Papers by Jiajun Bao
Explicit Semantic Decomposition for Definition Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing definition generation methods rely on decoding to extract semantic components of words. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly decomposes meaning of words into semantic components and models them with discrete latent variables for definition generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on WordNet and Oxford benchmarks. |
Toward Machine Interpreting: Lessons from Human Interpreting Studies (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current speech translation systems are static and do not adapt to real-world situations in ways human interpreters do. |
| Approach: | They propose to model human interpreting using a new language model to improve usability . they argue that there is great potential to adopt many human interpreted principles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to improve human interpreting and improve translation performance. |
Generating Sentences from Disentangled Syntactic and Semantic Spaces (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are widely used in natural language generation due to the regularization of the latent space. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate sentences from disentangled syntactic and semantic spaces by using the linearized tree sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves similar or better performance in various tasks compared with state-of-the-art models. |
Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive text generation models still fall behind in translation quality . authors propose a model that learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive Transformer model that implicitly categorizes latent variables into decoding . they find it improves translation quality by introducing more informative decoder inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks than strong baselines. |
EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong machine translation capabilities for English-centric language pairs but underperform in direct non-English (x2x) translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation framework that leverages models’ established English-to-x (en2x) capabilities by extending English parallel corpora into omnidirectional datasets and developing an English-referenced quality evaluation proxy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant improvement across 72 x2x directions while generalizing to enhance en2x performance. |
TRANS-ZERO: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation Without Parallel Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped machine translation, but multilingual MT still relies heavily on parallel data for supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages only monolingual data and the intrinsic multilingual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches models trained on large-scale parallel data and excels in non-English translation directions. |
latent-GLAT: Glancing at Latent Variables for Parallel Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text generation have limited applications due to multimodality problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses latent variables to capture word categorical information and invoke an advanced curriculum learning technique to overcome multi-modality problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines without an autoregressive model, which further broadens the application scenarios of the parallel decoding paradigm. |
Improving Long-Context Translation via Self-Supervised Dual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models with long context windows suffer from catastrophic information distortion, undermining the strict faithfulness required for translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised post-training framework that improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. |