Papers by Kevin Zhang
Handshape-Aware Sign Language Recognition: Extended Datasets and Exploration of Handshape-Inclusive Methods (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on sign language recognition encodes videos without acknowledging phonological attributes of signs. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-encoder network and a dual-encoding network for handshape-inclusive sign language recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform baseline methods in the PHOENIX14T-HS dataset . the proposed methods consistently outperformed baseline methods . |
CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data (2026.acl-long)
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Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob Van Der Goot, Lanwenn ar C’horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, null Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray, Sarah K. K. Luger
| Challenge: | Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. |
| Approach: | They introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 109 languages and shows that existing evaluations overestimate accuracy for many languages in the web domain. |
Reasoning or Knowledge: Stratified Evaluation of Biomedical LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Medical reasoning in large language models is a complex cognitive process through which clinicians interpret patient data and make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that disentangles knowledge recall from reasoning by training a PubMedBERT-based classifier and applying it to 11 widely used biomedical QA benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework disentangles knowledge recall from reasoning by training a PubMedBERT-based classifier and applying it to 11 widely used biomedical QA benchmarks. |
Reproducible and Efficient Benchmarks for Hyperparameter Optimization of Neural Machine Translation Systems (2020.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Optimal versus suboptimal hyperparameters can lead to dramatic swings in system performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a library of pre-trained models for fast, low cost HPO experimentation and to propose metrics for evaluating HPO methods on NMT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method uses a library of pre-trained models for fast, low cost experimentation on neural machine translation (NMT) . |
A Dashboard for Mitigating the COVID-19 Misinfodemic (2021.eacl-demos)
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Zhengyuan Zhu, Kevin Meng, Josue Caraballo, Israa Jaradat, Xiao Shi, Zeyu Zhang, Farahnaz Akrami, Haojin Liao, Fatma Arslan, Damian Jimenez, Mohanmmed Samiul Saeef, Paras Pathak, Chengkai Li
| Challenge: | a new public dashboard aims to understand the impact of the COVID-19 misinfodemic on Twitter . the dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVId-19 related facts and debunks of misinformation . |
| Approach: | They propose a public dashboard that matches tweets with COVID-19 misinformation . they also propose experiments to analyze the spread of misinformation on twitter . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVID-19 related facts and debunks misinformation . it shows the most prevalent information from the catalog among Twitter users in user-selected geographic regions . |
ELISA-EDL: A Cross-lingual Entity Extraction, Linking and Localization System (N18-5)
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| Challenge: | ELISA-EDL is a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for Wikipedia languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for English speakers . it extracts entities from unstructured text in any of 282 Wikipedia languages and links them to English knowledge bases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entity mentions from Wikipedia and links them to English knowledge bases and visualizes locations related to disaster topics on a world heatmap. |
Towards Better Generalization in Open-Domain Question Answering by Mitigating Context Memorization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions using an external large-scale knowledge corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach to QA that focuses on retrieving relevant knowledge from an external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to completely different knowledge domains while adapting to updated versions of the same knowledge corpus and switching to completely new knowledge domain. |
EVEDIT: Event-based Knowledge Editing for Deterministic Knowledge Propagation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple . current methods are limited to (substance, relation) triple, causing low confidence in their answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions to improve model confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model confidence by 55.6% while maintaining the naturalness of generation. |
AfriCLIRMatrix: Enabling Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval for African Languages (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for cross-lingual information retrieval are limited in many languages, especially those spoken in Africa. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a test collection for cross-lingual information retrieval in 15 diverse African languages. |
| Outcome: | AfriCLIRMatrix contains 6 million queries in English and 23 million relevance judgments automatically mined from Wikipedia inter-language links, covering many more African languages than any existing information retrieval test collection. |
HABLex: Human Annotated Bilingual Lexicons for Experiments in Machine Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to incorporate bilingual lexicons into statistical machine translation are unclear how to do so in the neural framework. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset to test methods for bilingual lexicon integration into neural machine translation using human generated alignments of words and phrases in three language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on baselines and improves training to address overfitting. |
Broad-Coverage Semantic Parsing as Transduction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to broad-coverage semantic parsing are not applicable to all frameworks because of the lack of explicit alignments between tokens in the sentence and nodes in the semantic graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a transduction parsing paradigm that unifies different broad-coverage semantic parsers into a paradigm that leverages multiple attention mechanisms to build meaning representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves state-of-the-art on AMR, SDP and UCCA and is competitive with the state- of-the art on SDP. |
