Papers by Thomas Li
CONTOR: Benchmarking Strategies for Completing Ontologies with Plausible Missing Rules (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations focus on distinguishing held-out ontologies from randomly corrupted ones, which often makes the task unrealistically easy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the common description logic syntax for encoding ontology rules to test their effectiveness on manually annotated hard negatives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are compared with existing models and have been evaluated on different ontologies. |
DynaEval: Unifying Turn and Dialogue Level Evaluation (2021.acl-long)
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Chen Zhang, Yiming Chen, Luis Fernando D’Haro, Yan Zhang, Thomas Friedrichs, Grandee Lee, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics focus on the turn-level quality of a dialogue . a unified framework that holistically considers the quality of the entire dialogue is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified automatic evaluation framework which holistically considers the quality of the entire dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art dialogue coherence model and correlates strongly with human judgements across multiple evaluation aspects at both turn and dialogue level. |
Joint Multimedia Event Extraction from Video and Article (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Brian Chen, Xudong Lin, Christopher Thomas, Manling Li, Shoya Yoshida, Lovish Chum, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract multimedia events from video and text are limited to video and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to jointly extract events from video and text documents . they propose 'self-supervised' cross-modal event coreference model and cross-mod transformer architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 6.0% and 5.8% absolute F-score gain on video-article pairs . the proposed method can resolve coreference and extract multimodal event frames more accurately than existing methods. |
How is BERT surprised? Layerwise detection of linguistic anomalies (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a number of studies have shown that transformer-based language models detect when a word is anomalous in context, but likelihood scores do not tell the cause of the anomaly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Gaussian models for density estimation at intermediate layers of three language models to evaluate grammaticality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method on BLiMP shows that language models employ different mechanisms to detect different types of linguistic anomalies. |
Learning to Model Multimodal Semantic Alignment for Story Visualization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Story visualization aims to generate sequence of images to narrate each sentence in a multi-sentence story . current methods face semantic misalignment because of their fixed architecture and diversity of input modalities . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GAN-based generative model to match semantic levels between text and image representations to solve the semantic misalignment problem. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed approach improves image quality and story consistency compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Neural reality of argument structure constructions (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | lexicalist linguistic theories assume argument structure is predictable from meaning of verbs . construction grammarians propose argument structure constructions distinct from verbs. |
| Approach: | They adapt psycholinguistic studies to probe for the existence of argument structure constructions in Transformer-based language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could be used to probe argument structure constructions in LMs . the study shows that LM learners prefer grouping by construction over verb grouping . |
Conversation Learner - A Machine Teaching Tool for Building Dialog Managers for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (2020.acl-demos)
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Swadheen Shukla, Lars Liden, Shahin Shayandeh, Eslam Kamal, Jinchao Li, Matt Mazzola, Thomas Park, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | a wide variety of tasks have created a need for flexible task-oriented dialog systems . dialog flows are intuitively interpretable but lack the flexibility needed to handle complex dialogs . |
| Approach: | They propose a machine teaching tool for building dialog managers using familiar tools . they convert the dialog flow into a parametric model and use user-system dialog logs as training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool combines the best of both approaches to build dialog managers . it converts the dialog flow into a parametric model and improves it over time . |
Competence-Level Prediction and Resume & Job Description Matching Using Context-Aware Transformer Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new method for resume classification reduces the time and labor needed to screen applications . the current method of screening applications involves reviewing individual resumes via string/regex matching . |
| Approach: | They propose to use transformer-based resume classification to reduce time and labor needed to screen applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models reduce time and labor needed to screen applications while improving the selection of suitable candidates. |
Automated Structured Radiology Report Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Justin Xu, Johannes Moll, Alois Thomas, Zhihong Chen, Sophie Ostmeier, Asfandyar Azhar, Kelvin Zhenghao Li, Andrew Johnston, Christian Bluethgen, Eduardo Pontes Reis, Mohamed S Muneer, Maya Varma, Curtis Langlotz
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to produce consistent, clinically meaningful reports and standard evaluation metrics fail to capture the nuances of radiological interpretation. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reformulates free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. |
Word class flexibility: A deep contextualized approach (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on word class flexibility have been fraught with difficulties in quantifying it accurately and at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify word class flexibility in 37 languages using contextualized word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method builds on recent work in contextualized word embeddings to quantify semantic shift between word classes and uncovers shared tendencies in class flexibility across languages. |
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)
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Jiarui Lu, Thomas Holleis, Yizhe Zhang, Bernhard Aumayer, Feng Nan, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Shen Ma, Mengyu Li, Guoli Yin, Zirui Wang, Ruoming Pang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools . |
| Approach: | a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator. |
| Outcome: | the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks . |
FineD-Eval: Fine-grained Automatic Dialogue-Level Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent model-based reference-free metrics for open-domain dialogue evaluation lack correlations with human judgment and poor interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional dialogue-level metric with three sub-metrics targeting a specific dimension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing models and sub-metrics in three high-quality dialogue evaluation benchmarks. |
RAGPPI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark for Protein–Protein Interactions in Drug Discovery (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks have supported Target ID, but no benchmark exists for identifying biological impacts of PPIs. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a factual question-answer benchmark of 4,420 question-announced pairs that focus on the potential biological impacts of PPIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on 4,420 question-answer pairs with expert-driven data annotation. |