Papers by Wenqiang Lei

47 papers
TRAVEL: Tag-Aware Conversational FAQ Retrieval via Reinforcement Learning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods aim to fully utilize the dynamic conversation context to enhance the semantic association between the user query and FAQ questions, but they are limited by noise and e.g., users may click questions they don't like, leading to inaccurate semantics modeling.
Approach: They propose to introduce tags of FAQ questions to reduce noise in the conversation context and integrate them into a reinforcement learning framework to minimize the negative impact of irrelevant information.
Outcome: The proposed method can eliminate irrelevant information and minimize negative impact of irrelevant information in the dynamic conversation context.
Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing CRSs can be highly persuasive, but they can be deceptive and can damage the long-term trust between users and the CRS.
Approach: They propose a method to enhance the credibility of CRS’s explanations by using a set of credibility-aware persuasive strategies and a post-hoc self-reflection process.
Outcome: The proposed method enhances the credibility of CRS’s explanations and refines them via post-hoc self-reflection.
Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures (P18-1)

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Challenge: Existing solutions to task-oriented dialogue systems follow pipeline designs which introduces complexity and fragility.
Approach: They propose a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) model which tracks dialogue believes and a two stage copynet instantiation which emonstrates good scalability.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art pipeline-based methods on large datasets and retains satisfactory entity match rate on out-of vocabulary (OOV) cases where pipeline-designed competitors totally fail.
Goal Awareness for Conversational AI: Proactivity, Non-collaborativity, and Beyond (2023.acl-tutorials)

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Challenge: Conventional conversation researches focus on the responseability of the system, such as dialogue context understanding and response generation, but overlook the design of an essential property in intelligent conversations, i.e., goal awareness.
Approach: This tutorial introduces the latest advances on the design of agent’s awareness of goals in a wide range of conversational systems.
Outcome: This tutorial introduces the latest advances on the design of agent’s awareness of goals in a wide range of conversational systems.
Fantastic Expressions and Where to Find Them: Chinese Simile Generation with Multiple Constraints (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing attempts to generate similes as context-free tasks are not suitable for simile generation . however, simile generated under such settings might be undesirable, we argue .
Approach: They propose a model to generate a simile with multiple simile elements . they propose to use a vehicle retrieval module to obtain the explicable comparison .
Outcome: The proposed model can generate a simile with multiple simile elements, e.g., context and vehicle.
GMH: A General Multi-hop Reasoning Model for KG Completion (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Knowledge graphs are incomplete with many facts missing, causing performance bottlenecks in many applications.
Approach: They propose a general multi-hop reasoning task that can be formulated as a search process and can be extended to long-distance reasoning scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on baselines in short and long distance reasoning scenarios.
ASTRO: Automatic Strategy Optimization For Non-Cooperative Dialogues (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for optimizing dialogues require substantial human effort for strategy optimization.
Approach: They propose a fully automated solution that leverages large language models’ self-envolving capabilities to optimize dialogue strategies.
Outcome: The proposed solution significantly improves on baseline models across non-cooperative dialogue tasks, highlighting the potential for autonomously developing such agents without human intervention.
PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on financial question answering systems focus on passively responding to user queries.
Approach: They propose a new dataset to facilitate conversational question answering over hybrid contexts in finance . they propose PACIFIC to combine clarification question generation and CQA .
Outcome: The proposed method performs multi-task learning over all sub-tasks in PACIFIC . it incorporates a simple ensemble strategy to alleviate error propagation issue .
STYLE: Improving Domain Transferability of Asking Clarification Questions in Large Language Model Powered Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for addressing ambiguities in conversational search systems are one-size-fits-all and struggle to achieve effective domain transferability.
Approach: They propose a method to provide search engines with strategies regarding when to ask clarification questions in a post-hoc manner.
Outcome: The proposed method improves search performance 10% on four unseen domains.
SCOP: Evaluating the Comprehension Process of Large Language Models from a Cognitive View (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: despite the potential of large language models, it is difficult to fully count on them in real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose to examine how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive perspective.
Outcome: The proposed model analyzes how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive perspective.
TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing QA systems focus on unstructured text, structured knowledge base, or semi-structured tables.
Approach: They propose a large-scale question answering model based on financial reports . numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 58.0% inF1, an 11.1% increase over the baseline model, but still lags behind the best human model.
