Papers by Stephen Wang
PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts (2022.acl-demo)
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Stephen Bach, Victor Sanh, Zheng Xin Yong, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel, Nihal V. Nayak, Abheesht Sharma, Taewoon Kim, M Saiful Bari, Thibault Fevry, Zaid Alyafeai, Manan Dey, Andrea Santilli, Zhiqing Sun, Srulik Ben-david, Canwen Xu, Gunjan Chhablani, Han Wang, Jason Fries, Maged Al-shaibani, Shanya Sharma, Urmish Thakker, Khalid Almubarak, Xiangru Tang, Dragomir Radev, Mike Tian-jian Jiang, Alexander Rush
| Challenge: | PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts . prompts are used to train and query language models in zero-shot learning settings . |
| Approach: | PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts . et al.: using prompts to train and query language models is emerging area in NLP . they propose a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, a user interface that iterates on prompt development . |
| Outcome: | PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts . it has a templating language for defining data-linked prompts and a community-driven set of guidelines . |
Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues (2021.naacl-main)
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Kai Sun, Seungwhan Moon, Paul Crook, Stephen Roller, Becka Silvert, Bing Liu, Zhiguang Wang, Honglei Liu, Eunjoon Cho, Claire Cardie
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems focus on functional goals, open-domain chatbots on socially engaging conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to add chit-chat to ENhance Task-ORiented dialogues by a human-assisted data collection approach to augment task-oriented dialogues with minimal annotation effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can code-switch between task and chit-chat to be more engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, and humanlike while maintaining competitive task performance. |
Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory for Computer-Use Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in vision–language models, real-world computer-use tasks remain challenging due to long-horizon workflows, diverse interfaces, and frequent intermediate errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based memory that couples discrete symbolic nodes with continuous trajectory embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-source models in Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Gemini2.5-Pro-Vision on desktop and mobile platforms. |
How to Best Use Syntax in Semantic Role Labelling (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on integrating external information into NLP tasks focus on word-level shallow features such as POS or chunk tags. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate syntactic information into a neural ELMo-based SRL sequence labelling model by using a constituency representation as input features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on the in-domain CoNLL’05 and CoNll’12 benchmarks. |
Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiyuan Yang, Zichuan Liu, Lei Song, Kai Ying, Stephen Wang, Joshua Thomas Bamford, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Jiang Bian, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has traditionally focused on binary classification and lacks the fine-grained categorization and explanatory reasoning required for transparent decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a time-series reasoning task that reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm. |
Bringing the State-of-the-Art to Customers: A Neural Agent Assistant Framework for Customer Service Support (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Stephen Obadinma, Faiza Khan Khattak, Shirley Wang, Tania Sidhorn, Elaine Lau, Sean Robertson, Jingcheng Niu, Winnie Au, Alif Munim, Karthik Raja Kalaiselvi Bhaskar
| Challenge: | Creating agent assistants that can help improve customer service support requires inputs from industry users and their customers as well as knowledge of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technology. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine expertise from academia and industry to build task/domain-specific Neural Agent Assistants with three high-level components for: (1) Intent Identification, (2) Context Retrieval, and (3) Response Generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three case studies of industry partners who successfully adapt the framework to their unique challenges. |
AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages (2024.naacl-long)
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Jiayi Wang, David Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Marek Masiak, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Tosin Adewumi, Hamam Mokayed, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Perez Ogayo, Oumaima Hourrane, Salma El Anigri, Lolwethu Ndolela, Thabiso Mangwana, Shafie Mohamed, Hassan Ayinde, Oluwabusayo Awoyomi, Lama Alkhaled, Sana Al-azzawi, Naome Etori, Millicent Ochieng, Clemencia Siro, Njoroge Kiragu, Eric Muchiri, Wangari Kimotho, Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Lyse Naomi Wamba, Daud Abolade, Simbiat Ajao, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Ricky Macharm, Ruqayya Iro, Saheed Abdullahi, Stephen Moore, Bernard Opoku, Zainab Akinjobi, Abeeb Afolabi, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Onyekachi Ogbu, Sam Ochieng’, Verrah Otiende, Chinedu Mbonu, Yao Lu, Pontus Stenetorp
| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have focused on scaling multilingual machine translation models and evaluation data to hundreds of languages, including multiple under-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use n-gram matching metrics to measure progress in multilingual machine translation to 13 typologically diverse African languages to create high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics have a higher correlation with human judgments than n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU and METEOR. |
Mention Flags (MF): Constraining Transformer-based Text Generators (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Constrained decoding algorithms produce hypotheses satisfying all constraints, but they are computationally expensive and can lower the generated text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a Mention Flag mechanism which traces whether lexical constraints are satisfied in outputs of an S2S decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models maintain higher constraint satisfaction and text quality than baseline models and other constrained decoding algorithms. |
STORIUM: A Dataset and Evaluation Platform for Machine-in-the-Loop Story Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets lack rich enough contexts to guide models and evaluations are unreliable for long-form creative text. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset and evaluation platform built from STORIUM . their dataset contains 6K lengthy stories with fine-grained natural language annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to generate 6K long stories with fine-grained natural language annotations and a user-generated dataset. |
Extending Multilingual BERT to Low-Resource Languages (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual BERT (M-BERT) has been a huge success in both supervised and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective approach to extend multilingual BERT to any new language and show an increase in F1 on M-BERT and new languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on languages already in M-BERT and out of it on other languages. |
ECOL-R: Encouraging Copying in Novel Object Captioning with Reinforcement Learning (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Novel Object Captioning is a zero-shot Image Caption task requiring describing objects not seen in the training captions, but for which information is available from external object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel captioning model that encourages copying of object labels with reinforcement learning that encourage a copy-augmented transformer model to accurately describe the object labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets new state-of-the-art on the nocaps and held-out COCO benchmarks. |
Noise Robust Named Entity Understanding for Voice Assistants (2021.naacl-industry)
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Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Sida Gao, Xiao Yang, Justine Kao, Stephen Pulman, Atish Kothari, Ray Shen, Yinying Pan, Vivek Kaul, Mubarak Seyed Ibrahim, Gang Xiang, Nan Dun, Yidan Zhou, Andy O, Yuan Zhang, Pooja Chitkara, Xuan Wang, Alkesh Patel, Kushal Tayal, Roger Zheng, Peter Grasch, Jason D Williams, Lin Li
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking are challenging for voice assistants . utterances are relatively short, so there is not much context to help disambiguate . |
| Approach: | They propose a Named Entity Understanding system that combines NER and EL in a joint reranking module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves NER accuracy by up to 3.13% and EL accuracy by 3.6% in F1 score . it also leads to better accuracies in other natural language understanding tasks . |