Papers by Shyam Upadhyay
Combining Discourse Markers and Cross-lingual Embeddings for Synonym–Antonym Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that distributional semantic approaches have difficulty distinguishing between synonyms and antonyms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use monolingual distributional information available in a target language to transfer supervision to other languages using cross-lingual word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the transfer of monolingual distributional information to other languages using co-occurrences with discourse markers indicative of antonymy. |
Can Sequence-to-Sequence Transformers Naturally Understand Sequential Instructions? (2023.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a limited annotation budget, we can greatly improve the performance on intermediate steps with a drop in final-step performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-supervised sequence-to-sequence transformer to provide training signals on intermediate steps with zero gold supervision instead of only final-step supervision to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on intermediate steps with a drop in final-step performance on one subtask, but also shows decreased performance on another subtask. |
Efficient Encoders for Streaming Sequence Tagging (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing bidirectional encoders require a restart when a new token is received. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hybrid Encoder with Adaptive Restart that enables asynchronous encoding of a new token in an incremental streaming input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoder offers FLOP savings in streaming settings up to 71.1% and outperforms bidirectional encoders for streaming predictions by up to +0% streaming exact match. |
Bootstrapping Transliteration with Constrained Discovery for Low-Resource Languages (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transliteration generation require a large number of training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrapping algorithm that uses constrained discovery to improve generation . they show that the model can be used with as few as 500 training examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on nine languages written in a unique script. |
TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tables models require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms strong baselines on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQ. |
Looking Beyond the Surface: A Challenge Set for Reading Comprehension over Multiple Sentences (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a dataset of 6,500+ questions, we found that human solvers achieved an F1-score of 88.1%. |
| Approach: | They propose a reading comprehension challenge in which questions can only be answered by taking into account information from multiple sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reading comprehension challenge is based on a reading comprehension dataset with 6,500+ questions and 1000+ paragraphs across 7 domains. |
Joint Multilingual Supervision for Cross-lingual Entity Linking (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity Linking (XEL) systems ground entity mentions written in any language to Wikipedia . XEL is challenging for most languages due to limited availability of resources as supervision . |
| Approach: | They develop a cross-lingual XEL approach that combines supervision from multiple languages jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves on the current state-of-the-art in 8 languages. |
Fact, Fetch, and Reason: A Unified Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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Satyapriya Krishna, Kalpesh Krishna, Anhad Mohananey, Steven Schwarcz, Adam Stambler, Shyam Upadhyay, Manaal Faruqui
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capabilities across various cognitive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-quality evaluation dataset to test LLMs' ability to provide factual responses, assess retrieval capabilities, and evaluate the reasoning required to generate final answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in end-to-end RAG scenarios. |
TIMEDIAL: Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in Dialog (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained language models for dialog reasoning fail to understand context correctly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a crowd-sourced English task and a time-based task to test models' temporal reasoning abilities in dialogs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task and crowd-sourced English challenge set show that even the best performing models struggle on this task compared to humans. |
Disfl-QA: A Benchmark Dataset for Understanding Disfluencies in Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Disfluencies are an under-studied topic in NLP, even though it is ubiquitous in human conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a challenge question answering dataset where humans introduce contextual disfluencies in previously fluent questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing models degrade significantly when tested on DISFL-QA in a zero-shot setting. |
Do LLMs Really Need 10+ Thoughts for “Find the Time 1000 Days Later”? Towards Structural Understanding of LLM Overthinking (2026.acl-long)
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Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Anhad Mohananey, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Pinelopi Papalampidi, Somit Gupta, Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Lu Wang, Shyam Upadhyay
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs' thought processes are limited to superficial, profiling-based observations, failing to delve into their inner workings. |
| Approach: | They propose a utility-based definition of overthinking that moves beyond length-based metrics and provides a more insightful understanding of LLMs' thought progression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decomposes the LLM thought process into minimally complete sub-thoughts and identifies common thinking patterns for topically similar queries. |
Robust Cross-Lingual Hypernymy Detection Using Dependency Context (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual hypernymy detection are sparse and can be trained on related languages with negligible loss of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of unsupervised approaches for cross-lingual hypernymy detection which learns sparse, bilingual word embeddings based on dependency contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance on this task, compared to approaches based only on lexical context. |
CogCompNLP: Your Swiss Army Knife for NLP (L18-1)
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Daniel Khashabi, Mark Sammons, Ben Zhou, Tom Redman, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Vivek Srikumar, Nicholas Rizzolo, Lev Ratinov, Guanheng Luo, Quang Do, Chen-Tse Tsai, Subhro Roy, Stephen Mayhew, Zhili Feng, John Wieting, Xiaodong Yu, Yangqiu Song, Shashank Gupta, Shyam Upadhyay, Naveen Arivazhagan, Qiang Ning, Shaoshi Ling, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | a corpus-reader module supports popular corpora, feature extraction and annotation modules for semantic and syntactic tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a library that provides modules to address different challenges . they provide a corpus-reader module that supports popular corpora in the NLP community . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library simplifies the process of design and development of NLP applications by providing modules to address different challenges. |