TurkingBench: A Challenge Benchmark for Web Agents (2025.naacl-long)
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Kevin Xu, Yeganeh Kordi, Tanay Nayak, Adi Asija, Yizhong Wang, Kate Sanders, Adam Byerly, Jingyu Zhang, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi
| Challenge: | TurkingBench is a benchmark consisting of tasks presented as web pages with textual instructions and multi-modal contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use HTML pages to perform various annotation tasks on crowdsourcing platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models on the TurkingBench benchmark. |
AutoML for NLP (2023.eacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is an emerging field that has potential to impact how we build models in NLP. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will summarize the main AutoML techniques and illustrate how to apply them to improve the NLP model-building process. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial summarizes the main AutoML techniques and illustrates how to apply them to improve the model-building process. |
SynthFix: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Code Vulnerability Repair (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex semantic and structural correctness required for automated code repair. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural-symbolic framework that unifies code synthesis with compiler-informed symbolic feedback to improve LLM-based vulnerability repair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves code repair accuracy and efficiency over strong SFT and RFT training strategies on the FixJS and CodeFlaws benchmarks. |
GPT-Fathom: Benchmarking Large Language Models to Decipher the Evolutionary Path towards GPT-4 and Beyond (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM leaderboards often reference scores reported in other papers without consistent settings and prompts, which may encourage cherry-picking favored settings and for better results. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source and reproducible LLM evaluation suite built on top of OpenAI Evals that systematically evaluates 10+ leading LLMs and OpenAI’s legacy models on 20+ curated benchmarks across 7 capability categories. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite is built on top of OpenAI Evals and evaluates 10+ leading LLMs and OpenAI’s legacy models on 20+ curated benchmarks across 7 capability categories. |
Curriculum Learning for Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) performance drops when domains do not match and in-domain training data is scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning approach to adapt generic neural machine translation models to a specific domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms unadapted and adapted baselines in two domains and two language pairs. |
Cross-lingual Decompositional Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Renewed interest in semantic analysis has led to a surge of proposed new frameworks . many of these efforts are limited to the analysis of English, but with a number of exceptions e.g., recent efforts in Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) and multilingual FrameNet annotation and parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual decompositional semantic analysis task based on a target language . they propose 'end-to-end' model with an annotating mechanism that supports intra-sentential coreference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by at least 1.75 F1 score on an evaluation dataset. |
Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | a paper abstract writing system can automatically generate an abstract from a title . a typical recurrent neural network (RNN) based approach easily loses focus. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper abstract writing system that automatically generates an abstract from a title. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system passes Turing tests by junior domain experts and non-experts at a rate up to 80%. |
Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia (2025.acl-long)
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Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, null Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia is underrepresented in vision-language research . SEA-VL is an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourced, automated image crawling and synthetic image generation to develop culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets capture SEA cultural nuances and contexts better than existing datasets. |
AMR Parsing as Sequence-to-Graph Transduction (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing is the task of transducing natural language text into AMR, a graphbased formalism used for capturing sentence-level semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that treats AMR parsing as sequence-to-graph transduction by aligner-free, and can be effectively trained with limited amounts of labeled AMR data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previously reported SMATCH scores on AMR 2.0 (76.3%) and AMR 1.0 (70.2%). |
EyeMulator: Improving Code Language Models by Mimicking Human Visual Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Zhang, Chen Huang, Yueke Zhang, Jiahao Zhang, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Collin McMillan, Kevin Leach, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Code Language Models learn attention based on statistical input-output token correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic technique to align CodeLLM attention with human visual attention without architectural changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in three languages, with gains of over 30 CodeBLEU points in translation and up to 22 BERTScore points in summarization. |
Evaluating Models’ Local Decision Boundaries via Contrast Sets (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Matt Gardner, Yoav Artzi, Victoria Basmov, Jonathan Berant, Ben Bogin, Sihao Chen, Pradeep Dasigi, Dheeru Dua, Yanai Elazar, Ananth Gottumukkala, Nitish Gupta, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Gabriel Ilharco, Daniel Khashabi, Kevin Lin, Jiangming Liu, Nelson F. Liu, Phoebe Mulcaire, Qiang Ning, Sameer Singh, Noah A. Smith, Sanjay Subramanian, Reut Tsarfaty, Eric Wallace, Ally Zhang, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization but are misleading when a dataset has systematic gaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly lower on contrast sets than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases. |