Reduce Human Labor On Evaluating Conversational Information Retrieval System: A Human-Machine Collaboration Approach (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Evaluating conversational information retrieval systems requires a significant amount of human labor for annotation.
Approach: They propose to use human annotation to calibrate evaluation results to eliminate evaluation biases.
Outcome: The proposed method consumes less than 1% of human labor and achieves a consistency rate of 95%-99% with human evaluation results.
How to Enable Effective Cooperation Between Humans and NLP Models: A Survey of Principles, Formalizations, and Beyond (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Using large language models, intelligent models have evolved into autonomous agents . this paradigm has yielded remarkable progress in numerous NLP tasks in recent years .
Approach: They present a review of human-model cooperation, exploring its principles, formalizations, and open challenges.
Outcome: The proposed model-model cooperation paradigm has been a key focus of recent research . it is a novel paradigm that can be applied to a variety of tasks .
Breaking the Stigma! Unobtrusively Probe Symptoms in Depression Disorder Diagnosis Dialogue (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to improve depression-diagnosis-oriented dialogue systems ignore the Stigma preventing users from open conversations about their struggles.
Approach: They propose a method to promote a sense of unobtrusiveness within the dialogue system and assessing depression disorder by probing symptoms.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on baselines including unobtrusiveness evaluation of dialogue content and diagnostic accuracy.
Dialogue State Tracking with Incremental Reasoning (2021.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Empirical results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of joint belief accuracy.
Approach: They propose to track dialogue states gradually with reasoning over dialogue turns using the back-end data.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of joint belief accuracy for a large-scale human–human dialogue dataset.
Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing unsupervised paraphrase generation methods require large-scale, manually annotated paraphrase datasets, which are labor-intensive to build.
Approach: They propose a self-supervised pseudo-data construction method that generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence.
Outcome: The proposed method generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence.
ARAIDA: Analogical Reasoning-Augmented Interactive Data Annotation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Empirical studies demonstrate that Araida reduces human correction labor by 11.02% compared to vanilla interactive data annotation methods.
Approach: They propose an analogical reasoning-based approach that enhances automatic annotation accuracy in the interactive data annotation setting and reduces the need for human corrections.
Outcome: Empirical studies show that Araida reduces human correction labor by 11.02% compared to vanilla interactive data annotation methods.
E2EDev: Benchmarking Large Language Models in End-to-End Software Development Task (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing E2ESD benchmarks are limited by coarse-grained requirement specifications and unreliable evaluation protocols.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess whether generated software meets user needs . they use a fine-grained set of user requirements and a fully automated testing pipeline .
Outcome: E2EDev is a benchmark to assess whether generated software meets user needs through mimicking real user interactions.
Reconciliation of Pre-trained Models and Prototypical Neural Networks in Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods do not consider that pre-trained models contain a prominently large amount of information regarding word frequencies, thus biasing prototypical neural networks against learning word entities.
Approach: They propose a one-line-code normalization method to reconcile such a mismatch with empirical and theoretical grounds and propose 'references' for the model enhancement.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on nine benchmark datasets and is comparable to the state of the art.
Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Non-collaborative dialogue agents are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, and this poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) the inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning; 2) the difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users.
Approach: They propose to integrate a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm into a non-collaborative dialogue agent for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to achieve a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives.
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored.
Approach: They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency.
GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness.
Approach: They propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework that integrates lexical and syntactical conditions into a text sequence and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm.
Outcome: The proposed framework can combine lexical and syntactical conditions and improve paraphrase generation.
Cross-model Transferability among Large Language Models on the Platonic Representations of Concepts (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Prior work has shown that a single LLM’s concept representations can be captured as steering vectors (SVs) prior work has demonstrated that SVs extracted from smaller LLMs can effectively control the behavior of larger LLM.
Approach: They propose a linear transformation method to bridge LLM concept representations using simple linear transformations to enable efficient cross-model transfer and behavioral control via SVs.
Outcome: The proposed method bridges concept representations across different LLMs and enables efficient cross-model transfer and behavioral control via SVs.
CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models are used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for evaluating large language models using a well-organized taxonomy.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on a well-organized taxonomy and compares it with other models.
Revisit Automatic Error Detection for Wrong and Missing Translation – A Supervised Approach (D19-1)

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Challenge: Current machine translation techniques are bottlenecked by adequacy issues . we propose automatic detection of missing and wrong translations .
