Papers by Linhai Zhang
Multi-Relational Probabilistic Event Representation Learning via Projected Gaussian Embedding (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event representation learning ignore relations and uncertainty of events . Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines on both existing and newly constructed datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to learning multi-relational probabilistic event embeddings based on contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks on existing and newly constructed datasets. |
DINER: Debiasing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Multi-variable Causal Inference (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase ABSA focus on single-variable causal inference . aspect-based sentiment analysis models are prone to learn spurious correlations from annotation biases . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework based on multivariable causal inference for debiasing ABSA . they propose to model different types of biases based upon different causal intervention methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework tackles different types of biases based on different intervention methods. |
Explainable Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews with Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on black-box neural networks, which lack interpretability, which is crucial in mental health contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented generation framework for Explainable depression detection that retrieves evidence from clinical interview transcripts, providing explanations for predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework retrieves evidence from clinical interview transcripts, providing explanations for predictions. |
Pre-training and Fine-tuning Neural Topic Model: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Incorporating External Knowledge (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that using external knowledge such as pre-trained word embeddings or pre-train language models only achieved limited performance improvements but with huge computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate external knowledge into neural topic modeling by pre-trained word embeddings (PWEs) or pre-train language models (PLMs) they propose to fine-tune the neural topic model on the target dataset and reduce the huge size of training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art neural topic models and some topic modeling approaches enhanced with PWEs or PLMs on three datasets and greatly reduces the huge size of training data. |
CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior implicit CoT methods have underperformed in terms of efficiency and robustness by relying on natural language tokens for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that compresses natural language CoT into continuous space by aligning hidden states of a designated token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in 3.1x compression rate and 28.2% accuracy on GSM8k scale. |
STAR: Constraint LoRA with Dynamic Active Learning for Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that supervised training is still necessary for complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate uncertainty-based active learning and LoRA to effectively integrate the two methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on three reasoning tasks. |
Beyond Text: Incorporating Metadata and Label Structure for Multi-Label Document Classification using Heterogeneous Graphs (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-label document classification ignore the heterogeneous graphical structures of metadata and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network based approach to multi-label document classification that uses two heterogeneous graphs to model metadata and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets. |
RGAR: Recurrence Generation-augmented Retrieval for Factual-aware Medical Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval approaches often overlook patient-specific factual knowledge embedded in EHRs . existing retrieval frameworks often overlook this factual information, limiting its effectiveness in clinical decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrence generation-augmented retrieval framework that synergizes factual and conceptual knowledge from dual sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on factual-aware medical QA benchmarks. |
MA2P: A Meta-Cognitive Autonomous Intelligent Agents Framework for Complex Persuasion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to persuasion generate generic or weakly grounded responses even when such cues are identified. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive autonomous intelligent agent framework for complex persuasion that coordinates perception management, mental-state inference, strategy execution, memory maintenance, and performance evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a higher persuasion success rate than baselines. |
Neural Topic Modeling based on Cycle Adversarial Training and Contrastive Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural topic models have been widely used to extract common topics across documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to apply contrastive learning directly to the decoder . they propose 'self-supervised' contrastive loss to make the generator capture similar topic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on four benchmark datasets. |
TECA: A Two-stage Approach with Controllable Attention Soft Prompt for Few-shot Nested Named Entity Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot nested named entity recognition (NER) ignore relationship between inner and outer entities, which is crucial for fewshot ner. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based method with a controllable attention soft prompt for few-shot nested named entity recognition (TECA) the span part identification provides possible entity mentions without an extra filtering module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on four benchmark datasets and outperformed competing models on F1-score by 5.62% on ACE04, 5.11% on ace05, 3.41% on KBP2017 and 0.7% on GENIA on the 10-shot setting. |
Sentiment Analysis on Streaming User Reviews via Dual-Channel Dynamic Graph Neural Network (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment analysis on user reviews neglect their time-varying characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-channel framework that models temporal user and product dynamics for sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing methods on five real-world datasets. |
