Papers by Xiaojiang Liu
TableGPT: Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation with Table Structure Reconstruction and Content Matching (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can produce informative and fluent text with the help of large-scale datasets, but they suffer insufficient learning problem with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use table transformation module with template to rewrite structured table in natural language as input for GPT-2 and exploit multi-task learning with two auxiliary tasks to preserve table’s structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on most few-shot settings. |
Retrieval-guided Dialogue Response Generation via a Matching-to-Generation Framework (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | generative models for end-to-end sequence generation have been shown promising for this task . however, how to precisely extract a skeleton and how to effectively train a retrieval-guided response generator is still challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where skeleton extraction is made by an interpretable matching model and a retrieval-guided response generator is followed by a separate generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in a variety of experiments. |
Translating a Math Word Problem to a Expression Tree (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Sequence-to-sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models have been successfully applied to automatic math word problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose an equation normalization method to normalize duplicated equations and propose an ensemble model to combine their advantages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models on the math word problem solving. |
Learning Bias-reduced Word Embeddings Using Dictionary Definitions (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings have undesirable gender, racial, and religious biases . DD-GloVe is a train-time debiasing algorithm that uses dictionary definitions based on word definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dictionary-guided loss function that encourages word embeddings to be similar to their relatively neutral dictionary definition representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can learn word embeddings by leveraging dictionary definitions. |
Automatic Article Commenting: the Task and Dataset (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to make comments on articles are based on human-annotated subsets, but they are not suitable for online forums. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale Chinese corpus with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments’ varying quality to generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates human-annotated subset characterizing the comments’ varying quality and shows that it is more accurate than previous models. |
Dialogue Generation on Infrequent Sentence Functions via Structured Meta-Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose of a sentence in a conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured meta-learning approach for dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves informativeness and relevance of dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions while preserving knowledge generalization for similar sentence functions. |
Towards Less Generic Responses in Neural Conversation Models: A Statistical Re-weighting Method (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Sequence-to-sequence models tend to generate generic/dull responses . |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical re-weighting method that assigns different weights for multiple responses of the same query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves acceptance rate of generated responses and significantly reduces generated generic responses. |
MR. Judge: Multimodal Reasoner as a Judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Effective reward modeling is especially valuable in reinforcement learning (RLHF) . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for empowering general-purpose MLLMs judges with strong reasoning capabilities by using multiple-choice problem models instead of directly assigning scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o on VL-RewardBench and improves performance on MM-Vet by up to 7.7%. |
Event Extraction as Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Event extraction (EE) is a crucial information extraction task that aims to extract event information in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning paradigm for event extraction by explicitly casting it as a machine reading comprehension problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the data-scarce scenario, achieving 49.8% in F1 for event argument extraction with only 1% data, compared with 2.2% of the previous method. |
Dual Dynamic Memory Network for End-to-End Multi-turn Task-oriented Dialog Systems (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialog systems struggle to dynamically model long dialog context for interactions and effectively incorporate knowledge base (KB) information into dialog generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual dynamic memory network for multi-turn dialog generation . the model dynamically expands the dialog memory turn by turn and keeps track of dialog history . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on three benchmark datasets on human evaluation and automatic evaluation. |
Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on improving attribute consistency focus on incorporating attribute information in responses, but few efforts have identified the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency . they propose to incorporate attribute information into the generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over strong baselines on downstream tasks. |
The World is Not Binary: Learning to Rank with Grayscale Data for Dialogue Response Selection (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning-to-rank response selection are suboptimal due to ignorance of diversity of response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf response retrieval models as automatic grayscale data generators to train response selection models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be automated without human effort on grayscale data. |
Skeleton-to-Response: Dialogue Generation Guided by Retrieval Memory (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative dialogue models generate responses from input queries . however, the results are limited and the models are unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which exploits retrieval results via a skeleton-to-response paradigm . they extract a query skelet and use it to generate a new skele and response . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the informativeness of the generated responses. |
Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yanghao Li, Yuepeng Fu, Siyang Deng, Qinyu Luo, Cheng Qian, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Xiaojiang Liu
| Challenge: | Positional biases in large language models hinder their ability to process long inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess positional bias in large language models involving multiple pieces of relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of long-context language models by examining their models with different input lengths and tasks. |
Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingjie Li, Xiang Li, Chenlei Guo, Xing Fan, Ruhi Sarikaya, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Large language model agents rely on in-context policy documents to act as effective user assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic benchmark generator with Controllable Complexity in agent policy across four levels to evaluate agents under increasing complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline in data-sparse and high-complexity settings. |
Generate, Delete and Rewrite: A Three-Stage Framework for Improving Persona Consistency of Dialogue Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona-based dialogue models generate human-like responses but can hardly avoid the generation of inconsistent persona words. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that deletes inconsistent words from a generated response prototype and further rewrites it to a personality-consistent one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves good performance on the persona-chat dataset. |
Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that restoring incomplete utterances from context improves the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to restore incomplete utterances from context . they propose to pick and combine the data to restore the incomplete . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts response quality of open-domain dialogue systems. |
Rigid Formats Controlled Text Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural text generation is a challenging task that requires rigid formats to be controlled . a framework called SongNet is designed to tackle this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to tackle a task called rigid formats controlled text generation . they propose rhyming schemes and a transformer-based auto-regressive language model to improve the modeling performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance on format, rhyme, and sentence integrity. |
A Batch Normalized Inference Network Keeps the KL Vanishing Away (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used to approximate a model’s posterior on latent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose to let the Kullback–Leibler divergence individual follow a distribution across the whole dataset and analyze that it is sufficient to prevent posterior collapse by keeping the expectation of the KL’s distribution positive. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can avoid posterior collapse effectively and efficiently without introducing any new model component or modifying the objective. |
A Discrete CVAE for Response Generation on Short-Text Conversation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural conversation models are easy to generate bland and generic responses . however, their improvement of generating high-quality responses is still unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a discrete latent variable with an explicit semantic meaning to improve the conditional variational autoencoder on short-text conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms various kinds of generation models under automatic and human evaluations and generates more diverse and informative responses. |
Fine-Grained Sentence Functions for Short-Text Conversation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has analyzed various factors indicating the conversational purpose such as emotions, topics, word orders, syntactic patterns and other aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a short-text conversation dataset with annotated sentences and train conversation models conditioned on the sentence functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict the quality of the returned responses. |
Response-Anticipated Memory for On-Demand Knowledge Integration in Response Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural conversation models generate appropriate but non-informative responses in general. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a document memory with anticipated responses in mind using a teacher-student framework and a student's input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art for the Conversing by Reading task. |
Enhancing Content Planning for Table-to-Text Generation with Data Understanding and Verification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Table-to-text models that select and order salient data and verbalize them fluently are lacking in content planning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance neural content planning by understanding data values with contextual numerical value representations that bring the sense of value comparison into content planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems with respect to content planning metrics on ROTOWIRE and MLB datasets. |