Papers by Siyan Li
EDEN: Empathetic Dialogues for English Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that student passion and perseverance, or grit, is associated with language learning success. |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves. |
| Outcome: | The proposed chatbot improves student persistence in learning a second language. |
Enhancing Self-Consistency and Performance of Pre-Trained Language Models through Natural Language Inference (2022.emnlp-main)
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Eric Mitchell, Joseph Noh, Siyan Li, Will Armstrong, Ananth Agarwal, Patrick Liu, Chelsea Finn, Christopher Manning
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for boosting consistency and accuracy of pre-trained NLP models without fine-tuning or re-training are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for boosting the consistency and accuracy of pre-trained NLP models using pre-trainer natural language inference models without fine-tuning or re-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts consistency and accuracy of pre-trained NLP models using pre-train natural language inference models without fine-tuning or re-training. |
Inferring the Reader: Guiding Automated Story Generation with Commonsense Reasoning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to automate story generation focus on single-character stories and lack basiccommonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense-inference Augmentedneural StoryTelling framework that introduces commonsensical reasoning into the story generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces significantly more coherent, on-topic, enjoyable andfluent stories than existing models in both the single-character and two-character settings. |
Systematicity in GPT-3’s Interpretation of Novel English Noun Compounds (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | e.g., stew skillet, swamp squash) are not fully compositional, but highly predictable based on whether the modifier and head refer to artifacts or natural kinds. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the interpretations of novel English noun compounds with the large language model GPT-3, which is governed by interpretive principles. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the large language model GPT-3 reasoning only about specific lexical items is consistent with the Levin et al.'s theory. |
PAPILLON: Privacy Preservation from Internet-based and Local Language Model Ensembles (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has studied privacy in LLM training data memorization, but it does not prevent users from disclosing PII at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a task for chaining API-based and local LLMs that uses public data to construct a benchmark that contains personally identifiable information (PII) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains high response quality for 85.5% of user queries while restricting privacy leakage to only 7.5%. |
Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Training conversational question-answering systems requires in-domain data, which is often scarce in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a bottom-up approach where QA pairs are generated first and combined into a coherent dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach produces more realistic and higher-quality dialogues compared to top-down methods. |
Bringing Pedagogy into Focus: Evaluating Virtual Teaching Assistants’ Question-Answering in Asynchronous Learning Environments (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing assessments rely on surface-level metrics and lack sufficient grounding in educational theory . a new framework is proposed to evaluate VTAs in asynchronous learning environments . |
| Approach: | They propose a pedagogically-oriented evaluation framework tailored to asynchronous forum discussions . they construct classifiers using expert annotations of VTA responses on a diverse set of forum posts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is rooted in learning sciences and tailored to asynchronous forum discussions. |
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)
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Yadong Xi, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lei Lin, Yanjiang Chen, Shuhan Yang, Xuhan Chen, Kailun Tao, Zhi Li, Gongzheng Li, Lin Jiang, Siyan Liu, Zeng Zhao, Minlie Huang, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |