Papers by Ming Zhong

45 papers
WhiteningBERT: An Easy Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Approach (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models perform well on learning sentence semantics when fine-tuned with supervised data.
Approach: They conduct a thorough examination of pretrained model based unsupervised sentence embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on whitening-based vector normalization with less than 10 lines of code.
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation.
Approach: They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved.
Outcome: The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment.
Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks for natural language generation are dominated by similarity-based metrics.
Approach: They propose a multi-dimensional evaluator for natural language generation that integrates multiple dimensions into one evaluer.
Outcome: The proposed evaluator improves on three typical NLG tasks and improves with external knowledge.
Vision-Language Model Fine-Tuning via Simple Parameter-Efficient Modification (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models have seen the success of prompt tuning and adapter tuning.
Approach: They propose a method to fine-tune CLIP without introducing any overhead of extra parameters.
Outcome: The proposed method improves CLIP by 7.27% average harmonic mean accuracy.
HSUGA: LLM-Enhanced Recommendation with Hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Group-Aware Alignment (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing sequential recommendation use long interaction sequences, but they lack the ability to extract user preferences from long sequences.
Approach: They propose a plugin that integrates LLMs to infer user preferences from interaction sequences.
Outcome: The proposed algorithms improve user semantic embedding extraction and utilization on three benchmark datasets.
ProQA: Structural Prompt-based Pre-training for Unified Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing QA research on question answering is focused on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills.
Approach: They propose a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model.
Outcome: The proposed model improves QA-centric ability on 11 QA benchmarks.
AssistedDS: Benchmarking How External Domain Knowledge Assists LLMs in Automated Data Science (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the automation of data science workflows, yet it remains unclear whether they can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate how large language models handle external domain knowledge in tabular prediction tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model evaluates whether it can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice.
Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Reaction Miner is a system designed to extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs.
Approach: They propose a system that extracts chemical reactions directly from raw scientific PDFs.
Outcome: The proposed system can extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs.
GEM: A General Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Tasks (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets that focus on natural language tasks are not considered as a general evaluation benchmark for multimodal tasks.
Approach: They present a general evaluation benchmark for multimodal tasks, GEM 1 . they compare it with existing multimodal vision-language datasets .
Outcome: The proposed model is compared with existing vision-language datasets focusing on natural language tasks . it is the largest vision-linguistic dataset covering image-language tasks and video-language task at the same time .
Mutual-Taught for Co-adapting Policy and Reward Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that this iterative approach leads to consistent improvements in both the policy model and reward model.
Approach: They propose a method that iteratively improves both the policy model and reward model without requiring additional human annotation.
Outcome: The proposed method improves both the policy model and reward model without human annotation.
Towards General-Domain Word Sense Disambiguation: Distilling Large Language Model into Compact Disambiguator (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Word Sense Disambiguation rely heavily on manually annotated data, which limits coverage and generalization.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages large language models as knowledge distillers to build silver-standard WSD corpora by combining generation-based distillation and annotation-based disambiguation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on general-domain benchmarks by 50% on the most challenging test set and by 1000 times fewer parameters.
The Shifted and The Overlooked: A Task-oriented Investigation of User-GPT Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks.
Approach: They analyze a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations to identify a significant gap between academic research in NLP and the needs of real-world NLP applications.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations and identifies a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks commonly studied in academic research.
Logic-Driven Context Extension and Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning of Text (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for logical reasoning of text focus on contextual semantics while struggling to explicitly model the logical inference process.
Approach: They propose a logic-driven context extension framework and a data-driven augmentation algorithm that uses contrastive learning to better capture logical information.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets, ReClor and LogiQA.
CiteSum: Citation Text-guided Scientific Extreme Summarization and Domain Adaptation with Limited Supervision (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Scientific extreme summarization (TLDR) aims to form ultra-short summaries of scientific papers . previous attempts failed to scale up due to heavy human annotation and domain expertise .
Approach: They propose a method to automatically extract TLDR summaries from scientific papers . they propose 'citeSum' with no human annotation, which is 30 times larger than SciTLDR .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms most fully-supervised methods on SciTLDR without fine-tuning and achieves state-of-the-art results with only 128 examples.
Instruct and Extract: Instruction Tuning for On-Demand Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models with instruction-following capabilities are not suitable for long-tail ad hoc extraction use cases for non-expert users.
Approach: They propose a task that follows instructions to extract the desired content from the associated text and present it in a structured tabular format.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm outperforms existing open-source models of similar size in terms of information extraction.
Weighted self Distillation for Chinese word segmentation (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent researches show that multi-criteria resources and n-gram features are beneficial to Chinese word segmentation (CWS).
Approach: They propose a framework that uses weighted self distillation to learn Chinese word segmentation using unigram features.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on SIGHAN Bakeoff datasets.
CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systems (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation methods for text summarization systems are limited to in-domain setting, where supervised pre-trained models are evaluated on the same dataset.
Approach: They propose to use a cross-dataset evaluation approach to evaluate different summarization systems in a multi-domain setting.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to evaluate text summarization systems on different datasets.
Temperature-Centric Investigation of Speculative Decoding with Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Speculative decoding is a novel method to expedite inference in autoregressive (large) language models.
Approach: They propose to use a smaller model as a draft model to speculate a block of tokens, which the target model then evaluates for acceptance.
Outcome: The proposed method can be used to accelerate inference in autoregressive (large) language models by using smaller models as draft models to speculate tokens for multiple inference steps.
A Survey on Training-free Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a survey of large language models (LLMs) aims to ensure outputs adhere to human values, ethical standards, and legal norms.
Approach: They present the first systematic review of TF alignment methods . they categorize them by stages of pre-decoding, in-decoder and post-decoration .
Outcome: The proposed methods are based on training-free (TF) alignment techniques . they are able to be used in open-source and closed-source environments without retraining .
ActionIE: Action Extraction from Scientific Literature with Programming Languages (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: a method that extracts experimental procedures from human language into actionable sequences in robotics language is challenging given the complexity of the instructions and context-dependent nature of the instruction.
Approach: They propose a method that converts actions written in natural language into Python code that can be easily translated into robotics language.
Outcome: The proposed method can extract experimental procedures from human language into actionable sequences in robotics language.
Reasoning Over Semantic-Level Graph for Fact Checking (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fact checking use string concatenation or fusing features of isolated evidence sentences.
Approach: They propose a method suitable for reasoning about the semantic-level structure of evidence . they use graph convolutional network and graph attention network to exploit the structure .
Outcome: The proposed method improves claim verification accuracy and FEVER score on a benchmark dataset.
ReactIE: Enhancing Chemical Reaction Extraction with Weak Supervision (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Structured chemical reaction information is a vital tool for chemists engaged in laboratory work and advanced endeavors such as computer-aided drug design.
Approach: They propose a method which utilizes frequent patterns within the text as linguistic cues to identify specific characteristics of chemical reactions.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and outperformed existing models.
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research on long-context scaling in language models has focused on managing lengthy input prompts instead of producing long outputs.
Approach: They propose a sequence-level curriculum learning framework that shifts a model’s focus from interpreting long chain-of-thoughts to generating them.
Outcome: Experiments on rigorous reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and GPQA Diamond, show that the proposed approach surpasses standard fine-tuning by over 10% while maintaining robust performance on understanding tasks.
Augmenting Legal Judgment Prediction with Contrastive Case Relations (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing legal judgment prediction methods only consider one case fact description as input, which may not fully utilize information in the data such as case relations and frequency.
Approach: They propose a new perspective that introduces some contrastive case relations to construct case triples as input and a corresponding judgment prediction framework with case triple modeling.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used to refine encoding and decoding processes using three customized modules on two public datasets.
Searching for Effective Neural Extractive Summarization: What Works and What’s Next (P19-1)

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Challenge: Recent years have seen success in the use of deep neural networks on text summarization, but there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well or how they might be improved.
Approach: They propose to use different types of model architectures to improve extractive summarization systems.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail by a large margin based on observations and analysis.
Beyond Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Analysis of Prompt Lexical Sensitivity and Its Impacts on Quality (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on prompt engineering have focused on optimizing models for performance under stylistic perturbations.
Approach: They conduct the first analysis of n-gram token-level mechanisms . they find that higher average performance is inherently associated with lower variance and greater stability.
Outcome: The proposed model reduces the variance of the generated code by 40% . the proposed model is based on a large-scale dataset of 132,000 prompt variants .
Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for instruction tuning do not include associating instructions with existing datasets.
Approach: They propose a dynamic growth paradigm for the automatic curation of instruction-tuning data . they use existing datasets to automatically construct instruction-uning datasets .
Outcome: The proposed model reduces the API cost for generating instructions and provides high-quality data.
QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on meeting summarization tasks is limited to short summaries that cover all the content of a meeting.
Approach: They propose a query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task that generates a single short summary of meetings based on a transcript.
Outcome: The proposed task is based on 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains.
Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods that use syntax of text in pre-training and fine-tuning suffer from discrepancy between the two stages.
Approach: They propose a model that utilizes the syntactic structure of text in pre-training and fine-tuning stages.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on six public benchmark datasets.
Extractive Summarization as Text Matching (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Currently, most of the neural extractive summarization systems score and extract sentences individually and model the relationship between sentences.
Approach: They propose to instantiate a neural extractive summarization task as a semantic text matching problem and use it to match a source document and candidate summaries in a semantic space.
