LLM and a "textto-speech" framework to generate a response based on this transcription .
Outcome: The survey offers an overview of recent approaches to building SpeechLMs . it outlines core architectural components, training methodologies, evaluation strategies and challenges .
Discern: Discourse-Aware Entailment Reasoning Network for Conversational Machine Reading (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading.
Approach: They propose a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the understanding of document and dialog.
Outcome: The proposed model improves document interpretation and dialog understanding on the ShARC benchmark.
Can LLM Watermarks Robustly Prevent Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation? (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking is radioactive and enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models.
Approach: They propose two types of watermark removal attacks that allow student models to perform untraceable knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance.
Outcome: The proposed attacks eliminate inherited watermarks while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead.
Interconnected Question Generation with Coreference Alignment and Conversation Flow Modeling (P19-1)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments show that our system outperforms several baselines and can generate highly conversational questions.
Approach: They propose a neural model that generates interconnected questions in question-answering style conversations.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and can generate highly conversational questions.
SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented approaches to large language models face performance limitations due to the lack of publicly available training data.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search based on Monte Carlo Tree Search and a self-rewarding paradigm to address these limitations.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability.
MTR-DuplexBench: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Round Conversations for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating single-round interactions, neglecting other critical aspects.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate full-duplex speech language models in multi-round settings . they segment continuous full-dual dialogues into discrete turns for evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark compared full-duplex speech language models with full-dual speech models . the results show that the models perform better in multi-round settings than standard models compared to benchmarks .
Retrieval, Reasoning, Re-ranking: A Context-Enriched Framework for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing embedding-based methods rely on triples in the KG, which is vulnerable to specious relation patterns and long-tail entities.
Approach: They propose a context-enriched framework for KGC that uses a large language model to generate potential answers for each query triple.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on FB15k237 and WN18RR datasets.
Entropy-Based Decoding for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Despite their success, retrieval-augmented LLMs still face the distractibility issue, where the generated responses are negatively influenced by noise from both external and intrinsic knowledge sources.
Approach: They propose a entropy-based document-parallel ensemble decoding method that prioritizes low-entropies from retrieved documents and incorporates a contrastive decoding mechanism that contrasts the obtained low- and high-entropic ensemble distributions with the high-end internal knowledge across layers.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on open-domain question answering datasets and shows that it is highly efficient.
WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollback (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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.
Exploiting Unsupervised Data for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models for Emotion Recognition in Conversations lack supervised data, which prevents them from playing their maximum effect.
Approach: They propose a Conversation Completion task which uses unsupervised conversation data to leverage unsupervised data.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the minority emotion classes on the ERC datasets.
CLongEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Context Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Developing long-context LLMs with robust long-text capabilities is underdeveloped due to a lack of benchmarks.
Approach: They propose a Chinese benchmark for evaluating long-context LLMs with Chinese capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on 6 open-source LLMs and 2 commercial ones.
A Training-free and Reference-free Summarization Evaluation Metric via Centrality-weighted Relevance and Self-referenced Redundancy (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for text summarization systems are expensive and time-consuming.
Approach: They propose a training-free and reference-free summarization evaluation metric that incorporates a centrality-weighted relevance score and a self-referenced redundancy score.
Outcome: The proposed evaluation metric outperforms existing methods on multi-document and single-document summarization evaluation.
MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) embed imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in outputs to identify LLM-generated text.
Approach: They propose to develop an open-source toolkit for LLM watermarking that embeds imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in model outputs to identify LLM-generated text.
Outcome: MarkLLM provides a unified framework for implementing LLM watermarking algorithms, while providing user-friendly interfaces to ensure ease of access.
The Integration of Semantic and Structural Knowledge in Knowledge Graph Entity Typing (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to predict missing type annotations for knowledge graphs use only structural knowledge in the local neighborhood of entities.
Approach: They propose a model for KG Entity Typing that integrates semantic and structural knowledge to infer missing types.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in the Knowledge Graph Entity Typing task.
NILE: Internal Consistency Alignment in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances show that the world knowledge in the Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) dataset, which is incompatible with LLMs’ internal knowledge, can greatly hurt the IFT performance.
Approach: They propose a framework to optimize the effectiveness of IFT by carefully aligning the world and internal knowledge of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework can significantly improve performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets.
Topic Memory Networks for Short Text Classification (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing classification models for short texts are weak due to data sparsity .
Approach: They propose topic memory networks for short text classification with a novel topic memory mechanism to encode latent topic representations indicative of class labels.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on short text classification, while generating coherent topics.
Microblog Hashtag Generation via Encoding Conversation Contexts (N19-1)

