Papers by Wentao Deng
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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Wentao Deng, Jiahuan Pei, Keyi Kong, Zhe Chen, Furu Wei, Yujun Li, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
Intent-calibrated Self-training for Answer Selection in Open-domain Dialogues (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing answer selection models require large amounts of labeled data to produce accurate answers. |
| Approach: | They propose intent-calibrated self-training to calibrate answer labels using labeled data . they propose intentcalibration to improve quality of pseudo answer labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed intent-calibrated answer selection paradigm outperforms baselines with 1%, 5%, and 10% labeled data on two benchmark datasets. |
Beyond Explicit Refusals: Soft-Failure Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing jamming attacks on RAG systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-of-service behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack framework that exploits safety-aligned behaviors of large language models to trigger soft failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits safety-aligned behaviors of large language models to induce soft failures. |
Improving Multi-label Malevolence Detection in Dialogues through Multi-faceted Label Correlation Enhancement (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for detecting dialogue malevolence neglect label correlation. |
| Approach: | They propose to crowdsource a multi-label dataset for detecting malevolent dialogue responses and a model with label correlation enhanced CRF to measure the correlation between malevolence and negative emotions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best performing baseline method on precision, recall, F1, and Jaccard score by 16.1%, 11.9%, 12.0%, and 6.1% on malevolence. |
Interactive Training: Feedback-Driven Neural Network Optimization (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | In traditional neural network training, static optimization methods lack flexibility and responsiveness . authors demonstrate that Interactive Training provides superior training stability and reduced sensitivity to initial hyperparameters . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework that enables real-time feedback-driven optimization of neural networks by human experts or automated AI agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior training stability, reduced sensitivity to initial hyperparameters, and improved adaptability to evolving user needs. |
Data-Centric Perspectives on Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at natural language understanding and generation, yet rely on static pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment Large Language Models with external retrieval to ground model outputs . traditional RAG is constrained by a fixed retrieve-then-generate routine . authors aim to guide creation of high-quality datasets for next generation of adaptive LLM agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can decompose tasks, issue exploratory queries, and refine evidence through iterative retrieval. |
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinnan Guo, Wentao Deng, Yongrui Chen, Yang Li, Mengdi Zhou, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Dong Yang, Liubin Wang, Yong Pan
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product features from unstructured text still suffer from problems . e-commerce platforms are focusing on multi-scale values, which can be confusing . |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training technique to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing token-level masking strategy and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks. |
Conversational Education at Scale: A Multi-LLM Agent Workflow for Procedural Learning and Pedagogic Quality Assessment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on large language models lacks scalability and assesses pedagogic quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent workflow leveraging large language models to simulate interactive teaching-learning conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow integrates teacher and learner agents, an interaction manager, and an evaluator to facilitate procedural learning and assess pedagogic quality. |
From Chat Logs to Collective Insights: Aggregative Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to analyzing large-scale conversation logs treat interactions as independent, missing critical insights. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires models to reason explicitly over thousands of user-chatbot interactions to answer aggregational queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task requires models to reason over thousands of user-chatbot interactions to answer aggregational queries such as identifying emerging concerns among demographics. |
EthicMind: A Risk-Aware Framework for Ethical-Emotional Alignment in Multi-Turn Dialogue (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue models address empathy and ethical safety in isolation . Existing models fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve . |
| Approach: | They propose a risk-aware framework that integrates ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than baselines in ethically complex interactions. |