Papers by Minghui Qiu
SpanProto: A Two-stage Span-based Prototypical Network for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot Named Entity Recognition ignore entity boundaries and are time-consuming . a seminal span-based prototypical network solves the problem using two stages: span extraction and mention classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a seminal span-based prototypical network that tackles few-shot NER . they transform sequential tags into a global boundary matrix and use prototypical learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines over multiple benchmarks. |
Knowledge-Empowered Representation Learning for Chinese Medical Reading Comprehension: Task, Model and Resources (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | MRC is a popular task in NLP, aiming to understand a passage and answer the relevant questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-target machine learning task for the medical domain that predicts answers to medical questions and corresponding support sentences from medical information sources simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by fusing context-aware and knowledge-awful token representations. |
Towards Unified Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Text Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Fuli Luo, Chuanqi Tan, Minghui Qiu, Fei Yang, Qiuhui Shi, Songfang Huang, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on few-shot text classification, but PLMs are unfamiliar with prompt-style expressions during pre-training, which limits the few- shot learning performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt-based fine-tuning that captures prompting semantics from non-target NLP datasets and propose 'Prompt-Options-Verbalizer' for joint prompt learning across different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-based fine-tuning frameworks on few-shot text classification tasks. |
UnClE: Explicitly Leveraging Semantic Similarity to Reduce the Parameters of Word Embeddings (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce word embedding parameters ignore semantic information . existing methods do not consider semantic information, allowing for performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages semantic similarity with weight sharing to reduce dimensionality of word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces word embedding parameters by more than 11x on a standard English-German dataset. |
Meta-Learning Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network for Few-Shot Text Classification (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for few-shot text classification rely on exploitation of lexical features and distributional signatures on training data, while neglecting to strengthen the model's ability to adapt to new tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework integrated with an adversarial domain adaptation network to improve the model's adaptive ability and generate high-quality text embedding for new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on four datasets and shows clear superiority over existing models. |
AudioVSR: Enhancing Video Speech Recognition with Audio Data (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaoda Yang, Xize Cheng, Jiaqi Duan, Hongshun Qiu, Minjie Hong, Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Zhiqing Hong, Zhimeng Zhang, Tao Jin
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown poor performance with non-Indo-European languages . previous work primarily utilizes video information to build VSR models . |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model for data inflation that integrates synthetic data with authentic visual data to enhance the VSR model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the audio-visual alignment problem in audio-video tasks. |
Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the learning of data-scarce target domains have negative transfer due to the data distributions between source and target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a reinforced selector to select helpful data for transfer learning and a Wasserstein-based discriminator to maximize the distance between the selected data and target data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on three real-world text mining tasks. |
VoCoT: Unleashing Visually Grounded Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Multi-Modal Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Despite the impressive capabilities of large multi-modal models, their effectiveness in handling complex tasks has been limited by the prevailing singlestep reasoning paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a visuallygrounded object-centric Chain-of-Thought reasoning framework for LMMs that is based on a multi-modal interleaved and aligned representation of object concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms SOTA models in CLEVR and EmbSpatial benchmarks. |
Meta Fine-Tuning Neural Language Models for Multi-Domain Text Mining (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained neural language models improve learning for various NLP tasks by fine-tuning them on task-specific training sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning procedure to fine-tune neural language models on task-specific training sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure solves a group of similar NLP tasks on a text mining dataset. |
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking. |
Transfer Learning for Context-Aware Question Matching in Information-seeking Conversations in E-commerce (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent researches focus on deep learning and reinforcement learning for multi-turn information seeking conversation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and effective multi-turn conversation model based on convolutional neural networks and extend it to adapt the knowledge learned from a resource-rich domain to enhance the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the existing model on an industrial chatbot called AliMe Assist. |
Reverse Modeling in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Using pre-trained LLMs with reversed text inputs can improve their performance across multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to determine whether LLMs can understand reversed text inputs by reversing entire paragraphs or documents at the token level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve understanding across multiple languages. |
TransPrompt: Towards an Automatic Transferable Prompting Framework for Few-shot Text Classification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that prompts improve performance of large pre-trained language models for few-shot text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based framework for few-shot learning that captures cross-task transferable knowledge and uses two de-biasing techniques to make it more task-agnostic and unbiased . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines over multiple NLP tasks and datasets. |
