Papers by Sen Yang
GQLBench: A Large-Scale Cross-Domain, Cross-Dialect Benchmark for NL2GQL (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite growing interest in NL2GQL, benchmarking progress has been constrained by the lack of resources that are simultaneously large-scale, cross-domain, and cross-dialect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates NL2SQL-to-NL2GQL conversion with graph-native data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports execution-based evaluation on Cypher and ISO-GQL, covering hundreds of graph databases and over 20k natural language questions for each dialect. |
Enhancing Grammatical Error Correction Systems with Explanations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | To help language learners better understand why the GEC system makes a correction, the causes of errors and the corresponding error types are two key factors. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate large dataset with evidence words and grammatical error types to help language learners better understand corrections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be validated by human evaluation and can be used to help second-language learners decide whether to accept a correction suggestion and understand the associated grammar rule. |
Treasures Outside Contexts: Improving Event Detection via Global Statistics (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural-based ED models are confused by changeable contexts during testing . we propose a system that extracts statistical event features from word-event cooccurrence frequencies . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a set of statistical event features from word-event co-occurrence frequencies into the training set to cooperate with contextual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms ten strong baselines on ACE2005 and KBP2015 datasets. |
Are LLM-based Evaluators Confusing NLG Quality Criteria? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs confuse evaluation criteria, which reduces their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical classification system for 11 common aspects with corresponding different evaluation criteria. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on 11 common aspects with different evaluation criteria. |
Once Upon a Time in Graph: Relative-Time Pretraining for Complex Temporal Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on strengthening the knowledge-time association between text and time-stamps, but this is insufficient for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that explicitly connects all temporally-scoped facts by modeling the time relations between any two sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline T5 on multiple temporal question answering datasets . it is especially good at modeling long-range complex temporal dependencies, the authors say . |
Investigating Non-local Features for Neural Constituency Parsing (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Constituency parsers have been able to achieve competitive performance by using local features. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject non-local features into the training process of a local span-based parser by predicting constituent n-gram non-local patterns and ensuring consistency between constituents and local constituents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the self-attentive parser in multi-lingual and zero-shot cross-domain settings. |
Multi-LLM Collaborative Search for Complex Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to the vast reasoning space inherent in the complexity and inherent ambiguities of natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-search-agents paradigm that integrates diverse reasoning pathways by combining independent exploration and iterative refinement among multiple LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance over single-agent and multi-agend baselines in complex mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Template-Based Named Entity Recognition Using BART (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fewshot NER do not make full use of knowledge transfer in NER model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method for NER that treats NER as a language model ranking problem in a sequence-to-sequence framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 92.55% F1 score on the CoNLL03 task and significantly better than fine-tuning BERT 10.88%, 15.34%, and 11.73% F1 scores on the MIT Movie, the ATIS, and the MATLAB task. |
Cross-domain Generalization for AMR Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to predict an AMR graph from textual input. |
| Approach: | They evaluate five representative AMR parsers on five domains and analyze challenges to cross-domain parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the domain distribution divergence of text and AMR features on two out-of-domain sets. |
CLeVeR: Multi-modal Contrastive Learning for Vulnerability Code Representation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting code capture the overall semantics of the code rather than its intrinsic vulnerability-specific semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that leverages contrastive learning to generate precise vulnerability code representations under the supervision of vulnerability descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in vulnerability detection tasks by 11.85% and 13.61%. |
Local Interpretation of Transformer Based on Linear Decomposition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on local explanation generation attempts to understand model dynamics on word-level or phraselevel by assigning importance scores on input features. |
| Approach: | They propose to interpret neural networks by linear decomposition by a Transformer model on a single input and a linear decomposing of the output to generate local explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance in sentiment classification and machine translation, and fidelity of explanation. |
StealthGraph: Exposing Domain-Specific Risks in LLMs through Knowledge-Graph-Guided Harmful Prompt Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Domain-specific datasets of harmful prompts are scarce and often rely on manual construction. Existing efforts to improve domain knowledge and reduce harmful prompt generation are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms domain knowledge into actionable constraints and increases the implicitness of generated harmful prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields high-quality datasets combining strong domain relevance with implicitness, enabling more realistic red-teaming and advancing LLM safety research. |
LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions (2025.acl-long)
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Ruihan Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Zhisong Zhang, Xinting Huang, Sen Yang, Nigel Collier, Dong Yu, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate factually incorrect content, i.e., hallucinations, despite impressive performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable models to express uncertainty when unsure . they propose atomic claims to refine uncertainty and refine it using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization to enhance uncertainty expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations, and maintains comprehensiveness of responses. |
Bridging SFT and RL: Dynamic Policy Optimization for Robust Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing unified optimization strategies overlook the statistical conflict between these distinct gradient signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reduce bias-variance trade-offs in Large Language Models . they propose DYPO, which leverages intrinsic group dynamics to significantly reduce RL gradient variance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional pipelines on reasoning benchmarks and out-of-distribution tasks. |
