Papers by Maria Wang
PhotoChat: A Human-Human Dialogue Dataset With Photo Sharing Behavior For Joint Image-Text Modeling (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PhotoChat to facilitate research on image-text modeling by combining a photo-sharing intent prediction task and a picture retrieval task to retrieve the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks achieve 10.4% recall@1 and 58.1% F1 scores, indicating that the proposed dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. |
A Survey on LLMs for Story Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Maria Teleki, Vedangi Bengali, Xiangjue Dong, Sai Tejas Janjur, Haoran Liu, Tian Liu, Cong Wang, Ting Liu, Yin Zhang, Frank Shipman, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Methods for story generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) have come into the spotlight recently. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel taxonomy of LLMs for story generation consisting of two major paradigms: independent story generation by an LLM, and author-assistance for story creation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy compares existing work on the topic with those of novel author-assistance models. |
PRBench: Large-Scale Expert Rubrics for Evaluating High-Stakes Professional Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Afra Feyza Akyürek, Advait Gosai, Chen Bo Calvin Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Jaehwan Jeong, Anisha Gunjal, Tahseen Rabbani, Maria Mazzone, David Randolph IV, Mohammad Mahmoudi Meymand, Gurshaan Chattha, Paula Rodriguez, Diego A. Mares Buendia, Pavit Singh, Michael Liu, Subodh Chawla, Peter Cline, Lucy Ogaz, Ernesto Gabriel Hernández Montoya, Zihao Wang, Pavi Bhatter, Marcos Ayestaran, Bing Liu, Yunzhong He
| Challenge: | Frontier models often lack a view of performance on open-ended, economically consequential tasks in high-stakes professional domains where practical returns matter most. |
| Approach: | They introduce a professional reasoning benchmark that recruits 182 qualified professionals to contribute questions inspired by their workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models in 114 countries and 47 US jurisdictions on hard subsets. |
Template-based Abstractive Microblog Opinion Summarization (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on Twitter uses extractive summarization to filter through information, but this approach often includes incomplete or redundant information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Twitter data to generate 3100 gold-standard opinion summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous work on extractive summarization models and fine-tunes to improve performance. |
ScreenQA: Large-Scale Question-Answer Pairs Over Mobile App Screenshots (2025.naacl-long)
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Yu-Chung Hsiao, Fedir Zubach, Gilles Baechler, Srinivas Sunkara, Victor Carbune, Jason Lin, Maria Wang, Yun Zhu, Jindong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing screen datasets focus on low-level structural and component understanding or on a much higher-level composite task such as navigation and task completion for autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate 86k question-answer pairs over the RICO dataset to benchmark screen content understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers full answers, short answer phrases, and corresponding UI contents with bounding boxes, enabling four subtasks to address various application scenarios. |
Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Identifying and translating scientific jargon for individual researchers could speed up research, but current methods of jaron identification rely on corpus-level familiarity indicators rather than modeling researcher-specific needs. |
| Approach: | They collect over 10K term familiarity annotations from 11 computer science researchers and investigate supervised and prompt-based methods to predict individual jargon familiarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves jargon familiarity prediction by using domain, subdomain, and individual knowledge. |
Towards Better Semantic Understanding of Mobile Interfaces (2022.coling-1)
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Srinivas Sunkara, Maria Wang, Lijuan Liu, Gilles Baechler, Yu-Chung Hsiao, Jindong Chen, Abhanshu Sharma, James W. W. Stout
| Challenge: | a dataset of 500k unique annotations is released to improve mobile accessibility and automation capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an annotation dataset to improve the accessibility of mobile UIs . they use images and view hierarchies to augment annotations for icons and their semantics - and use multimodal inputs to build models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that it can be used to improve UIs and categories on unseen apps. |
Fundamental Reasoning Paradigms Induce Out-of-Domain Generalization in Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Mingzi Cao, Xingwei Tan, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Marco Valentino, Maria Liakata, Xi Wang, Nikolaos Aletras
| Challenge: | Deduction, induction, and abduction are fundamental reasoning paradigms, core for human logical thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of symbolic tasks to induce deductive skills into large language models (LLMs) they then use FT to fine-tune models to improve OOD generalization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields strong generalizability with substantial performance gains (up to 14.60) across realistic out-of-domain tasks. |
An Efficient Conversational Smart Compose System (2023.acl-demo)
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Yun Zhu, Xiayu Chen, Lei Shu, Bowen Tan, Xinying Song, Lijuan Liu, Maria Wang, Jindong Chen, Ning Ruan
| Challenge: | a cloud-based smart compose system is designed to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a cloud-based smart compose system to improve conversation efficiency . they propose heuristics to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces latency without losing composing quality further. |
Co2PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models can encode unfair social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biase in downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a *debias-while-prompt tuning* method for mitigating biases via counterfactual contrastive prompt tuning on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can mitigate biases on three extrinsic bias benchmarks and adapt to existing debiased language models. |
JobFair: A Framework for Benchmarking Gender Hiring Bias in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Ze Wang, Zekun Wu, Xin Guan, Michael Thaler, Adriano Koshiyama, Skylar Lu, Sachin Beepath, Ediz Ertekin, Maria Perez-Ortiz
| Challenge: | a framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) is developed to protect vulnerable demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models for resume scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals significant issues of reverse gender hiring bias and overdebiasing in ten state-of-the-art LLMs. |
CHOIR: Harmonizing Structured Persona Diversity for Robust Collaborative LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Persona-assigned Large Language Models can be useful for personalized, context-aware reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harmonizes demographic perturbations into a unified prediction by balancing agreement and divergence among counterfactual personas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning performance even when base personas are suboptimal. |
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
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Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Akbar, Lester James Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno Kampman, Joel Moniz, Muhammad Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Jann Montalan, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Joanito Lopo, William Nixon, Börje Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Irawan, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Ryanda, Sonny Hermawan, Dan Velasco, Muhammad Kautsar, Willy Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region . |
Evaluation of Thematic Coherence in Microblogs (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on grouping together views about tweets expressing opinions about the same entities has been criticized for their lack of thematic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a corpus of microblogs representing opinions about the same topics within the same time window to evaluate thematic coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms surface level metrics, topic model coherence and text generation metrics (TGMs) but is not as reliable as TGMs due to being less sensitive to time windows. |