Outcome: The proposed framework is faster and more efficient than existing frameworks.
Analytical Reasoning of Text (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing models with implicit reasoning ability struggle to solve analytical reasoning of text.
Approach: They propose an approach to analyze text and use it to perform reasoning over it.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms pre-trained models on an analysis of the Law School Admission Test dataset.
A Closer Look at Data Bias in Neural Extractive Summarization Models (D19-54)

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Challenge: In this paper, we examine the generalization behaviour of summarization models . we propose several properties of datasets that matter for generalization .
Approach: They propose several properties of datasets which matter for generalization of summarization models.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art model by rethinking the model design process on a typical dataset.
Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Question Classification and Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing research focuses on the optimization of prompts and improvements in workflow, with few studies delving into the exploration of the questions.
Approach: They propose a text-to-SQL framework based on question classification and multi-agent collaboration (QCMA-Sql) they employ multiple cross-attention mechanisms to train a schema selector to classify questions and select the most suitable database schema.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Spider dataset and achieves 87.4% execution accuracy.
Neural Deepfake Detection with Factual Structure of Text (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to deepfake detection typically represent documents with coarse-grained representations, but they struggle to capture factual structures of documents.
Approach: They propose a graph-based model that captures factual structures of documents for deepfake detection.
Outcome: The proposed model improves strong base models built with RoBERTa on two public deepfake datasets.
Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Speaker-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing summarization systems based on pre-trained models cannot recognize the unique format of the speaker-utterance pair well in the dialogue.
Approach: They propose three speaker-aware supervised contrastive learning tasks to solve the speaker identification problem in dialogue summarization task.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve on two mainstream dialogue summarization datasets.
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately .
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes .
Outcome: The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show .
LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fact checking textual statements are not yet available.
Approach: They propose a neural network approach capable of leveraging logical operations for fact checking . they use a textual statement and semi-structured tables to generate a program from it .
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on TABFACT dataset . it derives a program (a.k.a. logical form) of the statement in semantic parsing manner .
PREME: Preference-based Meeting Exploration through an Interactive Questionnaire (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that providing meeting summaries does not align with current approaches to document summarization.
Approach: They propose a framework for generating questionnaires for preference-based meeting exploration . they measure how much questions are answerable to ensure factual correctness .
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a list of suggested questions reflecting user preferences . it measures how much questions are answerable to ensure factual correctness .
CoLo: A Contrastive Learning Based Re-ranking Framework for One-Stage Summarization (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extractive and abstractive summarization use token-level or sentence-level training objectives.
Approach: They propose a Contrastive Learning based re-ranking framework for one-stage summarization called CoLo.
Outcome: The proposed framework boosts extractive and abstractive results on CNN/DailyMail benchmarks while maintaining inference efficiency.
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on cross-lingual summarization (CLS) does not consider crosslingual sources for summarizing.
Approach: They propose a cross-lingual conversation summarization benchmark that explicitly considers source context.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses baselines on ConvSumX and 3 widely-used manual annotations.
Compare to The Knowledge: Graph Neural Fake News Detection with External Knowledge (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fake news detection rely on linguistic and semantic features from news content and do not exploit external knowledge.
Approach: They propose a graph neural model which compares news to knowledge base through entities for fake news detection.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.
Unsupervised Multi-Granularity Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Experimental results confirm the substantial superiority of GranuSum on multi-granularity summarization over strong baselines.
Approach: They propose to rank events by their salience and annotate a benchmark for GranuSum that contains multiple summaries at different granularities for each document cluster.
Outcome: The proposed framework is capable of producing multi-granular summaries in unsupervised manner over strong baselines.
Leveraging Declarative Knowledge in Text and First-Order Logic for Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-grained propaganda detection are not based on input-output data, but instead use declarative knowledge to detect propagandistic text fragments.
Approach: They propose a method to inject declarative knowledge of fine-grained propaganda techniques into training data to get better representations of propagandistic texts.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves superior performance on a large dataset for propaganda detection.
Mixed-modality Representation Learning and Pre-training for Joint Table-and-Text Retrieval in OpenQA (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to retrieve evidences from corpus are difficult due to table-text discrepancy and data sparsity problem.
Approach: They propose an optimized OpenQA Table-Text Retriever to retrieve tabular and textual evidences from tabular resources.
Outcome: The proposed OpenQA Table-Text Retriever significantly outperforms existing methods on QA tasks.
Open-Vocabulary Argument Role Prediction For Event Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies on event extraction depend on pre-defined argument roles . despite great progress, many studies still rely on hand-crafted ontologies .
Approach: They propose an unsupervised framework for customizing argument roles for event extraction . they propose a human-annotated event extraction dataset with 143 customized argument roles .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on an event extraction dataset.

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