Papers by Lan Du
Multi-label Few/Zero-shot Learning with Knowledge Aggregated from Multiple Label Graphs (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Few/zero-shot learning is a big challenge of many classification tasks, where a classifier is required to recognise instances of classes that have very few or even no training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-graph aggregation model that fuses knowledge from multiple label graphs encoding different semantic label relationships to improve multi-label zero/few-shot document classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two large clinical datasets and the EU legislation dataset on few/zero-shot labels. |
Neural Topic Modeling with Large Language Models in the Loop (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in topic discovery, but their direct application to topic modeling suffers from issues such as incomplete topic coverage, misalignment of topics, and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop framework that integrates Large Language Models with Neural Topic Models (NTMs) global topics and document representations are learned through the NTM, while an LLM refines these topics using an Optimal Transport (OT)-based alignment objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves topic interpretability while preserving the efficiency of existing NTMs. |
Neural Attention-Aware Hierarchical Topic Model (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural topic models (NTMs) use deep neural networks to learn topic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational autoencoder model that reconstructs sentence and document word counts using bag-of-words embeddings and pre-trained semantic embedders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model lowers reconstruction errors at sentence and document levels and finds more coherent topics from real-world datasets. |
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: Can Linguistic Hierarchies Help? (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) trains a single model that supports translation between multiple languages . transferring knowledge from a diverse set of languages degrades the translation performance due to negative transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical knowledge distillation approach to train multilingual models . they use typological features and phylogeny to overcome negative transfer issue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach avoids negative transfer effect by capitalising on language groups generated according to typological features and phylogeny of languages. |
Re-weighting Tokens: A Simple and Effective Active Learning Strategy for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing active learning approaches focus on information-rich sequences, reducing the need for expert annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a re-weighting-based active learning strategy that assigns dynamic weights to individual tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy improves on multiple corpora and validates its effectiveness. |
Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph for Conditional Question Answering on Long Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conditional question answering on long documents ignore document structure and discourse relations between sentences in document sections. |
| Approach: | They construct a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph and conduct bottom-up information propagation to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing methods on the conditional question answering on long documents by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, and 2.2 EM and 1.9 F1 scores on jointly answer and condition measuring. |
Hardness-guided domain adaptation to recognise biomedical named entities under low-resource scenarios (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks require a large amount of training data and domains are often scarcely labeled. |
| Approach: | They propose a hardness-guided domain adaptation framework for bioNER tasks that leverages domain hardness information to improve the adaptability of the learnt model in low-resource scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art MetaNER model on biomedical datasets. |
Leveraging Information Bottleneck for Scientific Document Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract salient sentences from document are unsupervised and rely on graph-based methods for sentence ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised extractive approach to document level summarization based on the Information Bottleneck principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be extended to a multi-view framework by different signals. |
Transformer over Pre-trained Transformer for Neural Text Segmentation with Enhanced Topic Coherence (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text segmentation use supervised and unsupervised learning to perform tasks such as text summarization and keyword extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer over transformer framework to perform neural text segmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of semantic coherence measure . bottom-level sentence encoders pre-trained on specific languages yield better performance . |
Leveraging Meta Information in Short Text Aggregation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models infer topics based on word co-occurrence information, which results in degraded performance and degrades performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model that aggregates short texts into clusters by leveraging the associated meta information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more interpretable topics and document clusters. |
Understanding Gender Bias in Knowledge Base Embeddings (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge base (KB) embeddings have been shown to contain gender biases . authors develop two new bias measures to quantify them and trace their origins in KB . |
| Approach: | They propose two ways to quantify gender biases in knowledge base (KB) embeddings . they use the influence function to inspect the contribution of each triple in KB to the overall group bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed measures are compared with real-world census data to examine gender biases. |
Exploring Human Gender Stereotypes with Word Association Test (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings have been used to study gender stereotypes in texts . however, evaluating their validities is still an open problem . et al.: this study investigates gender bias using the lens of language, especially, the words . |
| Approach: | They use word association test to derive bias scores for large amount of words . they find that these bias scores correlate well with bias in the real world . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method correlates well with bias in the real world, and with census data, it provides a different perspective on gender stereotypes in words. |
Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both NLP and CV . they are comparable to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, but are more interpretable in their predictions. |
| Approach: | They develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity . they inject the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks. |