Papers by Junwen Duan
Event Representation Learning Enhanced with External Commonsense Knowledge (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn event representations from text lack commonsense knowledge about the intents and emotions of event participants. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage external commonsense knowledge about the intent and sentiment of the event to learn distributed representations for structured events from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on hard similarity tasks and yields more precise inferences on subsequent events under given contexts. |
Learning Sentence Representations over Tree Structures for Target-Dependent Classification (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on tree structures uses syntactic parsers or Treebank annotations to perform target-dependent classifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning based approach which automatically induces target-specific sentence representations over tree structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gives superior performance on two benchmark tasks compared to previous work on parsed trees . |
DDO: Dual-Decision Optimization for LLM-Based Medical Consultation via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs fail to capture the dual nature of medical consultation (MC) this mismatch often results in ineffective symptom inquiry and unreliable disease diagnosis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based framework that performs Dual-Decision Optimization by decoupling the two sub-tasks and optimizing them with distinct objectives through a collaborative multi-agent workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLM-based approaches on three real-world MC datasets and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art generation-based methods. |
Multi-modal Concept Alignment Pre-training for Generative Medical Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) aims to provide accurate answers to questions regarding medical images, a task particularly challenging for open-ended questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal concept alignment pre-training approach for generative Med-VQA that leverages a knowledge graph sourced from medical image-caption datasets and the Unified Medical Language System. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing methods on a set of benchmark datasets and shows high efficiency and knowledge-image alignment capability. |
medIKAL: Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs for Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis on EMRs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are the digitized record of a patient's medical and health information and are integral to modern healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance diagnostic capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assigns weighted importance to entities in medical records based on their type, enabling precise localization of candidate diseases within KGs. |
Towards Better Representations for Multi-Label Text Classification with Multi-granularity Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained language models generate word frequency-oriented text representations, causing texts with different labels to be closely distributed in a narrow region, which is difficult to classify. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to refine the text representation for multi-label text classification using contrastive learning and multi-task learning modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the quality of the representations and yields stable and competitive improvements. |
Safe Inputs but Unsafe Output: Benchmarking Cross-modality Safety Alignment of Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Siyin Wang, Xingsong Ye, Qinyuan Cheng, Junwen Duan, Shimin Li, Jinlan Fu, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on single-modality threats, but this approach fails to address cross-modal safety alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety alignment challenge to evaluate cross-modality safety alignment . they propose 'Safe Inputs but Unsafe Output' to consider safety of single modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed safety alignment challenge examines cases where modalities are safe independently but could lead to unsafe outputs when combined. |
MARE: Multi-Aspect Rationale Extractor on Unsupervised Rationale Extraction (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract text snippets from input text to support model predictions without explicit rationale annotation have limited their ability to capture meaningful internal correlations between aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-aspect rationale extractor that extracts text snippets to support model predictions without explicit rationale annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on two unsupervised rationale extraction benchmarks. |
WSpeller: Robust Word Segmentation for Enhancing Chinese Spelling Check (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese spelling check model that takes into account word segmentation and a module that can assist the correction module by predicting correct word segmentations from sentences containing spelling errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on SIGHAN13, SIGHEN14, and SIGHAN15 and maintains equal performance on SSGHAN14. |
CDA: A Contrastive Data Augmentation Method for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting AD are challenging and time-consuming due to lack of data and generalizability of the models. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive data augmentation method which simulates the cognitive impairment of a patient by randomly deleting a proportion of text from the transcript to create negative samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best performance among language-based models on the benchmark ADReSS Challenge dataset. |
Learning Target-Specific Representations of Financial News Documents For Cumulative Abnormal Return Prediction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work considers learning dense representations for news titles and abstracts . text representations can address the sparsity of discrete indicators in statistical models . |
| Approach: | They propose to use news abstracts to combine the most informative sentences in news content to learn dense representations for text elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to estimate abnormal returns of companies when compared to titles and abstracts. |
RUIE: Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction using Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Unified information extraction (UIE) aims to extract diverse structured information from unstructured text using a single model or framework. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-context learning for efficient task generalization by combining LLM preferences with a keyword-enhanced reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on eight held-out datasets than existing methods and instruction-tuning methods. |