Papers by Ji Ma
CP-BCS: Binary Code Summarization Guided by Control Flow Graph and Pseudo Code (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work on understanding assembly code is oriented towards generating function names, which involve numerous abbreviations that make them confusing. |
| Approach: | They propose a control flow graph and pseudo code guided binary code summarization framework to learn the comprehensive binary function execution behavior and logic semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of reverse engineering on 3 different binary optimization levels for 3 different computer architectures. |
A Survey of LLM-based Agents in Medicine: How far are we from Baymax? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming healthcare through their ability to understand and assist with medical tasks. |
| Approach: | They analyze system profiles, clinical planning, medical reasoning frameworks, and external capacity enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight the future directions in medical reasoning, physical system integration, and training simulations. |
RAVEN: Robust Advertisement Video Violation Temporal Grounding via Reinforcement Reasoning (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting ads video violations lack precise temporal grounding, noisy annotations, and limited generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates curriculum reinforcement learning with large language models to enhance reasoning and cognitive capabilities for violation detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance in violation category accuracy and temporal interval localization. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Entity-level Prototypical Network Enhanced by Dispersedly Distributed Prototypes (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing prototypical networks for named entity recognition suffer from label dependency and tightly distributed prototypes, thus causing misclassifications. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-level Prototypical Network enhanced by dispersedly distributed prototypes to build entity-level prototypes and distribute them dispersionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the previous models on two evaluation tasks and the Few-NERD settings in terms of overall performance. |
Zero-shot Neural Passage Retrieval via Domain-targeted Synthetic Question Generation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural retrieval have led to advancements on document, passage and knowledge-base benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to zero-shot learning for passage retrieval that uses synthetic question generation to close this gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can exceed term-based techniques on document retrieval benchmarks by using domain-targeted synthetic question generation. |
HYRR: Hybrid Infused Reranking for Passage Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing passage retrieval systems typically adopt a two-stage retrieve-then-rerank pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training robust reranking models using hybrid retrievers . they propose HYRR framework that allows users to select training data using hybrids . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is robust to different first-stage retrieval settings. |
Entailment-Preserving First-order Logic Representations in Natural Language Entailment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | First-order logic (FOL) is often used to represent logical entailment, but determining natural language (NL) enanglement using FOL remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entailment-Preserving FOL representations task and a method which trains an NL-to-FOL translator by using the natural language entailment labels as verifiable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.8–2.7% improvement in EPR and 17.4–20.6% increase in E PR@16 compared to baselines in three datasets. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
CSMCIR: CoT-Enhanced Symmetric Alignment with Memory Bank for Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhipeng Qian, Zihan Liang, Yufei Ma, Ben Chen, Huangyu Dai, Yiwei Ma, Jiayi Ji, Chenyi Lei, Han Li, Xiaoshuai Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to search for images using single-modality are limited by representation space fragmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment . they introduce a multi-level Chain-of-Thought prompting strategy that guides MLMs to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves efficient query-target alignment through synergistic components. |
Automated Fine-Grained Mixture-of-Experts Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures is inadequate for model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures . they find that expert networks exhibit distinctive channel-wise outlier distributions ." |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the Mixtral-8x7b-v0.1 architecture while maintaining minimal computational overhead. |
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)
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Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Ziyan Ma, Haoyang He, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Zihua Rong, Rongjin Li, Kun Ji, Qing Huang, Xinyang Hu, Yang Liu, Qianhe Zheng
| Challenge: | Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging. |
To Answer or Not To Answer? Improving Machine Reading Comprehension Model with Span-based Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to recognize answerable questions due to subtle literal changes . MRC models are forced to perceive crucial semantic changes from slight literal differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based method of Contrastive Learning which explicitly contrasts answerable questions with their answerable counterparts at the answer span level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves baselines significantly and is an effective way to utilize generated questions. |
Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sentence embeddings are useful for language processing tasks, but it is unclear how to produce them from encoder-decoder models. |
| Approach: | They investigate the effects of scaling up sentence encoders to 11B parameters on sentence embeddings from text-to-text transformers (T5) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the previous best models on both SentEval and SentGLUE transfer tasks. |