HEIDL: Learning Linguistic Expressions with Deep Learning and Human-in-the-Loop (P19-3)
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| Challenge: | HITL-ML approaches are too low-level and far-removed from human’s conceptual models. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototype HITL-ML system that exposes the machine-learned model through high-level, explainable linguistic expressions formed of predicates representing semantic structure of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system exposes the machine-learned model through high-level, explainable linguistic expressions formed of predicates representing semantic structure of text. |
Challenges to Open-Domain Constituency Parsing (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing findings on cross-domain constituency parsing are only made on a limited number of domains. |
| Approach: | They manually annotate a high-quality constituency treebank containing five domains and analyze challenges to open-domain constituency parsing using a set of linguistic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the performance of the proposed model on the domain-variant features. |
Improving Knowledge Production Efficiency With Question Answering on Conversation (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing researches on conversation-based QA focus on document-based tasks . current researche focuses on document based tasks, but there is a lack of researche on conversation based qa . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-span extraction model on conversation-based QA and introduce continual pre-training and multi-task learning schemes to further improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline on two Chinese datasets and will be released for research purposes. |
EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong machine translation capabilities for English-centric language pairs but underperform in direct non-English (x2x) translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation framework that leverages models’ established English-to-x (en2x) capabilities by extending English parallel corpora into omnidirectional datasets and developing an English-referenced quality evaluation proxy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant improvement across 72 x2x directions while generalizing to enhance en2x performance. |
SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)
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Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages. |
| Outcome: | SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations . |
TRANS-ZERO: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation Without Parallel Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped machine translation, but multilingual MT still relies heavily on parallel data for supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages only monolingual data and the intrinsic multilingual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches models trained on large-scale parallel data and excels in non-English translation directions. |
Exploring Pre-trained Language Models for Event Extraction and Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event data are laborious to create and limited in size. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction model to overcome the roles overlap problem by separating the argument prediction in terms of roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on the ACE2005 dataset and improves on the previous methods. |
What Have We Achieved on Text Summarization? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text summarization have been investigated, but there are still gaps between them and human professionals. |
| Approach: | They analyze 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarization models manually. |
| Outcome: | Aiming to gain more understanding of summarization systems with respect to their strengths and limitations on a fine-grained syntactic and semantic level, we use 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarizing models. |
RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haonan Bian, Zhiyuan Yao, Sen Hu, Zishan Xu, Shaolei Zhang, Yifu Guo, Ziliang Yang, Xueran Han, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture “long-term project-oriented” interactions where agents must track evolving goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks simulate the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
Neuro-Symbolic Integration Brings Causal and Reliable Reasoning Proofs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for complex reasoning with LLMs is developed to improve reasoning proof accuracy and interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate search logs that can be interpreted into human-readable reasoning proofs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning accuracy but lacks interpretability due to black-box nature of the solvers. |
Not All Preference Pairs Are Created Equal: A Recipe for Annotation-Efficient Iterative Preference Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities to understand and generate human languages, supporting applications such as question answering, coding, and psychological counseling. |
| Approach: | They propose strategies to save annotation budgets while achieving competitive or even better performances for iterative preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods save annotation budgets while achieving better performance. |
Diversity and Consistency: Exploring Visual Question-Answer Pair Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks to generate question-answer pairs from visual images are under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that targets question-answer pair generation from visual images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse or consistent QAPs on two benchmarks. |
The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Parallel and Sequential Inference Scaling via Aggregation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models achieve substantial gains with test-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They introduce a supervised fine-tuning paradigm where models synthesize multiple draft responses into a single, refined answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models outperform baseline models while eliminating external guidance. |
Making the Best Use of Review Summary for Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment analysis of user reviews are limited to a few examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchically-refined attention model that exploits the sentimental distribution of a review and its corresponding summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make better use of user-written summaries for review sentiment analysis and is more effective compared to existing methods when the user summary is replaced with summary generated by an automatic summarization system. |
Crabs: Consuming Resource via Auto-generation for LLM-DoS Attack under Black-box Settings (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on white-box attacks focus on black-box LLMs, leaving black- box scenarios underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated algorithm designed for black-box LLMs that constructs the DoS Attack Tree and expands the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black- box conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can be used to build a DoS Attack Tree and expand the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black-box conditions. |