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Challenge: Automated hashtag annotation plays an important role in content understanding for microblog posts.
Approach: They propose to annotate hashtags with a novel sequence generation framework via viewing the hashtag as a short sequence of words.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on two large-scale datasets . it can generate rare and even unseen hashtags, which is not possible with existing models .
From General Reward to Targeted Reward: Improving Open-ended Long-context Generation Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current research on long-form context in Large Language Models (LLMs) focuses on understanding of long-contexts, but the open-ended Long Text Generation (Open-LTG) remains underexplored.
Approach: They propose a method that uses data synthesis and a reward signal to enhance model performance.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms GPT-4-Turbo and improves performance by 20% on the Open-LTG task.
Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning.
Approach: They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks .
Outcome: The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education.
Self-Training Sampling with Monolingual Data Uncertainty for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that enhancing the learning on uncertain monolingual sentences improves the translation quality of high-uncertainty sentences and also benefits the prediction of low-frequency words at the target side.
Approach: They propose to use monolingual data to augment model training with synthetic parallel data by selecting the most informative monolingual sentences to complement the parallel data.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the performance of natural language models by selecting the most informative monolingual sentences.
Photon: A Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL System (2020.acl-demos)

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Challenge: Existing natural language interfaces to databases are ambiguous or untranslatable . we present a robust, modular cross-domain text-to-SQL system .
Approach: They propose a system that flags natural language input to which a SQL mapping cannot be immediately determined.
Outcome: The proposed system can flag natural language input to which a SQL mapping cannot be determined.
Thread Popularity Prediction and Tracking with a Permutation-invariant Model (D18-1)

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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.
FedLFC: Towards Efficient Federated Multilingual Modeling with LoRA-based Language Family Clustering (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks for multilingual modeling face communication costs and parameter interference conflicts.
Approach: They propose a communication-efficient federated learning framework with low-rank adaptation and language family clustering for Multilingual Modeling (MM) they maintain the weights of the base model, updating the lightweight Low-rank adapt parameters to minimize communication costs.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline models in performance and reduces communication overhead.
Retrieval-Augmented Multilingual Keyphrase Generation with Retriever-Generator Iterative Training (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on keyphrase generation on non-English languages haven’t been vastly investigated.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented method for multilingual keyphrase generation that leverages keyphrase annotations in English datasets to facilitate generating keyphrases in low-resource languages.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on non-English keyphrase generation datasets and the proposed model is scalable.
HiGRU: Hierarchical Gated Recurrent Units for Utterance-Level Emotion Recognition (N19-1)

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Challenge: Using textual features, our proposed HiGRU models achieve at least 8.7%, 7.5%, 6.0% improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on each dataset.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical gated recurrent unit framework to model word-level inputs and an upper-level GRU to capture contexts of utterance-level embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 8.7%, 7.5%, 6.0% improvement over state-of-the-art methods on three datasets.
Multimodal Relation Extraction with Cross-Modal Retrieval and Synthesis (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations.
Approach: They propose to retrieve multimodal relation extraction information based on object, sentence, and whole image . they propose to synthesize the object-level, image-level and sentence-level information .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multimodal relation extraction.
Improving Question Generation With to the Point Context (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing sequence-to-sequence neural models may not be able to identify answer-relevant context words for question generation.
Approach: They propose to model the unstructured sentence and the structured answer-relevant relation for question generation by combining to the point context and unstructure.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed model improves on the unstructured sentence and the structured answer-relevant relation.
An Effective Post-training Embedding Binarization Approach for Fast Online Top-K Passage Matching (2022.aacl-short)

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Challenge: Existing models that learn semantic representations of passages are prone to performance degradation . embedding binarization is a promising branch of model compression .
Approach: They propose an embedding binarization approach that can be used to optimize for online inference.
Outcome: The proposed model can perform query-passage matching acceleration.

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