HRKD: Hierarchical Relational Knowledge Distillation for Cross-domain Language Model Compression (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown overwhelming performances on many tasks, but their large size and slow inference speed have hindered practical deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical relational knowledge distillation method to capture hierarchic and domain relational information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multi-domain datasets and is highly reproducible. |
ARTIST: A Transformer-based Chinese Text-to-Image Synthesizer Digesting Linguistic and World Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Synthesis (TIS) is a popular task to convert natural language texts into realistic images. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based Chinese text-to-image synthesizer for high-resolution image generation that incorporates linguistic and relational knowledge facts into the model to ensure better performance without the usage of ultra-large models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in Chinese with linguistic and relational knowledge facts. |
Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Contextual Language Representations for Domain Natural Language Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Taolin Zhang, Ruyao Xu, Chengyu Wang, Zhongjie Duan, Cen Chen, Minghui Qiu, Dawei Cheng, Xiaofeng He, Weining Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs with relational triples are difficult to adapt to close domains due to the lack of sufficient domain graph semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning framework for various closed domains that captures the implicit graph structure among the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs in closed domains significantly. |
EasyNLP: A Comprehensive and Easy-to-use Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Taolin Zhang, Tingting Liu, Lei Li, Jianing Wang, Ming Wang, Jun Huang, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) have reshaped the development of natural language processing (NLP) but it is not easy to obtain high-performing PTMs without a large amount of labeled training data and deploy them online with fast inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose to make it easy to build NLP applications with knowledge-enhanced pre-training and knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | EasyNLP supports a comprehensive suite of NLP algorithms and features knowledge-enhanced pre-training, knowledge distillation and few-shot learning functionalities. |
Knowledge Prompting in Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce redundant factual knowledge from knowledge bases and require complex modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge prompting-based PLM framework that incorporates factual knowledge into PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be flexibly combined with existing mainstream PLMs. |
SueNes: A Weakly Supervised Approach to Evaluating Single-Document Summarization via Negative Sampling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on automatic summary evaluation metrics focus on lexical similarity and require a reference summary which is expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a weakly supervised summary evaluation approach without the presence of reference summaries to transform existing summarization datasets into corrupted reference summarizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and shows that it improves linguistic quality over all metrics. |
Meta-KD: A Meta Knowledge Distillation Framework for Language Model Compression across Domains (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been successful in NLP tasks, but their large size and long inference time limit their deployment in real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-teacher model that captures transferable knowledge across domains and passes it to students. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distill large teacher models into small student models with guidance from the meta-teacher. |
SMedBERT: A Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Model with Structured Semantics for Medical Text Mining (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-based PLMs are based on linked-entity information, but they only use linked-enemy information as auxiliary information. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate semantic knowledge from neighbours of linked-entity into a medical PLM that integrates heterogeneous-entities into the homogeneously neighbouring entity structure. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SMedBERT outperforms baselines in knowledge-intensive Chinese medical tasks. |
KECP: Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Extractive Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extractive Question Answering (EQA) is one of the most essential tasks in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms extractive question answering into a non-autoregressive Masked Language Modeling (MLM) generation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot learning scenarios by a large margin. |
DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-based metrics are limited by their reliance on human input. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt some reference-based metrics to assess system summary against human-written references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms reference-based metrics on two datasets and is comparable to reference-free metrics. |
Decoder-Only LLMs can be Masked Auto-Encoders (2025.acl-short)
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Dan Qiao, Yuan Gao, Zheming Yang, Di Yang, Ziheng Wu, Pengcheng Lu, Minghui Qiu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Modern NLP workflows require different models for generation and embedding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transforms an LLM into a Uni-Directional Masked Auto-Encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art under unsupervised conditions with merely 100 training steps. |
Meta Distant Transfer Learning for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Notable PLMs are available for text classification tasks, but performance of PLM on downstream tasks may be limited by the availability of training set. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework to learn the transferable knowledge across tasks using PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on seven datasets and is task-agnostic and unbiased. |