Papers by Wenliang Chen
UAQFact: Evaluating Factual Knowledge Utilization of LLMs on Unanswerable Questions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets to assess LLMs' performance on unanswerable questions lack factual knowledge support. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual unanswerable question dataset with auxiliary factual knowledge created from a Knowledge Graph and two new tasks to measure LLMs' ability to utilize internal and external factual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that LLMs do not consistently perform well even when they have factual knowledge stored. |
Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset (2022.lrec-1)
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Tiezheng Yu, Rita Frieske, Peng Xu, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Cheuk Tung Yiu, Holy Lovenia, Wenliang Dai, Elham J. Barezi, Qifeng Chen, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | In this paper, we address the problem of data scarcity for the Hong Kong Cantonese language . due to the popularization of deep learning, ASR technology has led to a significant improvement in recognizing many languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze the data available for the Hong Kong Cantonese language . they use zh-HK as a source and a state-of-the-art ASR model to build a powerful model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the biggest existing dataset, Common Voice zh-HK. |
mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer (2023.acl-long)
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Guanhua Chen, Lu Hou, Yun Chen, Wenliang Dai, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Jia Pan, Wenping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual vision-language pretrained models are biased towards English due to the lack of sufficient non-English image-text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a retrieval-efficient dual-stream multilingual VLP model by aligning CLIP model and a multilingual text encoder through a novel Triangle Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation method. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that mCLIP achieves new state-of-the-art performance for both zero-shot and finetuned multilingual image-text retrieval tasks. |
IS-CoT: Breaking the Long-form Generation Collapse via Interleaved Structural Thinking (2026.acl-long)
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Zechen Sun, Yuyang Sun, Zecheng Tang, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu, Wenliang Chen, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models with reasoning capabilities suffer from a severe length collapse in open-ended writing . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that embeds a dynamic plan-write-reflect cycle into the generation process and train a model with interleaved reasoning traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form benchmarks compared to other models on the same dataset. |
Distantly Supervised NER with Partial Annotation Learning and Reinforcement Learning (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese are limited by the lack of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can automatically populate annotated training data without humancost by using distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than comparison systems on two datasets. |
Early Exit with Disentangled Representation and Equiangular Tight Frame (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing early exit paradigm relies on training parametrical internal classifiers to complete specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decouple two distinct types of representation and introduce a non-parametric tight frame classifier for improvement. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on monolingual and multilingual tasks show that the proposed method improves over existing methods. |
Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for directing language model outputs are limited in their accuracy due to a distributional gap . existing methods train static value functions on trajectories sampled exclusively from the base policy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to bridge a distributional gap in the accuracy of value functions . they propose RLHF to align language models with human values and task requirements . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computational costs and improves value function accuracy by leveraging principled value function optimization. |
Improving Relation Extraction with Relational Paraphrase Sentences (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing annotated data is expensive and non-scalable, limiting performance of relation extraction models. |
| Approach: | They propose to enrich relation expressions by relational paraphrase sentences by annotating human-annotated data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance even on a strong baseline. |
STAD: Self-Training with Ambiguous Data for Low-Resource Relation Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for low-resource relation extraction use only confident instances and uncertain instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training approach for low-resource relation extraction using auto-annotated instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two widely used datasets with low-resource settings. |
SelfMix: Robust Learning against Textual Label Noise with Self-Mixup Training (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to handle label noise in text classification tasks are limited to visual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to handle label noise in text classification tasks using a Gaussian Mixture Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three types of text classification tasks on visual and textual data. |
SafeConv: Explaining and Correcting Conversational Unsafe Behavior (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets do not provide enough annotation to explain unsafe behavior . current chatbots generate toxic and offensive responses, which can be dangerous . |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset called SafeConv that provides comprehensive annotations for chatbots . they compare safe alternatives to rewrite unsafe responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can explain unsafe behavior and detoxify chatbots, the authors show . the proposed model is able to detect unsafe utterances, extract unsafe spans, and convert unsafe responses to safe versions. |
DiffusionDialog: A Diffusion Model for Diverse Dialog Generation with Latent Space (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have tried to introduce discrete or Gaussian-based latent variables to address the one-to-many problem, but the diversity is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion model to enhance the diversity of dialogue generation by using continuous latent variables instead of discrete ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model greatly enhances diversity of dialog response while keeping the coherence. |
Mirror: A Universal Framework for Various Information Extraction Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Tong Zhu, Junfei Ren, Zijian Yu, Mengsong Wu, Guoliang Zhang, Xiaoye Qu, Wenliang Chen, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies often formulate IE tasks as a triplet extraction problem, but this paradigm does not support multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and a non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or reaches competitive performance with SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings and it is compatible with 57 datasets. |
CI-AVSR: A Cantonese Audio-Visual Speech Datasetfor In-car Command Recognition (2022.lrec-1)
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Wenliang Dai, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Tiezheng Yu, Elham J. Barezi, Peng Xu, Cheuk Tung Yiu, Rita Frieske, Holy Lovenia, Genta Winata, Qifeng Chen, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | In-car smart assistants should be able to process general as well as car-related commands and perform corresponding actions, which eases driving and improves safety. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for in-car command recognition in the cantonese language with both video and audio data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve a considerable quality on the clean test set, but the speech recognition quality on noisy data is still inferior. |
Learning to Refuse: Towards Mitigating Privacy Risks in LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating natural languages, but can inadvertently memorize private information, posing significant privacy risks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to evaluate machine unlearning methods for protecting personal data in a realistic scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods by 5.65 points and protects target individuals’ personal data while maintaining general capabilities. |
ASCEND: A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset for Code-switching in Multi-turn Conversation (2022.lrec-1)
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Holy Lovenia, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Winata, Peng Xu, Yan Xu, Zihan Liu, Rita Frieske, Tiezheng Yu, Wenliang Dai, Elham J. Barezi, Qifeng Chen, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus from read speech rather than spontaneous speech to address this phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | ASCEND consists of 10.62 hours of clean speech, collected from 23 bilingual speakers of Chinese and English. |
MoPE: Mixture of Prefix Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot dialogue state tracking models suffer from domain transferring and partial prediction problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to establish connections between similar slots in different domains to improve model transfer performance in unseen domains. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves the goal accuracy of 57.13% on MultiWOZ2.1 and 55.4. |
NesTools: A Dataset for Evaluating Nested Tool Learning Abilities of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on nested tool learning are lacking relevant data instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct large-scale nested tool calls with different nesting structures using a large-quality dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to evaluate the nested tool learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. |
Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are constrained by their fixed model capacities when the number of tasks grows in instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine all training tasks and apply fixed sampling weights without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on knowledge & reasoning tasks and open-ended queries with limited training budget. |
M-CNER: A Corpus for Chinese Named Entity Recognition in Multi-Domains (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | NER is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate sentences from human-computer interaction, social media, and e-commerce using two rounds of annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs the best on all the data sets. |
Probing Language Models for Pre-training Data Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, while raising concerns about the data contamination due to privacy issues and leakage of benchmark datasets in the pre-training phase. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize the probing technique to examine the model’s internal activations to detect pre-training data contamination by examining the model's internal activates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both WikiMIA and ArxivMIA, with additional experiments confirming its efficacy. |
Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Towards Accurate and Consistent Evaluation: A Dataset for Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Distant Supervision (DS) generates large-scale annotated data but has wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing. |
| Approach: | They build a dataset using DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label test data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset NYTH has a much larger test set and performs more accurate and consistent evaluation. |