VIEWS: Entity-Aware News Video Captioning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Hammad Ayyubi, Tianqi Liu, Arsha Nagrani, Xudong Lin, Mingda Zhang, Anurag Arnab, Feng Han, Yukun Zhu, Xuande Feng, Kevin Zhang, Jialu Liu, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning benchmarks and models produce generic captions for videos that lack specific identification of individuals, locations, or organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of directly summarizing news videos into captions that are entity-aware . they validate the effectiveness of their approach across three video captioning models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective across three video captioning models. |
A Hyperparameter Optimization Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation Research (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Insufficient tuning of hyperparameters may lead to poor results and exaggerated results . lack of open-source support tools means that the level of rigor in hyperparametric optimization may vary widely. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperparameter optimization toolkit for neural machine translation that is implemented as a wrapper on top of the open-source Sockeye NMT software. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit is implemented as a wrapper on top of the open-source Sockeye NMT software. |
Generating Self-Contained and Summary-Centric Question Answer Pairs via Differentiable Reward Imitation Learning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a proposed model for question-answer pairs with self-contained, summary-centric questions and length-constrained, article-summarizing answers is based on suggested question generation in conversational news recommendation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for generating question-answer pairs with self-contained, summary-centric questions and length-constrained, article-summarizing answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the central gists of the articles and achieves high answer accuracy. |
Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations (D19-3)
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Dian Yu, Michelle Cohn, Yi Mang Yang, Chun Yen Chen, Weiming Wen, Jiaping Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kevin Jesse, Austin Chau, Antara Bhowmick, Shreenath Iyer, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Sam Davidson, Ashwin Bhandare, Zhou Yu
| Challenge: | Gunrock is a speech-based social chatbot that can be used to understand complex sentences and have in-depth conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that allows users to understand complex sentences and have in-depth conversations in open domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system produces longer sentences, which are directly related to user engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns). |
An Experimental Design Framework for Label-Efficient Supervised Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Gantavya Bhatt, Yifang Chen, Arnav Das, Jifan Zhang, Sang Truong, Stephen Mussmann, Yinglun Zhu, Jeff Bilmes, Simon Du, Kevin Jamieson, Jordan Ash, Robert Nowak
| Challenge: | Supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruction datasets has shown immense potential in improving the zero-shot generalization capabilities observed in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use experimental design to minimize the computational cost of active learning by identifying useful subsets of samples to annotate from an unlabeled pool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods save 50% of the annotation cost compared to random sampling on generative tasks. |
Parallel Corpus Filtering via Pre-trained Language Models (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to filter out noisy parallel sentences from web crawled data are in demand. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to filter out noisy sentence pairs from web crawled corpora using pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art on two datasets. |
Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization with Cross-Document Graph-based Information Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) and summarization (summarization) are closely related, but both aims to abstract the most salient information into a generated text summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to use structured IE graphs to enhance the abstractive summarization task by using cross-document IE output to incorporate an alignment loss between IE nodes and their text spans to reduce inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate summaries that are more factual while not losing abstractiveness. |
Multi-lingual Common Semantic Space Construction via Cluster-consistent Word Embedding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to multilingual word embedding is needed to achieve this goal . a multilingual common semantic space is a language-agnostic semantic continuous space . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual common semantic space where words from multiple languages are mapped into a shared space so that resources and knowledge can be shared across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 14.6% absolute F-score gain over state-of-the-art methods on cross-lingual direct transfer. |
MeetDot: Videoconferencing with Live Translation Captions (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Arkady Arkhangorodsky, Christopher Chu, Scot Fang, Yiqi Huang, Denglin Jiang, Ajay Nagesh, Boliang Zhang, Kevin Knight
| Challenge: | MeetDot is a videoconferencing system with live translation captions overlaid on screen . currently, the system supports speech and captions in 4 languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a videoconferencing system with live translation captions overlaid on screen . the system supports speech and captions in 4 languages and combines automatic speech recognition and machine translation in a cascade . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports speech and captions in 4 languages and has very tight latency requirements to have acceptable call quality. |
SPICA: Retrieving Scenarios for Pluralistic In-Context Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning only considers similarity when drawing few-shot examples and not cross-group differences in values. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that accounts for group-level differences during in-context example retrieval by using scenario banks, group-informed retrieval metrics, and in-constraint alignment prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on an alignment task with groups seeing up to a +0.16 point improvement on a 5 point scale. |