Papers by Ru Li
Incorporating Syntax and Frame Semantics in Neural Network for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for machine reading comprehension rely on manually defined features and are difficult to generalize to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Syntax and Frame Semantics model for Machine Reading Comprehension which takes full advantage of syntax and frame semantics to get richer text representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms ten state-of-the-art models on machine reading comprehension tasks. |
A Frame-based Sentence Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine learning approaches do not have above semantic knowledge to address complicated MRC questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a frame-based Sentence Representation method which integrates frame semantic knowledge to facilitate sentence modelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods on machine reading comprehension task. |
Trigger-Argument based Explanation for Event Detection (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing works on ED use words or phrases to explain models’ inner mechanisms, but for ED, the event structure is more enlightening clues to explain model behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Trigger-Argument based Explanation method which can utilize event structure knowledge to uncover a faithful interpretation for existing ED models at neuron level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reveal the process by which the model predicts on the large-scale MAVEN and the widely-used ACE 2005 datasets. |
EventOA: An Event Ontology Alignment Benchmark Based on FrameNet and Wikidata (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event ontologies focus on entity-based OA, and neglect event-based one . however, independent development of event ontoologies often results in heterogeneous representations that raise the need for establishing alignments between semantically related events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view event ontology alignment method that utilizes description information and neighbor information to obtain richer representations of the event ontoologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing entity-based methods and can serve as a strong baseline for future research. |
Dynamic Energy-Based Contrastive Learning with Multi-Stage Knowledge Verification for Event Causality Identification (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event causal identification rely on rule-based or random sampling strategies, which introduce spurious causal positives. |
| Approach: | They propose an ECI method enhanced by Dynamic Energy-based Contrastive Learning with multi-stage knowledge verification which generates high-quality contrastive samples and effectively suppresses spurious causal disturbances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmarks. |
Hyperspherical Multi-Prototype with Optimal Transport for Event Argument Extraction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Event Argument Extraction (EAE) aims to extract arguments for specified events from a text . previous work focused on long-distance dependencies of arguments, modeling co-occurrence relationships . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that takes inductive biases as targets to locate prototypes . they set multiple prototypes to represent each role to capture intra-class differences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the RAMS and WikiEvents datasets. |
Active Sentence Learning by Adversarial Uncertainty Sampling in Discrete Space (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing uncertainty sampling methods are time-consuming and can't be executed frequently. |
| Approach: | They propose adversarial uncertainty sampling in discrete space to find informative unlabeled text samples for annotation using adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on effectiveness on five datasets. |
Enhancing Event Causality Identification with LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify causal relationships between events often overlook the dependencies between similar events. |
| Approach: | They propose an ECI method enhanced by LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (LKCER) the method constructs a conceptual-level heterogeneous event graph by leveraging local contextual information of related event mentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both benchmarks, EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank. |
Leibniz: Theory-of-Mind Driven Neuro-Symbolic Logical Reasoning via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for logical reasoning with large language models suffer from insufficient rule semantic grounding and weak rule application mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory-of-mind driven neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that integrates natural language and symbolic representations throughout the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models in reasoning accuracy and flexibility. |
Inference-Time Decontamination: Reusing Leaked Benchmarks for Large Language Model Evaluation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current LLMs are achieving better performance on various benchmarks, but their performance in practical applications does not always match their benchmark results. |
| Approach: | They propose to detect and rewrite leaked benchmarks without altering their difficulties by using Inference-Time Decontamination (ITD) to mitigate performance inflation caused by memorizing leaked samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces inflated accuracy by 22.9% on GSM8K and 19.0% on MMLU. |
Improving Sequential Model Editing with Fact Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fix erroneous knowledge in Pre-trained Language models experience a performance decline when the number of edits increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages factual information to enhance editing generalization and guide the identification of edits by retrieving related facts from the fact-patch memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve model generalization and accuracy even with thousands of edits. |
Suggest-Verify-Revise: A Three-Stage Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Narrative Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level Event Causality Identification rely on local semantic similarity for independent event-pair discrimination . Existing approaches ignore the influence of the overall narrative backbone in the propagation of causal dependencies and the role differentiation of events within multi-cause/multi-effect structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a suggest-verify-revise approach for document-level Event Causality Identification with narrative consistency (SVRECI) they integrate heuristic causal suggestions generated by an LLM with structural suggestions derived from hypergraph modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on event-storylines and Causal-TimeBank datasets. |
Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Entity Typing over Knowledge Graphs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to knowledge graph entity typing ignore the way types can be clustered together. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that effectively encodes coarse-grained knowledge from clusters into entity and type embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method encodes coarse-grained knowledge from clusters into entity and type embeddings. |
DAGCN: Distance-based and Aspect-oriented Graph Convolutional Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in sentiment analysis tend to interference from local factors such as irrelevant words and edges, hindering the precise identification of opinion words. |
