Papers by Patrick Ng
End-to-End Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering Systems (2020.emnlp-main)
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Siamak Shakeri, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng, Feng Nan, Zhiguo Wang, Ramesh Nallapati, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for synthetic QA data generation have limited or no success in improving the downstream Reading Comprehension task. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end approach for synthetic QA data generation using a transformer-based encoder-decoder network that is trained end- to-end to generate both answers and questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in the domain adaptation of QA models. |
Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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Yiqun Hu, Yiyun Zhao, Jiarong Jiang, Wuwei Lan, Henghui Zhu, Anuj Chauhan, Alexander Hanbo Li, Lin Pan, Jun Wang, Chung-Wei Hang, Sheng Zhang, Jiang Guo, Mingwen Dong, Joseph Lilien, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers lack the data to perform well with augmented synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that imposes strong typing constraints and incorporates key relationships from schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the high-quality synthesized SQL and natural language question (NLQ) models have significant accuracy boosts and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on spider. |
Answering Ambiguous Questions through Generative Evidence Fusion and Round-Trip Prediction (2021.acl-long)
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Yifan Gao, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Zhiguo Wang, Feng Nan, Dejiao Zhang, Ramesh Nallapati, Andrew O. Arnold, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering is a task to answer questions using passages with diverse topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that aggregates evidence from multiple passages to adaptively predict a single answer or a set of question-answer pairs for ambiguous questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AmbigQA dataset and shows competitive performance on NQ-Open and TriviaQA. |
Retrieval, Re-ranking and Multi-task Learning for Knowledge-Base Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on question answering over knowledge bases limited the search space to a subset of KBs . a retrieval-and-rerank framework is used to access KB and rerank retrieved candidates with more powerful neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to share a BERT encoder across all three sub-tasks and define task-specific layers on top of the shared layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy on the SimpleQuestions dataset and the FreebaseQA dataset. |
You Only Read Once (YORO): Learning to Internalize Database Knowledge for Text-to-SQL (2025.naacl-long)
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Hideo Kobayashi, Wuwei Lan, Peng Shi, Shuaichen Chang, Jiang Guo, Henghui Zhu, Zhiguo Wang, Patrick Ng
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL systems encode the same schema for every question, resulting in unnecessary high inference cost and missing crucial database knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that directly internalizes database knowledge into the parametric knowledge of a text-to-SQL model during training and eliminates the need for schema encoding during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm significantly reduces the input token length by 66%-98% and outperforms traditional systems on three benchmarks. |
Benchmarking Diverse-Modal Entity Linking with Generative Models (2023.findings-acl)
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Sijia Wang, Alexander Hanbo Li, Henghui Zhu, Sheng Zhang, Pramuditha Perera, Chung-Wei Hang, Jie Ma, William Yang Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang, Patrick Ng
| Challenge: | Existing models for diverse-mode entity linking (EL) work well on per modality configurations, but it is more challenging to design a unified model for diverse modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative diverse-modal model that integrates text, image and table . they propose combining a multimodal encoder-decoder paradigm with a fine-tuning GDMM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by 8.51 F1 on average for diverse-modal EL. |
Template-Based Question Generation from Retrieved Sentences for Improved Unsupervised Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Question Answering (QA) is a field of increasing demand due to the availability of information online. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to training QA models with generated pseudo-training data by applying a simple template on a related sentence rather than the original context sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of a QA model on generated pseudo-training data. |
Improving Cross-task Generalization of Unified Table-to-text Models with Compositional Task Configurations (2023.findings-acl)
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Jifan Chen, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Rui Dong, Xinchi Chen, Patrick Ng, William Yang Wang, Zhiheng Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multitask learning typically use a dataset name as input prefix, which limits the effectiveness of multitask training. |
| Approach: | They propose compositional task configurations, a set of prompts prepended to the encoder to improve cross-task generalization of unified models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the UnifiedSKG baseline by noticeable margins in both in-domain and zero-shot settings. |
Few-Shot Data-to-Text Generation via Unified Representation and Multi-Source Learning (2023.acl-long)
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Alexander Hanbo Li, Mingyue Shang, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, Jie Ma, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Bonan Min, William Yang Wang, Kathleen McKeown, Vittorio Castelli, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data-to-text generation focus on specific types of structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides a unified representation that can handle various forms of structured data such as tables, knowledge graph triples, and meaning representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot and few-shot scenarios and can adapt to new structured data. |