Approach: They propose automatic detection of adequacy errors in MT hypothesis for MT model evaluation by annotating missing and wrong translations in 15000 Chinese-English translation pairs.
Outcome: The proposed model can detect missing and wrong translations in 15000 Chinese-English translation pairs.
ConReader: Exploring Implicit Relations in Contracts for Contract Clause Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing CCE methods treat contracts as plain text, creating a barrier to understanding complex contracts.
Approach: They propose a framework to model implicit relations in legal contracts to improve contract understanding . they propose Term-Definition Relation captures the relation between important terms and their definitions .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on two CCE tasks in conventional and zero-shot settings.
Discursive Socratic Questioning: Evaluating the Faithfulness of Language Models’ Understanding of Discourse Relations (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Discursive Socratic Questioning (DISQ) assesses a model's understanding of discourse relations by requiring systematic accuracy over multiple questions.
Approach: They propose a method that evaluates faithfulness of understanding discourse based on question answering.
Outcome: The proposed method evaluates the faithfulness of understanding discourse based on question answering.
Beyond Prompt: Fine-grained Simulation of Cognitively Impaired Standardized Patients via Stochastic Steering (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for training patients with cognitive impairment rely on discrete prompt engineering and fail to capture the heterogeneity of deficits across domains and severity levels.
Approach: They propose to use steering vectors from contrastive pairs of instructions and responses to capture domain-specific features and introduce a Stochastic Token Modulation mechanism to regulate the intervention probability.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines in clinical authenticity and severity controllability while remaining open-source.
NL ⇒ Schedule: Evaluate Multitask Scheduling Capability of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for scheduling from natural language descriptions rely on experts with limited scheduling skills and domain knowledge.
Approach: They propose a model to generate a feasible schedule from natural language descriptions.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves more robust performance than six state-of-the-art LLM+solver methods.
BAR: A Backward Reasoning based Agent for Complex Minecraft Tasks (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on forward reasoning based planning, but this paradigm doesn't work well for complex tasks.
Approach: They propose to decompose a task into easily executed steps by planning and use a backward reasoning based agent to make the planning starting from the terminal state.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods and the proposed modules in a virtual environment that simulates complex tasks based on real-world scenarios.
Can Large Language Models Understand Internet Buzzwords Through User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating definitions of internet buzzwords rely on user-generated content, such as posts and reviews, to understand them.
Approach: They propose a method to generate accurate buzzword definitions using UGC as examples.
Outcome: The proposed method mirrors human language learning skills and can produce more accurate definitions.
Tailor: A Soft-Prompt-Based Approach to Attribute-Based Controlled Text Generation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work focuses on generating sentences satisfying pre-specified attributes such as topic and sentiment, yet suffers from increases in storage and inference time.
Approach: They propose a method that uses a pre-trained continuous vector to generate a fixed pre-trainable language model to satisfy a specified attribute.
Outcome: The proposed model can achieve improvements on eleven attribute-specific generation tasks with 0.08% extra training parameters.
Molweni: A Challenge Multiparty Dialogues-based Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset with Discourse Structure (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Multiparty dialog applications such as discourse parsing and meeting summarization are now mainstream research.
Approach: They propose to annotate a machine reading comprehension dataset with discourse structure built over multiparty dialog using a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) style.
Outcome: The proposed dataset contributes large-scale discourse dependency annotations in a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) style for all of its multiparty dialogs, and achieves only 67.7% F1 on Molweni’s questions, a 20+% significant drop as compared against its SQuAD 2.0 performance.
Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that ChatGPT has limitations such as failing to ask clarifying questions to ambiguous queries or refusing problematic user requests.
Approach: They propose a Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains to trigger proactivity.
Outcome: The proposed scheme augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains to trigger the proactivity of LLM-based proactive dialogue systems.
Towards Proactive Information Probing: Customer Service Chatbots Harvesting Value from Conversation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a new technology is transforming customer service chatbots into strategic bridges for business intelligence . a recent study shows that customer service bots are increasingly being used as reactive support tools .
Approach: They propose a task of Proactive Information Probing which optimizes when to probe users for pre-specified information while minimizing conversation turns and user friction.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in both information probing and service quality.
METER: Evaluating Multi-Level Contextual Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks evaluate contextual causal reasoning in fragmented settings, failing to ensure context consistency or cover the full causal hierarchy.
