Papers by Xian-Ling Mao
ET5: A Novel End-to-end Framework for Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods require three steps to understand text, but span extraction and question rephrasing steps are not fully exploited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conversational machine reading comprehension based on shared parameter mechanism . experimental results show the proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art results on the ShARC leaderboard . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the ShARC leaderboard with the BLEU-4 score of 55.2. |
Cross-Lingual Phrase Retrieval (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual phrase retrieval learn word or sentence representations in word or sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual phrase retrieval model that extracts phrase representations from unlabeled example sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale cross-lingual phrase retrieval dataset, showing it can perform in an unseen language pair during training. |
XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA (2022.acl-long)
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Zewen Chi, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Bo Zheng, Saksham Singhal, Payal Bajaj, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | ELECTRA-style tasks are used to pretrain cross-lingual models for NLP tasks . masked language modeling tasks require massive computation resources, rendering such models quite expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ELECTRA-style tasks to pre-train a cross-lingual language model . they propose to pretrain the model on multilingual and parallel corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cross-lingual understanding tasks with much less computation cost. |
Hashing based Efficient Inference for Image-Text Matching (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on image-text matching has focused on exploring interactions between images and sentences to improve performance without considering inference efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a hashing-based efficient inference module which can be plugged into existing frameworks to speed up inference step without reducing retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can be plugged into existing framework to speed up inference step without reducing retrieval performance. |
Automatic Evaluation for Text-to-image Generation: Task-decomposed Framework, Distilled Training, and Meta-evaluation Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs rely on commercial models such as GPT-4o for evaluations, but they are not universally accessible. |
| Approach: | They propose a task decomposition evaluation framework based on GPT-4o to automatically construct a specialized training dataset to break down the multifaceted evaluation process into simpler sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art GPT-4o evaluation framework with over 4.6% improvement in Spearman and Kendall correlations with human judgments. |
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training (2024.acl-long)
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Le Zhuo, Zewen Chi, Minghao Xu, Heyan Huang, Jianan Zhao, Heqi Zheng, Conghui He, Xian-Ling Mao, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that ProtLLM achieves superior performance against protein-specialized baselines on protein-centric tasks and induces zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities on protein language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal large language model (LLM) that can handle protein-centric and protein-language tasks by using a dynamic protein mounting mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict proteins from a vast pool of candidates and can also predict natural language and biological papers. |
mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Saksham Singhal, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on monolingual texts, but it has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a partially non-autoregressive objective for text-to-text pre-training and propose mT6 to improve cross-lingual transferability over multilingual T5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability over existing models. |
Gated Mechanism Enhanced Multi-Task Learning for Dialog Routing (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog routing are mostly heuristic and cannot achieve high-quality performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework with a dialog encoder and two tailored gated mechanism modules to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can play the role of hierarchical information filtering and is non-invasive to existing dialog systems. |
Bridging The Gap: Entailment Fused-T5 for Open-retrieval Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversation scenes. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stage end-to-end framework to bridge the information gap between decision-making and question generation in a global understanding manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the OR-ShARC benchmark. |
SQLWOZ: A Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with SQL-Based Dialogue State Representation for Complex User Requirements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing TOD datasets present simplified interactions with simple slot-value style constraints and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel TOD dataset that captures complex user requirements using SQL statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset captures complex, real-world user requirements. |
AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for annotating long-document question answering are based on short documents and can hardly incorporate long-range information. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method to generate long-document question answering pairs . they propose a method to aggregate and generate answers with long-range dependency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on NarrativeQA and Qasper. |
Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters for usergenerated text in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese spell checker that leverages multimodal Chinese characters' information to predict the correct output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the SIGHAN benchmarks by a large margin. |
EXCEEDS: Extracting Complex Events via Nugget-based Grid Modeling in Scientific Domain (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive event extraction research has been conducted in many domains, including news, finance, and biology. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end scientific event extraction framework for encoding nuggets into a grid matrix and simplifying complex event extraction as a nuggot-based grid modeling task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs well in scientific domain, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. |
SciMRC: Multi-perspective Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets focused on single-perspective question-answer pairs overlooking inherent variation in comprehension levels among different readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective scientific machine reading comprehension dataset . their dataset comprises 741 scientific papers and 6,057 question-answer pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes questions from beginners, students, and experts. |
Context-aware Entity Typing in Knowledge Graphs (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graph entity typing are embedding-based and graph convolutional networks (GCNs) . Existing approaches for knowledge Graph Entity Typing (KGET) are incomplete and require multiple inference mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses entities’ contextual information to infer missing types in knowledge graphs by using two inference mechanisms: N2T and Agg2T. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can infer entities' missing types by completing two real-world KGs. |
Can Cross-Lingual Transferability of Multilingual Transformers Be Activated Without End-Task Data? (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-lingual transfer learning cannot activate cross-linguistic transferability when end-task data are unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual transfer method that disassembles multilingual Transformers into sub-modules and reassembles them to be the multilingual end-task model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method activates the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers without accessing end-task data. |
