Papers by Ricardo Henao
Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for sequence labeling are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback . they identify context and feedback biases by formulating interactive sequence labels via a Structural Causal Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can effectively alleviate the biases and can be learnt with the user feedback. |
Learning Subjective Label Distributions via Sociocultural Descriptors (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional approaches aggregate annotator judgements (labels), ignoring minority perspectives, and overlooking the influence of sociocultural context behind such annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where subjectivity in binary labels is modeled as an empirical distribution accounting for the variation in annotators through human values extracted from sociocultural descriptors using a language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields well-calibrated toxicity distribution predictions across binary toxicity labels, which are further used for majority label prediction across cultural subgroups. |
Calibrating Model-Based Evaluation Metrics for Summarization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in summary evaluation are based on model-based metrics to assess quality dimensions, such as completeness, conciseness, and faithfulness. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework that generates individual and average proxy scores without relying on reference summaries, human annotations, or expensive model-based metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on seven datasets on continuous-value scenarios, such as summarization, but is applicable to discrete-value tasks, such QA. |
Learning to Control Summaries with Score Ranking (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in summarization focus on improving summary quality across multiple dimensions, but they overlook the challenge of controlling summary generation with respect to individual dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a loss function that aligns model outputs with fine-grained, model-based evaluation scores to enable both improvement in summary quality and dimension-specific control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the overall quality of summaries while maintaining strong control over individual quality dimensions. |
Joint Embedding of Words and Labels for Text Classification (P18-1)
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Guoyin Wang, Chunyuan Li, Wenlin Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Dinghan Shen, Xinyuan Zhang, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text classification use word embeddings to capture semantic regularities between words. |
| Approach: | They propose to view text classification as a label-word joint embedding problem . they use a framework that measures compatibility between text sequences and labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on large text datasets. |
Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Junda Wu, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Ricardo Henao
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) are used for personalized federated learning . communication costs are high with large PLMs, and local training is expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for federated learning with pretrained language models . they propose 'discrete local search' and compression mechanism for local training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance compared with baselines. |
NASH: Toward End-to-End Neural Architecture for Generative Semantic Hashing (P18-1)
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Dinghan Shen, Qinliang Su, Paidamoyo Chapfuwa, Wenlin Wang, Guoyin Wang, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fast similarity search require two-stage training and the binary constraints are handled ad-hoc. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural architecture for semantic hashing where binary hash codes are treated as Bernoulli latent variables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on unsupervised and supervised scenarios on three public datasets. |
Improved Semantic-Aware Network Embedding with Fine-Grained Word Alignment (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to network embeddings focus on one-hot representations of vertices, which are not able to capture relationships between verti- ces. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate semantic features into network embeddings by matching important words between text sequences for all pairs of vertices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art embedding methods on three real-world benchmarks for downstream tasks including link prediction and multi-label vertex classification. |
Unsupervised Paraphrasing Consistency Training for Low Resource Named Entity Recognition (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods augment input sequence with token replacement, assuming annotations on the replaced positions are unchanged. |
| Approach: | They propose to use paraphrasing to enhance unsupervised consistency training by replacing tokens with augmented data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is especially effective when annotations are limited. |
Learning to Substitute Words with Model-based Score Ranking (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms both masked language models and large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based scoring approach to quantify sentence quality . they propose 'loss function' that optimizes alignment between model predictions and sentence scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms masked language models and large language models in the quantitative analysis of word substitutions. |
SpanPredict: Extraction of Predictive Document Spans with Neural Attention (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | identifying predictive text in clinical notes can be as important as the predictions themselves . identifying specific content in clinical note descriptions may illuminate previously unknown risk factors . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for identifying predictive text in clinical notes . they use linear attention to formalize the problem as predictive extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model preserves differentiability and allows scalable inference via stochastic gradient descent. |
Baseline Needs More Love: On Simple Word-Embedding-Based Models and Associated Pooling Mechanisms (P18-1)
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Dinghan Shen, Guoyin Wang, Wenlin Wang, Martin Renqiang Min, Qinliang Su, Yizhe Zhang, Chunyuan Li, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing deep learning architectures to model compositionality in text sequences require a large number of parameters and expensive computations. |
| Approach: | They propose two additional pooling strategies over word embeddings for improved interpretability and hierarchical pooling for spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pooling strategies improve interpretability and preserve spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. |
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of Named Entity Recognition (NER) are trained on large datasets with predefined entity classes, but data of new classes arrives constantly. Existing work on NER relies on the assumption that there exists abundance of labeled data for the training of new class. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot class-incremental learning problem where NER model is trained with only few labeled samples of the new classes without forgetting knowledge of the old ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over existing baselines by reconstructing training data of old classes and real data from the training set. |
Integrating Task Specific Information into Pretrained Language Models for Low Resource Fine Tuning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pretrained language models are agnostic to downstream information and can overfit when fine-tuned with low resource datasets. |
| Approach: | They integrate label information as a task-specific prior into the self-attention component of pretrained BERT models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmarks and real-word datasets show that the proposed approach can improve the performance of pretrained models when fine-tuned with small datasets. |
Federated Domain Adaptation for Named Entity Recognition via Distilling with Heterogeneous Tag Sets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a federated domain adaptation approach is used to learn with NER datasets from multiple platforms while not violating data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a distillation approach to facilitate knowledge transfer across platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in the clinic domain. |
Open World Classification with Adaptive Negative Samples (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with no effective open category data during training are limited by the lack of effective open categories data during the training stage. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to generate effective open category samples in the training stage and without requiring prior knowledge or external datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates effective synthetic open category samples in the training stage and without requiring any prior knowledge or external datasets. |