Papers by Maximillian Chen
FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing syntactic similarity metrics are computationally expensive and inconsistent when faced with syntaktically dissimilar documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric which pairs and averages the most similar constituency parse trees between a pair of documents based on tree kernels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is more robust to syntactic dissimilarities and runs up to 5.32 times faster than its predecessor over documents in the r/ChangeMyView corpus. |
PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis (2023.findings-eacl)
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Maximillian Chen, Alexandros Papangelis, Chenyang Tao, Seokhwan Kim, Andy Rosenbaum, Yang Liu, Zhou Yu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Currently, collecting high quality conversational data is expensive and infeasible for many applications . a promising direction is to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose to use expert-written conversations as in-context examples to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is generalizable to multi-party conversations, compared to human-collected conversations. |
M2-TabFact: Multi-Document Multi-Modal Fact Verification with Visual and Textual Representations of Tabular Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking systems that can reason over structured data are inefficient compared to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal table-based fact verification task that requires reasoning over visual and textual representations of structured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reason over visual and textual representations of structured data. |
Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy Planning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Optimal policy planning is a difficult task, authors say . many goal-oriented conversations require subjective strategies, they say - a problem in goal-orientated settings . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to perform goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without model training. |
Data-Centric Improvements for Enhancing Multi-Modal Understanding in Spoken Conversation Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Conversational assistants are increasingly popular across diverse real-world applications . speech data constitute high-dimensional signals that are difficult to model even for frontier models . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric customization approach for enhancing multimodal understanding in conversational speech modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the Spoken-SQuAD benchmark using 10% of training data with open-weight models. |
Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Training conversational question-answering systems requires in-domain data, which is often scarce in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a bottom-up approach where QA pairs are generated first and combined into a coherent dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach produces more realistic and higher-quality dialogues compared to top-down methods. |
Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialogue (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue systems are designed for chatbots to communicate with and influence users with specific goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular dialogue system framework that integrates factual information and social content into persuasive dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is generalizable to any dialogue tasks that have mixed social and task contents. |
Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Mixed initiative dialogue systems allow all interacting agents to initiate actions to control the interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt large language models as a drop-in replacement for fine-tuning on conditional generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompts improve fine-tuning and ground truth responses . the results show that generated responses are high . |
VarBench: Robust Language Model Benchmarking Through Dynamic Variable Perturbation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent benchmarks release only training and validation sets, keeping the test set labels closed-source. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract variables from each test case and define a value range for each variable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of the evaluations on four datasets covering mathematical generation and multiple-choice tasks. |