Papers by Xiaoman Pan
Connect-the-Dots: Bridging Semantics between Words and Definitions via Aligning Word Sense Inventories (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised models struggle to make correct predictions on rare word senses due to limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a gloss alignment algorithm that can align definition sentences with the same meaning from different sense inventories to collect rich lexical knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on both frequent and rare word senses. |
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks. |
How do Words Contribute to Sentence Semantics? Revisiting Sentence Embeddings with a Perturbation Method (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on sentence representation learning focus on human annotation, but they neglect the critical property that essential contents should contribute to sentence semantics more than non-essential contents when encoding a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbation method for unsupervised semantic analysis that uses a sentence compression metric to adapt sentence compression datasets for automatic evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture the main semantics of sentences better than several SOTA unsupervised sentence embedding models. |
C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pretrain open-domain question answering systems lack task-specific annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain a two-stage open-domain question answering system with strong transfer capabilities by using a dictionary and a large-scale corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach leads to 2%-10% gains in top-20 accuracy and improves with reader. |
ELISA-EDL: A Cross-lingual Entity Extraction, Linking and Localization System (N18-5)
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| Challenge: | ELISA-EDL is a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for Wikipedia languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for English speakers . it extracts entities from unstructured text in any of 282 Wikipedia languages and links them to English knowledge bases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entity mentions from Wikipedia and links them to English knowledge bases and visualizes locations related to disaster topics on a world heatmap. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
OpenFact: Factuality Enhanced Open Knowledge Extraction (2023.tacl-1)
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Linfeng Song, Ante Wang, Xiaoman Pan, Hongming Zhang, Dian Yu, Lifeng Jin, Haitao Mi, Jinsong Su, Yue Zhang, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing OIE systems organize knowledge into subject-relation-object (SRO) triplets, and they use templates to extract such knowledge triplet. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to handle expressiveness and groundedness in OpenFact . they propose to use templates, extra constraints, and adopt human efforts to ensure that most triplets contain enough details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves expressiveness and groundedness of OpenFact . it is more accurate and denser than OPIEC-Linked, which is grounded to Wikidata . |
From Language Modeling to Instruction Following: Understanding the Behavior Shift in LLMs after Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in aligning with user intentions. |
| Approach: | They develop local and global explanation methods and a feed-forward-based method for input-output attribution to investigate the impact of instruction tuning on user intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compares explanations from pre-trained and instruction-tuned models . it empowers LLMs to recognize the instruction parts of user prompts, it encourages response generation . |
Zemi: Learning Zero-Shot Semi-Parametric Language Models from Multiple Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing semi-parametric language models lack the capacity to perform zero-shot tasks . large language models have shown impressive zero-shoot ability, but huge model size costs . semi-parametric language model can be used to augment a smaller language model with retrieved background knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-parametric language model for zero-shot task generalization that augments a smaller language model with retrieved related background knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms T0-3B by 16% across seven diverse evaluation tasks while being 3.8x smaller in scale. |
Cross-lingual Joint Entity and Word Embedding to Improve Entity Linking and Parallel Sentence Mining (D19-61)
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| Challenge: | Entities can be used as effective signals to generate less ambiguous semantic representations and align multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia . it provides reliable alignment on word/entity level and sentence level, and thus can be used for unsupervised cross-linguistic entity linking. |
Improving Question Answering with External Knowledge (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | ARC-Easy, ARC Challenge, and OpenBookQA use Wikipedia to augment training data . performance degrades when additional instances exhibit higher difficulty than original training data. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods for exploiting external knowledge for QA in science . they enrich the original corpus with relevant text snippets from an open-domain resource . the second method simply increases the amount of training data by appending additional in-domain instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve gains in accuracy of 8.1%, 13.0%, and 12.8% on science QA tasks. |
OASum: Large-Scale Open Domain Aspect-based Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generic summarization methods generate only one summary for all different requests which is not optimal for diverse demands. |
| Approach: | They use crowd-sourced knowledge on Wikipedia to create a large-scale open-domain aspect-based summarization dataset with 1 million different aspects on 2 million Wikipedia pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse aspect-based summarizations on Wikipedia with zero/few-shot and fine-tuning on seven downstream datasets. |
DivScene: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation with Large Vision Language Models in Diverse Scenes (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhaowei Wang, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Ye Tian, Yue Yang, Kaixin Ma, Xiaoman Pan, Yangqiu Song, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in tasks like visual question answering and document understanding. |
| Approach: | They introduce DivScene, a large-scale dataset with 4,614 houses across 81 scene types and 5,707 kinds of target objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a much greater diversity of target objects and scene types than existing datasets, enabling a comprehensive task evaluation. |
Error Analysis of Uyghur Name Tagging: Language-specific Techniques and Remaining Challenges (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | despite efforts at name tagging, there is limited understanding on the performance ceiling . despite the high-resource language, there are very few natural language processing tools available . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a machine learning model to identify Uyghur name tagger errors . they conclude that such a model is unlikely to be effective for Uygur, or low-resource languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is unlikely to be effective for Uyghur, or low-resource languages in general, the authors argue . they show that the proposed model can be used for high-res languages with superficial features . |
MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely on knowledge distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view fine-tuning method that exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods that rely heavily on LLM teachers . it grants models generalization ability across views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete data. |
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Jingbo Shang, Zhepei Wei, Henry Peng Zou, Zijie Huang, Zhengyang Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiaoman Pan, Lian Xiong, Jingguo Liu, Philip S. Yu, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
GAIA: A Fine-grained Multimedia Knowledge Extraction System (2020.acl-demos)
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Manling Li, Alireza Zareian, Ying Lin, Xiaoman Pan, Spencer Whitehead, Brian Chen, Bo Wu, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang, Clare Voss, Daniel Napierski, Marjorie Freedman
| Challenge: | Open source knowledge extraction tools are used for many real-world applications, but there is no comprehensive system for KE. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimedia knowledge extraction system that takes multimedia data from various sources and languages as input and creates a coherent, structured knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The system achieves top performance at the recent NIST TAC SM-KBP2019 evaluation. |
Skills-in-Context: Unlocking Compositionality in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | eliciting compositional generalization capabilities in large language models is challenging for advanced LLMs because they lack foundational skills and compositional examples in the same prompt context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use compositional generalization capabilities in large language models to elicit compositional skills in a prompt context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure enables LLMs to tackle more challenging problems with as few as two exemplars and unlocks their latent potential. |
PIVOINE: Instruction Tuning for Open-world Entity Profiling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction focus on a closed-world setting, but PIVOINE is a promising solution to tackle the open-world problem of entity profiling. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an LLM that performs Open-world Entity Profiling with instruction tuning to extract desirable entity profiles . they construct INSTRUCTOPENWIKI, a substantial instruction-tuning dataset for Open-World Entity Profiles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and ChatGPT-based baselines on unseen and out-of-ontology cases. |
Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstract reasoning is a key to generalization in human reasoning, but eliciting language models to perform reasoning with abstraction remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a new structured reasoning format called Abstraction-of-Thought (AoT) this approach elicits language models to first contemplate on the abstract level before incorporating concrete details . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning on 23 unseen tasks. |
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Standard RALMs often neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to improve robustness of RALMs by generating sequential reading notes for each retrieved document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard RALMs on four open-domain QA benchmarks. |