LOHRec: Leveraging Order and Hierarchy in Generative Sequential Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | generative recommenders focus on maximizing the prediction probability of the next item in the temporal sequence, ignoring diverse potential items. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning framework that leverages order and hierarchy in generative recommendation using quantized identifiers to further explore performance ceiling of lightweight generative recommenders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning framework outperforms strong prior baselines across multiple datasets. |
RAVEN++: Pinpointing Fine-Grained Violations in Advertisement Videos with Active Reinforcement Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Deyi Ji, Yuekui Yang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Haiyang Wu, Shaogang Tang, Xudong Chen, Shaoping Ma, Tianrun Chen, Lanyun Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have improved the detection of non-compliant content, but critical gaps persist in fine-grained understanding, explainability, and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines active reinforcement learning, fine-grained violation understanding and progressive multi-stage training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms general-purpose LLMs and specialized models in fine-grained violation understanding, explainability, and generalization. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
Control Image Captioning Spatially and Temporally (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate image captions with user intention are still under exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that connects Contrastive constraints and Attention Guidance in a loop manner and engages explicit spatial and temporal constraints to the generating process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on a trace-controlled image captioning task. |
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)
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Yu-Zhe Shi, Shiqian Li, Xinyi Niu, Qiao Xu, Jiawen Liu, Yifan Xu, Shiyu Gu, Bingru He, Xinyang Li, Xinyu Zhao, Zijian Zhao, Yidong Lyu, Zhen Li, Sijia Liu, Lin Qiu, Jinhao Ji, Lecheng Ruan, Yuxi Ma, Wenjuan Han, Yixin Zhu
| Challenge: | PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives. |
State-of-the-art Chinese Word Segmentation with Bi-LSTMs (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | A wide variety of neural-network architectures have been proposed for the task of Chinese word segmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional LSTM model with standard deep learning techniques and best practices for the task of Chinese word segmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models based on standard deep learning techniques and best practices on Chinese word segmentation datasets. |
Thinking with Map: Reinforced Parallel Map-Augmented Agent for Geolocalization (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Ji, Yong Wang, Ziyu Ma, Yiming Hu, Hailang Huang, Xuecai Hu, Guanhua Chen, Liaoni Wu, Xiangxiang Chu
| Challenge: | Existing large vision-language model (LVLM) approaches overlook a common strategy used by humans — using maps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to equip a vision-language model with the ability to think with maps and optimize it using agentic reinforcement learning and parallel test-time scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms open- and closed-source models on most metrics. |
COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation (2021.naacl-demos)
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Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Xuan Wang, Nikolaus Parulian, Guangxing Han, Jiawei Ma, Jingxuan Tu, Ying Lin, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Yingjun Guan, Bangzheng Li, Ruisong Li, Xiangchen Song, Yi Fung, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han, Shih-Fu Chang, James Pustejovsky, Jasmine Rah, David Liem, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Clare Voss, Cynthia Schneider, Boyan Onyshkevych
| Challenge: | a new framework to digest relevant biomedical knowledge is needed to combat COVID-19 . quantity of research results is a bottleneck, and false information promoted in publications . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers has developed a framework to extract multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature to combat COVID-19. |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature . it provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence . the framework is based on a case study of drug repurposing . |
ALGOGEN: Tool-Generated Verifiable Traces for Reliable Algorithm Visualization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based systems require simulation of algorithm flow and video rendering constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that decouples algorithm execution from rendering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reduces execution success rates, element overlap, and inter-frame inconsistencies. |
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
| Challenge: | Rhetorical strategies are important to persuasive communication, but their analysis relies on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate and label debate data . they fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this dataset and validate it against human data a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. |
Enhancing LLM-Based Persuasion Simulations with Cultural and Speaker-Specific Information (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Qichao Wang, Ivory Yang, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to persuasive dialogue generation suffer from stance oscillation and low informativeness. |
| Approach: | They propose reinforced instructional prompting, a method that ensures speaker characteristics consistently guide all stages of dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ensures speaker characteristics guide all stages of dialogue generation and aligns language use with speakers’ native languages to better capture cultural nuances. |
Transformation of Dense and Sparse Text Representations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to NLP to leverage sparsity have been limited due to the gap with dense representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Semantic Transformation method to bridge dense and sparse spaces and propose supervised NLP tasks to use both spaces. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with classification tasks and natural language inference tasks show that the proposed method is effective. |
Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate source code summaries are coarse-grained and noise-filled . however, they do not capture contextual code semantics and are often outdated in continuous software iteration. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained Token-level retrieval-augmented mechanism on the decoder side to enhance performance of neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more low-frequency tokens and is interpretable. |
Timeline Summarization based on Event Graph Compression via Time-Aware Optimal Transport (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for timeline summarization ignore the events’ intra-structures and inter-structure connections. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent news articles as an event-graph, thus compressing the whole graph to its salient sub-graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on the state-of-the-art on three real-world datasets, including two public benchmarks and a Timeline100 dataset. |
Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Ji Ma, Vincent Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, Yinfei Yang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that dual encoders outperform sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. |
| Approach: | They challenge belief that bottleneck layer is too limited for out-of-domain generalization . they scale up the model while keeping bottleneck as a single dot-product with a fixed size . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. |
Constructing contrastive samples via summarization for text classification with limited annotations (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Various contrastive learning methods have been developed and lead to state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct efficient contrastive samples using text summarization to gain better representations of text classification tasks with limited annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework gains better representations on text classification tasks with limited annotations and is compared with existing methods on real-world text classification datasets. |
OpenMSD: Towards Multilingual Scientific Documents Similarity Measurement (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for finding related papers in different languages are not effective for multilingual SDSM. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Open-access Multilingual Scientific Documents to develop multilingual SDSM models that adjust and extend state-of-the-art methods for English SDSM tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on multilingual SDSM tasks while preserving the performance of the existing methods. |
Unsupervised Reference-Free Summary Quality Evaluation via Contrastive Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document summarization consider the informativeness of the assessed summary and require human-generated references for each test summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate summary qualities without reference summaries by unsupervised contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other evaluation metrics even without reference summaries. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
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Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
Stand on The Shoulders of Giants: Building JailExpert from Previous Attack Experience (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xi Wang, Songlei Jian, Shasha Li, Xiaopeng Li, Bin Ji, Ma Jun, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Wang, Jianfeng Zhang, Jie Yu, Feilong Bao, null Wangbaosheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-aligned content with a “jailbreak prompt” are inefficient and repetitive, causing inefficiency and a lack of experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates past attack experiences to aid current jailbreak attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both attack effectiveness and efficiency compared to the current black-box jailbreak method. |
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Redundancy Elimination to Compress Dense Vectors for Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dense passage retrieval improves ranking accuracy in open-domain question answering but at the cost of large space and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple unsupervised pipeline that includes principal component analysis (PCA), product quantization, and hybrid search to improve space efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves good accuracy–space trade-offs, for example, 48 compression with less than 3% drop in top-100 retrieval accuracy on average or 96 compression without drop in space requirements. |
Communication Makes Perfect: Persuasion Dataset Construction via Multi-LLM Communication (2025.naacl-long)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Ivory Yang, Shiyu Ji, Joice Chen, Farnoosh Hashemi, Shubham Mohole, Ethan Gearey, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in generating persuasive dialogue, yet concerns about the fluency and sophistication of their outputs persist. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM communication framework that facilitates the efficient production of high-quality, diverse linguistic content with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels in naturalness, linguistic diversity, and the strategic use of persuasion, even in complex scenarios involving social taboos. |
ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Tao Chen, Zhen Qin, Jing Lu, Dara Bahri, Ji Ma, Jai Gupta, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using document to query generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to more expensive approaches while being 6.8X faster. |
Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Attention-based Span-specific and Contextual Semantic Representations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods treat each span token equally important, ignoring significant features. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based joint extraction framework with attention-based semantic representations that utilizes span-specific and contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on ACE2005, CoNLL2004 and ADE. |
Multi-stage Training with Improved Negative Contrast for Neural Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural firststage retrieval models overcome lexical gap issue by projecting query and document to a shared dense space. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage framework for neural passage retrieval using synthetic data, negative sampling, and fusion techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval accuracy and enhances the negative contrast in both stages. |