Papers by Salim Roukos
A Multilingual Reading Comprehension System for more than 100 Languages (2020.coling-demos)
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Anthony Ferritto, Sara Rosenthal, Mihaela Bornea, Kazi Hasan, Rishav Chakravarti, Salim Roukos, Radu Florian, Avi Sil
| Challenge: | Recent advances in open domain question answering (QA) have focused on machine reading comprehension (MRC) |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual machine reading comprehension (MRC) demo which can answer questions in over 100 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can answer questions in over 100 languages and integrates with IBM Watson's machine translation widget to improve language accessibility. |
The TechQA Dataset (2020.acl-main)
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Vittorio Castelli, Rishav Chakravarti, Saswati Dana, Anthony Ferritto, Radu Florian, Martin Franz, Dinesh Garg, Dinesh Khandelwal, Scott McCarley, Michael McCawley, Mohamed Nasr, Lin Pan, Cezar Pendus, John Pitrelli, Saurabh Pujar, Salim Roukos, Andrzej Sakrajda, Avi Sil, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Todd Ward, Rong Zhang
| Challenge: | TECHQA is a domain-adaptation question answering dataset for the technical support domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptation question-answering dataset for the technical support domain that contains actual questions posed by users on a technical forum . |
| Outcome: | The TECHQA dataset highlights two real-world issues from the automated customer support domain. |
Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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Pavan Kapanipathi, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Srinivas Ravishankar, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Maria Chang, Cristina Cornelio, Saswati Dana, Achille Fokoue, Dinesh Garg, Alfio Gliozzo, Sairam Gurajada, Hima Karanam, Naweed Khan, Dinesh Khandelwal, Young-Suk Lee, Yunyao Li, Francois Luus, Ndivhuwo Makondo, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Tahira Naseem, Sumit Neelam, Lucian Popa, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ryan Riegel, Gaetano Rossiello, Udit Sharma, G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Mo Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches face challenges including complex question understanding and lack of large end-to-end training datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular knowledge base question answering system that leverages AMR parses for task-independent question understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two prominent KBQA datasets based on DBpedia. |
Bootstrapping Multilingual AMR with Contextual Word Alignments (2021.eacl-main)
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Janaki Sheth, Young-Suk Lee, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Tahira Naseem, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a sentence-level graph that is biased towards English. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique for foreign-text-to-English AMR alignment using contextual word alignment between English and foreign language tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms the best results for German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. |
Rewarding Smatch: Transition-Based AMR Parsing with Reinforcement Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstract meaning representations (AMRs) are labeled directed acyclic graphs that represent a non intersentential abstraction of natural language with broad-coverage semantic representations. |
| Approach: | They build upon a transition-based AMR parser that uses Stack-LSTMs and augment training with policy learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser performs comparable to the best published parsers. |
Towards building a Robust Industry-scale Question Answering System (2020.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that use “zero-shot transfer learning” (ZSTL) are difficult to train and have observation biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a production model called GAAMA which has two characteristics . it is robust and efficient, and trains on the recently introduced Natural Questions dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on two benchmarks: BioASQ and CovidQA. |
CFO: A Framework for Building Production NLP Systems (D19-3)
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Rishav Chakravarti, Cezar Pendus, Andrzej Sakrajda, Anthony Ferritto, Lin Pan, Michael Glass, Vittorio Castelli, J. William Murdock, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Avi Sil
| Challenge: | Using a new orchestration framework, we build, test, and deploy interactive NLP and IR systems to production environments. |
| Approach: | They introduce a new orchestration framework for building, experimenting with, and deploying interactive NLP and IR systems to production environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is well suited to a variety of use cases but is not suitable for academic benchmarking or industry specific use cases. |
Granite-Function Calling Model: Introducing Function Calling Abilities via Multi-task Learning of Granular Tasks (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Kinjal Basu, Mayank Agarwal, Sadhana Kumaravel, Matthew Stallone, Rameswar Panda, Yara Rizk, G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Maxwell Crouse, Chulaka Gunasekara, Shajith Ikbal, Sachindra Joshi, Hima Karanam, Vineet Kumar, Asim Munawar, Sumit Neelam, Dinesh Raghu, Udit Sharma, Adriana Soria, Dheeraj Sreedhar, Praveen Venkateswaran, Merve Unuvar, David Cox, Salim Roukos, Luis Lastras, Pavan Kapanipathi
| Challenge: | Existing research explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone of agentic systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model trained using a multi-task training approach on seven fundamental tasks encompassed in function calling that has better generalizability on multiple tasks across seven evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms more than 15 other models on out-of-domain datasets and ranks among the top on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL). |
Pushing the Limits of AMR Parsing with Self-Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Young-Suk Lee, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Tahira Naseem, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing has experienced a notable growth in performance in the last two years due to the impact of transfer learning and the development of novel architectures specific to AMR. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AMR annotations to generate synthetic text and refine actions oracle without additional human annotations for AMR parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve on AMR 1.0 and 2.0 without human annotations. |
PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering Research and Development (2023.acl-demo)
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Avi Sil, Jaydeep Sen, Bhavani Iyer, Martin Franz, Kshitij Fadnis, Mihaela Bornea, Sara Rosenthal, Scott McCarley, Rong Zhang, Vishwajeet Kumar, Yulong Li, Md Arafat Sultan, Riyaz Bhat, Juergen Bross, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos
| Challenge: | Question Answering (QA) is a major area of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stop and open-source QA repository for question answering . it supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension . they say it will facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. |
Ensemble-Instruct: Instruction Tuning Data Generation with a Heterogeneous Mixture of LMs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Young-Suk Lee, Md Sultan, Yousef El-Kurdi, Tahira Naseem, Asim Munawar, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Ramón Astudillo
| Challenge: | Empirical studies with different instruction-tuned LMs show that our proposed method yields higher-quality instruction tuning data than Self-Instruct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-context learning techniques to train strong conversational agents . they propose to categorize and simplify ICL templates to make prompt learning easier . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method yields higher-quality instruction tuning data than Self-Instruct and improves performance of both vanilla and instruction-tuned LMs. |
A Semantics-aware Transformer Model of Relation Linking for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.acl-short)
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Tahira Naseem, Srinivas Ravishankar, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Young-Suk Lee, Pavan Kapanipathi, Salim Roukos, Alfio Gliozzo, Alexander Gray
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems do not leverage the explicit semantic parse of the question text. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based neural model that leverages the AMR semantic parse of a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on 4 popular benchmark datasets. |
MISMATCH: Fine-grained Evaluation of Machine-generated Text with Mismatch Error Types (2023.findings-acl)
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Keerthiram Murugesan, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Soham Dan, Subhajit Chaudhury, Chulaka Gunasekara, Maxwell Crouse, Diwakar Mahajan, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Achille Fokoue, Pavan Kapanipathi, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for machine text are inadequate to capture quality of text . a recent study has focused on task-specific evaluation metrics or on properties of machine-generated text based on mismatch errors . |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation scheme based on fine-grained mismatch errors . they propose 13 mismatch error types to guide the model for better prediction of human judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation scheme is based on mismatch errors in 7 NLP tasks . the mismatch error types guide the model for better prediction of human judgments . |
DocAMR: Multi-Sentence AMR Representation and Evaluation (2022.naacl-main)
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Tahira Naseem, Austin Blodgett, Sadhana Kumaravel, Tim O’Gorman, Young-Suk Lee, Jeffrey Flanigan, Ramón Astudillo, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Nathan Schneider
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs are compared to gold graphs by the Smatch metric, but lack a well-defined representation and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm for deriving a unified graph representation using a super-sentential annotation method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm avoids the pitfalls of over-merging and lacks coherence from under merging. |
ARES: A Reading Comprehension Ensembling Service (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Anthony Ferritto, Lin Pan, Rishav Chakravarti, Salim Roukos, Radu Florian, J. William Murdock, Avi Sil
| Challenge: | ARES is a machine reading comprehension (MRC) demonstration system which utilizes an ensemble of models to increase F1 by 2.3 points. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine reading comprehension (MRC) demonstration system which utilizes an ensemble of models to increase F1 by 2.3 points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system increases F1 by 2.3 points on a short answer task using an ensemble of models. |
Logical Neural Networks for Knowledge Base Completion with Embeddings & Rules (2022.emnlp-main)
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Prithviraj Sen, Breno William Carvalho, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Pavan Kapanipathi, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray
| Challenge: | Knowledge base completion (KBC) is a human-interpretable dialect . rule-based KBC has a high quality but low accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose to use logical neural networks to learn both kinds of rules in a common framework using gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves by 10% relative to SotA rule-based methods and by combining it with knowledge graph embeddings it achieves an additional 7.5% relative improvement. |
Zero-shot Entity Linking with Less Data (2022.findings-naacl)
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G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Dinesh Khandelwal, Saswati Dana, Dinesh Garg, Pavan Kapanipathi, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray, L Venkata Subramaniam
| Challenge: | Entity linking maps an entity mention in a natural language sentence to an entity in KB. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic, multi-task learning approach to bridge this gap by exploiting an auxiliary information about entity types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significantly higher performance on four different benchmark datasets when trained with just 0.01%, 0.1%, or 1% of the training data. |
Moving Beyond Downstream Task Accuracy for Information Retrieval Benchmarking (2023.findings-acl)