Dual Reader-Parser on Hybrid Textual and Tabular Evidence for Open Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative models for open-domain question answering focus on generating direct answers from unstructured textual information, but a large amount of knowledge is stored in structured databases, and need to be accessed using query languages such as SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid framework that takes both textual and tabular evidences as input and generates either direct answers or SQL queries depending on which form could better answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on OpenSQuAD datasets and can generate SQL queries on the associated databases to obtain the final answers. |
Improving Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Fine-grained Query Understanding (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Jun Wang, Patrick Ng, Alexander Hanbo Li, Jiarong Jiang, Zhiguo Wang, Bing Xiang, Ramesh Nallapati, Sudipta Sengupta
| Challenge: | Recent research on Text-to-SQL semantic parsing relies on parser or heuristic based approach to understand natural language query. |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose, modular neural semantic parsing framework that is based on token-level fine-grained query understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model by 2.7% on a WikiTableQuestions test set. |
Propagation and Pitfalls: Reasoning-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing through Counterfactual Tasks (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to effectively propagate updates to interconnected facts, limiting the performance of reasoning tasks based on these updated facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-based benchmark, ReCoE, which covers six common reasoning schemes in the real world. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning-based benchmark shows that current models struggle to propagate updated knowledge within reasoning schemes. |
Improving Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization via Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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Feng Nan, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng, Kathleen McKeown, Ramesh Nallapati, Dejiao Zhang, Zhiguo Wang, Andrew O. Arnold, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that about 30% of summaries generated by neural text summarization suffer from fact fabrication. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic evaluation metric to measure factual consistency and a learning algorithm that maximizes the metric during model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves factual consistency and overall quality of summarization models. |
PRACTIQ: A Practical Conversational Text-to-SQL dataset with Ambiguous and Unanswerable Queries (2025.naacl-long)
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Mingwen Dong, Nischal Ashok Kumar, Yiqun Hu, Anuj Chauhan, Chung-Wei Hang, Shuaichen Chang, Lin Pan, Wuwei Lan, Henghui Zhu, Jiarong Jiang, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL systems focus on user questions with clear intentions that can be answered, but real user questions can be ambiguous with multiple interpretations or unanswerable due to a lack of relevant data. |
| Approach: | They construct a conversational text-to-SQL dataset called PRACTIQ, consisting of ambiguous and unanswerable questions inspired by real-world user questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates conversations with four turns, generating the user’s question, an assistant response seeking clarification, and the user's clarified SQL response with the natural language explanation of the execution results. |
Generative Context Pair Selection for Multi-hop Question Answering (2021.emnlp-main)
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Dheeru Dua, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Patrick Ng, Ben Athiwaratkun, Bing Xiang, Matt Gardner, Sameer Singh
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that discriminative training results in models that exploit these underlying biases to achieve a better held-out performance, without learning the right way to reason. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative context selection model for multi-hop QA that reasons about how the given question could have been generated given a context pair and not just independent contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on hotpotQA while being comparable to the state of the art answering performance on adversarial held-out set. |
Multi-passage BERT: A Globally Normalized BERT Model for Open-domain Question Answering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that BERT models can find answers from multiple passages . however, the results of these studies are still unaddressed. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-passage BERT model to globally normalize answer scores across all passages of the same question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on four benchmarks. |
Generate then Select: Open-ended Visual Question Answering Guided by World Knowledge (2023.findings-acl)
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Xingyu Fu, Sheng Zhang, Gukyeong Kwon, Pramuditha Perera, Henghui Zhu, Yuhao Zhang, Alexander Hanbo Li, William Yang Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Patrick Ng, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to reason over visual and natural language inputs using world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new VQA pipeline that deploys a generate-then-select strategy guided by world knowledge for the first time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline expands the knowledge coverage from in-domain training data by 4.1% on OK-VQA, without additional computation cost. |
What Really Matters for Table LLMs? A Meta-Evaluation of Model and Data Effects (2026.findings-eacl)
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Naihao Deng, Sheng Zhang, Henghui Zhu, Shuaichen Chang, Jiani Zhang, Alexander Hanbo Li, Chung-Wei Hang, Hideo Kobayashi, Yiqun Hu, Patrick Ng
| Challenge: | a series of paradigm shifts have come with distinct characteristics and challenges associated with table modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to replicate four table LLMs by instruction-tuning three foundation models on four existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The results show that base model choice plays a more dominant role than training data itself. |