HCL-TAT: A Hybrid Contrastive Learning Method for Few-shot Event Detection with Task-Adaptive Threshold (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection have failed to address the problem of constantly emerging event types with limited data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method for event detection with a task-adaptive threshold . they propose to learn discriminative representations with 'two-view contrastive loss' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset. |
Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Shuaibin Li, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang, Dahua Lin, Xian-Ling Mao, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | utilizing human annotations can enhance critique ability, but model-generated critiques suffer from inherent flaws due to complexity of critique . a new framework that leverages multi-agent feedback improves critique ability . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability . they propose to use supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve this capability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves critique ability in both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning stages. |
Capturing Global Structural Information in Long Document Question Answering with Compressive Graph Selector Network (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer long document questions ignore the global structure of the long document, which is essential for long-range understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a Compressive Graph Selector Network to capture the global structure of the long document in a compressive and iterative manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on two datasets. |
Comprehensive Study: How the Context Information of Different Granularity Affects Dialogue State Tracking? (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays a key role in task-oriented dialogue systems to monitor the user’s goal. |
| Approach: | They propose to use scratch-based and previous-based strategies to track dialogue state . they explore how different granularities affect dialogue state tracking . |
| Outcome: | The scratch-based strategy obtains each slot value by inquiring all the dialogue history, while the previous-based method is not very useful for long-dependency dialogue state tracking. |
Personalized Topic Selection Model for Topic-Grounded Dialogue (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic-grounded dialogue systems tend to predict user-uninteresting and contextually irrelevant topics due to noise within side information sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a personalized topic selection model for topic-grounded dialogue that selectively aggregates side information to generate engaging responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple evaluation metrics. |
MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang, Jinxing Zhou, Changsen Yuan, Tian Lan, Ziqin Zhou, Yudong Li, Jiajun Xu, Jingyun Liao, YiMing Cheng, Xuefeng Chen, Xian-Ling Mao, Yousheng Feng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation are largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression. |
Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: From Complex Modularity to Zero-Shot Autonomous Agent (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialogue systems are designed to be composed of several functional modules, but lacks a general-purpose instruction-following language model. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully zero-shot autonomous TOD agent that leverages a general-purpose instruction-following language model to decide what to do at each dialogue turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can perform tasks in real-life scenarios with a general-purpose instruction-following language model. |
Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate personalized dialogues using latent-space energy-based models by using a latent space energy-model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in personality controllability and response quality. |
Sequential Topic Selection Model with Latent Variable for Topic-Grounded Dialogue (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic-grounded dialogue systems focus on the current conversation and corresponding topic sequence to predict the next topic. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to exploit topic-guided conversations to better model post-to-response topic-transition and guide the response generation to the current conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on prediction and generation tasks. |
SEOE: A Scalable and Reliable Semantic Evaluation Framework for Open Domain Event Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for Open Domain Event Detection (ODED) lack representative representations of the real world, making it difficult to accurately reflect performance of various ODED methods in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable and reliable Semantic-level Evaluation framework for Open domain event detection by constructing a more representative evaluation benchmark and introducing a semantic evaluation metric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework first constructs a more representative evaluation benchmark that currently includes 564 event types covering 7 major domains, with a cost-effective supplementary annotation strategy to ensure the benchmark’s representativeness. |
BiSyn-GAT+: Bi-Syntax Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis is challenging because a sentence may contain multiple aspects or complicated relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-syntax aware Graph Attention Network to model the context of every aspect and sentiment relations across aspects for learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets. |
TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent reasoning-based models cannot fully figure out complex causal relationships between mentioned entities with external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree structure Reasoning schEmA that constructs a multi-hierarchical scalable tree as the reasoning structure to clarify the causal relationships between mentioned entities. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets show the proposed model works. |
Mix-Initiative Response Generation with Dynamic Prefix Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems focus on training a holistic response generation model without any distinction between different initiatives. |
| Approach: | They propose a general mix-Initiative Dynamic Prefix Tuning framework to decouple different initiatives from the generation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two public dialogue datasets on human evaluations and automatic metrics. |
Your Reasoning Model Knows What Counts: Self-Guided Chain-of-Thought Pruning for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chain-of-Thought reasoning are often degraded because they disregard the model’s intrinsic reasoning dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided pruning framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic likelihood landscape to identify segments that are extraneous to its specific reasoning pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces output length while maintaining or improving accuracy on multiple benchmarks. |
Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that denoising word alignment improves cross-lingual transferability . most applications and resources are still English-centric, making non-English users hard to access. |
| Approach: | They propose to denoise word alignment as a cross-lingual pre-training task . they first self-label word alignments for parallel sentences and then mask tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability on token-level tasks, especially on question answering, and structured prediction. |
Unsupervised Question Answering via Answer Diversifying (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive question answering methods use labeled data to train QA models. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method by diversifying answers by using data construction, data augmentation and denoising filter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous models on five benchmark datasets . it shows strong performance in the few-shot learning setting . |
InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.naacl-main)
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Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Nan Yang, Saksham Singhal, Wenhui Wang, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning cross-lingual representations are lacking in the field of NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual transferability on benchmarks. |