Approach: They use a unified context to benchmark large language models' contextual causal reasoning skills.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that LLMs are susceptible to distraction by irrelevant but factually correct information at lower level of causality.
PAGED: A Benchmark for Procedural Graphs Extraction from Documents (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extraction of procedural graphs from documents are not solving the task well.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to test automatic extraction of procedural graphs from documents . they involve three advanced large language models and enhance them with a novel self-refine strategy .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark systematically examines the progress of current methods and explores the potential of emerging large language models (LLMs) on this task.
METRO: Towards Strategy Induction from Expert Dialogue Transcripts for Non-collaborative Dialogues (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Developing non-collaborative dialogue agents traditionally requires manual codification of expert strategies.
Approach: They propose a method that formalizes expert knowledge into a Strategy Forest from raw transcripts.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 9%-10% in two benchmarks.
Re-examining the Role of Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing text-to-SQL models treat schema linking as a minor component . Existing solutions treat schema as merely a string component based on string matching .
Approach: They build a schema linking corpus based on a Spider text-to-SQL dataset . they find schema linking is the crux for the current text- to-Sql task .
Outcome: The proposed model performs well on the Spider text-to-SQL dataset despite its simplicity.
Dynamic Voting for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multi-path voting methods generate multiple reasoning paths for each problem, causing factual errors and illusion generation.
Approach: They propose a multi-path voting technique that effectively reduces the number of reasoning paths during multi-path voting while preserving accuracies.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms Self-consistency using 24.7% of the number of paths on the LetterConcat task.
ELABORATION: A Comprehensive Benchmark on Human-LLM Competitive Programming (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on human-LLM competitive programming use scattered, application-specific human feedback.
Approach: They propose a taxonomy of human feedback consolidating the entire programming process, which promotes fine-grained evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark pinpoints strengths and weaknesses of existing methods and will be openly released.
Knowing-how & Knowing-that: A New Task for Machine Comprehension of User Manuals (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for machine reading comprehension of user manuals have trouble answering complex questions.
Approach: They propose a knowing-how & knowing-that task that requires the model to answer factoid-style, procedure-style and inconsistent questions about user manuals.
Outcome: The proposed model can answer factoid-style, procedure-style and inconsistent questions about user manuals.
Towards Effective Automatic Debt Collection with Persona Awareness (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing debt collection agents fail to tailor strategies to debtor personas, leading to ineffective collection.
Approach: They present a commercial practice on debt collection agents that organizes debtor personas into a taxonomy and constructs a persona-aware conversation dataset.
Outcome: The proposed agent increases recovery rate by 3.31% and collects additional 100K RMB after two months of testing.
Selective Annotation via Data Allocation: These Data Should Be Triaged to Experts for Annotation Rather Than the Model (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to obtain high-quality annotations under limited budgets focus on selecting informative data for expert annotations while the rest of the data is assigned to model annotation.
Approach: They propose a semi-automatic annotation framework that uses error-aware triage and bi-weighting mechanisms to obtain high-quality annotations under limited budget.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in the data annotation problem under limited budgets.
CARE: A Clue-guided Assistant for CSRs to Read User Manuals (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current solutions don't fit the online custom service scenarios well due to the lack of attention to user questions and possible responses.
Approach: They propose to build a clue-guided assistant for customer service representations (CSRs) that can provide accurate responses and explicitly show explainable paths about how to arrive at these responses.
Outcome: The proposed assistant can reduce CSRs' reading burden and keep high service quality, in particular with >35% decrease in time spent and keeping a >0.75 ICC score.
POS-Constrained Parallel Decoding for Non-autoregressive Generation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive generation systems face multimodality problem due to conditionally independent decoding.
Approach: They propose to incorporate linguistic structure into NAG inference instead of teacher AG . they propose a method that provides a specific POS sequence to constrain the NAG model .
Outcome: The proposed method improves NAG models on four text generation tasks to a greater extent compared to knowledge distillation.
GraphOTTER: Evolving LLM-based Graph Reasoning for Complex Table Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for complex table question answering are often implicit, feeding the entire table into prompts.
Approach: They propose a GraphOTTER that explicitly establishes the reasoning process to pinpoint the correct answers.
Outcome: The proposed method is able to identify the correct answers on two benchmark datasets and two LLM backbones.

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