Implicit Sentiment Analysis with Event-centered Text Representation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for implicit sentiment analysis simply view noun phrases or entities in text as events or indirectly model events with sophisticated models. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-centric implicit sentiment analysis that utilizes the sentiment-aware event contained in a sentence to infer sentiment polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect sentiment in sentences without sentiment words and is compared to existing models on a benchmark dataset. |
SCOPE: Optimizing Key-Value Cache Compression in Long-context Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Excessive compression during the prefill phase impairs comprehension of reasoning tasks . SCOPE is a framework that performs KV cache optimization during the decoding and prefill phases . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs optimization during the prefill and decoding phases . they propose enabling a sliding strategy to select essential heavy hitters for the decoding phase . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SCOPE can optimize key-value cache for long-context generation tasks . the framework can preserve essential information while minimizing memory usage and transfer . |
Beyond Static Artifacts: An Evolutionary Framework for Synthetic Claim Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing claim detection benchmarks treat claims as static textual artifacts . current research ignores sociological etiology of how information naturally emerges and mutates . |
| Approach: | They propose a socially generative framework for synthetic claim generation . they propose utterance, proposition and context-based simulations to capture truth decay . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm models claims as socially evolving entities . it allows precise simulation of truth decay and intervened propagation with multi-auditor oversight . |
Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion with Approximated Gaussian Process Embedding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing TKGC methods are based on deterministic vector embeddings, which are not flexible and expressive enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maps entities and relations to multivariate Gaussian processes by mapping global trends and local fluctuations in TKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict global trends and local fluctuations in the TKGs and can be optimized on two real-world benchmark datasets. |
WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Zhenglin Wang, Zekun Xi, Runnan Fang, Linhai Zhang, Yulan He, Deyu Zhou, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal by using an explore-critic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker in real-world scenarios. |
PROPER: A Progressive Learning Framework for Personalized Large Language Models with Group-Level Adaptation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personalized large language models (LLMs) aim to tailor outputs to user preferences . however, user data is typically sparse, making it challenging to adapt LLMs to specific user patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive learning framework that groups users based on preferences and adapts LLMs in stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA models across multiple tasks. |
Focusing, Bridging and Prompting for Few-shot Nested Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on few-shot named entity recognition (NER) addresses flat entities instead of nested entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method based on focusing, bridging and prompting for few-shot nested NER without using source domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on four benchmark datasets and outperformed several competing models on F1-score by 9.33% on ACE2004, 6.17% on ace2005, 9.40% on GENIA and 5.12% on KBP2017. |
SynGraph: A Dynamic Graph-LLM Synthesis Framework for Sparse Streaming User Sentiment Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional sentiment analysis methods focus on static reviews, failing to capture temporal relationship between user sentiment rating and textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic graph-based framework that addresses data sparsity in streaming reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces data sparsity by categorizing users into mid-tail, long-tail and extreme scenarios and incorporating LLM enhancements within a dynamic graph-based structure. |
SEE-Few: Seed, Expand and Entail for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot named entity recognition methods focus on leveraging existing datasets in the rich-resource domains which might fail in training-from-scratch setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework for Few-shot named entity recognition without using source domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot named entity recognition methods on a training-from-scratch dataset. |
A Novel Framework Based on Medical Concept Driven Attention for Explainable Medical Code Prediction via External Knowledge (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict medical codes from clinical notes lack interpretability due to lengthy and noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework based on medical concept driven attention to integrate external knowledge for explainable medical code prediction from clinical notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset showing that it is more accurate than existing methods. |
A Multi-label Multi-hop Relation Detection Model based on Relation-aware Sequence Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods treat multi-label learning problem as a single label . Existing approaches focus on measuring semantic similarity of questions and candidate relations . |
| Approach: | They propose to solve multi-hop relation detection problem by generating sequences of hops and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in KBQA, despite the unknown number of labels and hops. |
A Divide-And-Conquer Approach for Multi-label Multi-hop Relation Detection in Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation detection only detect one path to obtain the answer without considering other correct paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-and-conquer approach for multi-label multi-hop relation detection . they propose 'path sampling mechanism' to generate diverse relation paths . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms other competitive approaches on the FreebaseQA benchmark dataset. |
Beyond Meta-Reasoning: Metacognitive Consolidation for Self-Improving LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for improving LLM reasoning remain episodic and lack reusable meta-reasoning skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that consolidates metacognitive experience from past reasoning episodes into reusable knowledge that improves future meta-reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework consolidates metacognitive experience from past reasoning episodes into reusable knowledge that improves future meta-reasoning. |