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Keshav Santhanam, Jon Saad-Falcon, Martin Franz, Omar Khattab, Avi Sil, Radu Florian, Md Arafat Sultan, Salim Roukos, Matei Zaharia, Christopher Potts
| Challenge: | Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years . many IR benchmarks focus on downstream task accuracy, concealing costs incurred . |
| Approach: | They propose to include efficiency considerations on IR benchmarks to help drive progress . eral et al. propose to incorporate query latency and cost budgets into evaluation . |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that the best IR system varies according to how efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed . the proposed benchmarks would allow for more thorough exploration of possible system designs . |
SYGMA: A System for Generalizable and Modular Question Answering Over Knowledge Bases (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Sumit Neelam, Udit Sharma, Hima Karanam, Shajith Ikbal, Pavan Kapanipathi, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Young-Suk Lee, Santosh Srivastava, Cezar Pendus, Saswati Dana, Dinesh Garg, Achille Fokoue, G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Dinesh Khandelwal, Srinivas Ravishankar, Sairam Gurajada, Maria Chang, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray, Guilherme Lima, Ryan Riegel, Francois Luus, L V Subramaniam
| Challenge: | Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) systems have limited generalizability across knowledge bases and multiple reasoning types. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular approach for KBQA that is built on a framework adaptable to multiple knowledge bases and reasoning types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is generalized across multiple knowledge bases and reasoning types. |
Structure-aware Fine-tuning of Sequence-to-sequence Transformers for Transition-based AMR Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that pre-trained sequence-to-sequence Transformer models are effective in predicting linearized Abstract Meaning Representation graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware transition-based approach to AMR parsing that integrates general pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models with a structured transition set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach retains the desirable properties of previous approaches while reaching the new parsing state of the art for AMR 2.0. |
From Multiple-Choice to Extractive QA: A Case Study for English and Arabic (2025.coling-main)
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Teresa Lynn, Malik H. Altakrori, Samar M. Magdy, Rocktim Jyoti Das, Chenyang Lyu, Mohamed Nasr, Younes Samih, Kirill Chirkunov, Alham Fikri Aji, Preslav Nakov, Shantanu Godbole, Salim Roukos, Radu Florian, Nizar Habash
| Challenge: | Recent years have brought about very fast developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP), but many other languages are overlooked due to limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose to repurpose a multilingual BELEBELE dataset for a task of extractive QA in the style of machine reading comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach could be used to extract QA in the style of machine reading comprehension. |
UDAPDR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via LLM Prompting and Distillation of Rerankers (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Khattab, Keshav Santhanam, Radu Florian, Martin Franz, Salim Roukos, Avirup Sil, Md Sultan, Christopher Potts
| Challenge: | Existing methods for information retrieval tasks require large labeled datasets for fine-tuning, but they can experience significant drops in accuracy due to distribution shifts from the training to the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for using large language models to generate large numbers of synthetic queries cheaply using an expensive LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts zero-shot accuracy in long-tail domains and achieves substantially lower latency than standard reranking methods. |
GPT-too: A Language-Model-First Approach for AMR-to-Text Generation (2020.acl-main)
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Manuel Mager, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Tahira Naseem, Md Arafat Sultan, Young-Suk Lee, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating text from AMRs focus on training sequence-to-sequence or graph-tosequent models on annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a strong pre-trained language model with cycle consistency-based re-scoring to generate AMR text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the English LDC2017T10 dataset. |
Maximum Bayes Smatch Ensemble Distillation for AMR Parsing (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | AMR parsing has experienced an unprecendented increase in performance in the last three years due to a mixture of effects including architecture improvements and transfer learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Smatch-based ensembling techniques with ensemble distillation to overcome this diminishing returns of silver data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can produce gains rivaling those of human annotated data for QALD-9 and achieve a new state-of-the-art for BioAMR. |
CLAPnq: Cohesive Long-form Answers from Passages in Natural Questions for RAG systems (2025.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a popular application for large language models. |
| Approach: | They present a benchmark Long-form Question Answering dataset for RAG . they use a passage grounded in a gold passage to provide accurate answers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides long answers with grounded gold passages from Natural Questions (NQ) the answers are concise, 3x smaller than the full passage, and cohesive, meaning the answer is composed fluently. |
Multi-Stage Pre-training for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Rong Zhang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Md Arafat Sultan, Vittorio Castelli, Anthony Ferritto, Radu Florian, Efsun Sarioglu Kayi, Salim Roukos, Avi Sil, Todd Ward
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transfer learning target data to in-domain text . prior work has adapted pre-trained LMs to specific domains . |
| Approach: | They extend the vocabulary of a pretrained language model with domain-specific terms to create synthetic tasks that help it transfer to downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches show significant performance gains on extractive reading comprehension, document ranking and duplicate question detection tasks. |