Papers by Miaoran Zhang
AfriMTEB and AfriE5: Benchmarking and Adapting Text Embedding Models for African Languages (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Text embeddings are an essential building component of several NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a regional expansion of MTEB covering 59 languages, 14 tasks, and 38 datasets, including six newly added datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and mE5 in hate speech detection, intent detection, and emotion classification tasks. |
Preventing Author Profiling through Zero-Shot Multilingual Back-Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Documents as short as a single sentence may reveal sensitive information about authors . style transfer is effective but a number of current methods cause a drop in down-stream utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to remove sensitive information from documents by multilingual back-translation using off-the-shelf translation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers adversarial gender and race prediction by 22% while retaining 95% of original utility on downstream tasks. |
Unveiling the Key Factors for Distilling Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinghao Chen, Zhijing Sun, Guo Wenjin, Miaoran Zhang, Yanjun Chen, Yirong Sun, Hui Su, Yijie Pan, Dietrich Klakow, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
| Approach: | They examine the factors influencing CoT distillation including granularity, format and teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on four teacher models and seven student models across seven mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. |
Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Identifying beneficial tasks to transfer from is a critical step toward successful intermediate-task transfer learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that measures pairwise token similarity using maximum inner product search to improve task prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves task prediction scores from 2.59% to 3.96% for tasks requiring reasoning abilities, but not for reasoning abilities. |
A Lightweight Method to Generate Unanswerable Questions in English (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to build robust question answering models are too complex . antonym and entity swaps on answerable questions are used to build models . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for performing antonym and entity swaps on unanswerable questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art and has higher human-judged relatedness and readability. |
AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languages (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Israel Abebe Azime, Miaoran Zhang, Cristina España-Bonet, Rachel Bawden, Dawei Zhu, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Clement Oyeleke Odoje, Idris Akinade, Iffat Maab, Davis David, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Neo Putini, David O. Ademuyiwa, Andrew Caines, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | AFRIDOC-MT is a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering five languages . AFRITIC-MT models perform better on sentences than general-purpose LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 334 health and 271 information technology news documents . it shows that NLLB-200 achieves the best average performance among standard models . |
The Impact of Demonstrations on Multilingual In-Context Learning: A Multidimensional Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
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Miaoran Zhang, Vagrant Gautam, Mingyang Wang, Jesujoba Alabi, Xiaoyu Shen, Dietrich Klakow, Marius Mosbach
| Challenge: | In-context learning is a popular inference strategy where large language models solve a task using only a few labeled demonstrations without updating the model parameters. |
| Approach: | They conduct multidimensional analysis of multilingual in-context learning using 5 models from different model families and 9 datasets covering classification and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The results show that demonstrations vary significantly across models, tasks, and languages. |
SummaCoz: A Dataset for Improving the Interpretability of Factual Consistency Detection for Summarization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Summarization is an important application of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They integrate human-annotated and model-generated natural language explanations to elucidate how a summary deviates and becomes inconsistent with its source article. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides rationales for its judgments and improves its accuracy significantly. |
Fine-Tuning Large Language Models to Translate: Will a Touch of Noisy Data in Misaligned Languages Suffice? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation depends on large volume, diverse directions, and high quality of training data. |
| Approach: | They revisit the importance of large language models for translation by fine-tuning on 32 parallel sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be fine-tuned on as few as 32 parallel sentences . however, the choice of direction is critical to avoid misinterpretation, the authors say . |
MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings are limited by the complexity of pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art average Spearman’s correlation by 1.7% on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks. |
Self-Checker: Plug-and-Play Modules for Fact-Checking with Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact-checking text generated by large language models are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that harnesses large language models for efficient fact-checking in a few-shot manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is compared with state-of-the-art models and shows that it can be used to speed up fact-checking in a few-shot manner. |