| Approach: | They propose a distance-based syntactic weight and Aspect-Fusion Attention to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three public datasets and verify its effectiveness. |
Integrating Semantic Scenario and Word Relations for Abstractive Sentence Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based methods only consider word relations or structure information, which neglect the correlation between them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Graph network for Abstractive Sentence Summarization that captures word relations and structure information from sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular benchmark datasets. |
Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level relation extraction relied on implicitly powerful representations, which makes the model less transparent. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in relation performance and logical consistency. |
Transformer-based Entity Typing in Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs encoding entity types are far from complete, since in real-world applications they are continuously emerging. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based approach to infer plausible entity types by encoding neighbours' information by a local transformer and a global transformer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on two real-world datasets. |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
GCRC: A New Challenging MRC Dataset from Gaokao Chinese for Explainable Evaluation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine reading comprehension datasets lack an explainable evaluation of systems' reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset with multi-choice questions that evaluates MRC systems' reasoning process . they use sentence-level relevant supporting facts, error reason of distractors to evaluate MRC . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is more challenging and useful for identifying limitations of existing MRC systems in an explainable way. |
Inference Helps PLMs’ Conceptual Understanding: Improving the Abstract Inference Ability with Hierarchical Conceptual Entailment Graphs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to abstract inference ignore the *polysemy* and *hierarchical nature of concepts* . prevailing approaches disregard how arguments might entail differently across various concept levels, thereby missing potential enlargement connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes arguments hierarchically and delves into entailment relations at diverse concept levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the model's generalization and reasoning prowess in natural language inference. |
FRVA: Fact-Retrieval and Verification Augmented Entailment Tree Generation for Explainable Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating a entailment tree exhibit the reasoning chains from knowledge facts to predicted answers, but they have large fact search spaces and error accumulation problems resulting in the generation of invalid steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fact-Retrieval and Verification Augmented bidirectional entailment tree generation method that contains two systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models and achieves state-of-the-art performance in fact selection and structural correctness. |
Memorization ≠ Understanding: Do Large Language Models Have the Ability of Scenario Cognition? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess LLMs’ scenario cognition . they examine the ability to link semantic scenario elements with their arguments in context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses large language models’ scenario cognition . it shows that current models rely on superficial memorization, failing to achieve robust semantic scenario cognition even in simple cases. |
Dynamic Heterogeneous-Graph Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Representation Learning for Commonsense Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA use knowledge graphs, but they ignore subgraph optimization and subgraph deepening. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic heterogeneous-graph reasoning method with LMs and knowledge representation learning that optimizes the structure and knowledge representing of the HKG using a two-stage pruning strategy and knowledge-representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods at CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA. |
Mitigating Shortcut Learning via Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve shortcut learning performance are limited by manual definition of shortcuts and inherent confirmation bias during model training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Models to identify shortcuts and generate their anti-shortcut counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an improvement of 5.61% across various natural language processing tasks. |
InstructEd: Soft-Instruction Tuning for Model Editing with Hops (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model editing are limited due to excessive memorization and knowledge conflict issues. |
| Approach: | They propose to insert soft instructions into the attention module to facilitate interactions between instructions and questions and to understand and utilize new facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 10% improvement in one-hop (multi-hop) model editing on three datasets with LLaMAs and GPT2 . |
LOG: A Local-to-Global Optimization Approach for Retrieval-based Explainable Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering emphasize single-step and multi-step iterative decomposition or retrieval, which are susceptible to failure in long-chain reasoning due to the progressive accumulation of erroneous information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local-tO-Global optimized retrieval method to discover more beneficial information and improve tuplet objective loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models and significantly improves multi-hop reasoning. |
AGR: Reinforced Causal Agent-Guided Self-explaining Rationalization (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing rationalization approaches are susceptible to degeneration due to lack of effective control over the learning direction of the model during training. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-guided rationalization approach that guides the next step of the model based on its current training state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on BeerAdvocate and HotelReview datasets. |
Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Sentence-level Extractive Text Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence-level extractive text summarization is difficult to model the importance of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Extractive Summarization that leverages Frame semantics to model sentences from both intra-sentence level and inter-sentent level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms six state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark corpus datasets. |
A Knowledge-Guided Framework for Frame Identification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for frame identification are limited to only a few types of frame knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-Guided Frame Identification framework that integrates frame knowledge to learn better frame representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
NutFrame: Frame-based Conceptual Structure Induction with LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on syntactic knowledge and world knowledge, but conceptual structure is not well-understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for coNceptual structure induction based on FrameNet . they use prompts to induce conceptual structure of Framenet with LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to induce conceptual structure of FrameNet with LLMs. |