Papers by Yanran Li
NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding (2024.eacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for interactive agents focus on specific capabilities in predetermined scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives in an immersive environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates human-like responses guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. |
Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Definition Generation (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained transformer-based definition generation models lack effective representation learning to contain full semantic components of the given word, leading to under-specific definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive learning method that encourages the model to capture more detailed semantic representations from the definition sequence encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could generate more specific definitions compared with state-of-the-art models. |
MISC: A Mixed Strategy-Aware Model integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for emotional support conversation are too coarse-grained to capture user’s instant mental state and focus on expressing empathy in the response rather than gradually reducing user’ s distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which firstly infers the user’s fine-grained emotional status and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model infers the user’s fine-grained emotional status and responds skillfully using mixed-up strategy modeling. |
Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Scripts are written text for plays, movies, or broadcasts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level contrastive learning framework to capture characters’ global information in a fine-grained manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three character understanding sub-tasks by a considerable margin. |
Focus-Constrained Attention Mechanism for CVAE-based Response Generation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate high-frequency but trivial responses such as "I don't know" or "I'm ok" due to the discrepancy in discourse-level information, standard models generate one-to-many relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform coarse-grained discourse-level information into fine-grounded word-level knowledge by introducing a fine-grain focus signal and a focus-constrained attention mechanism to take full advantage of focus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more diverse and informative responses compared with state-of-the-art models. |
GraphCheck: Breaking Long-Term Text Barriers with Extracted Knowledge Graph-Powered Fact-Checking (2025.acl-long)
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Yingjian Chen, Haoran Liu, Yinhong Liu, Jinxiang Xie, Rui Yang, Han Yuan, Yanran Fu, Peng Yuan Zhou, Qingyu Chen, James Caverlee, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking methods that use large language models often generate subtle factual errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-checking framework that uses extracted knowledge graphs to enhance text representation. |
| Outcome: | GraphCheck outperforms existing specialized fact-checkers on seven benchmarks spanning general and medical domains . Graph Neural Networks process extracted knowledge graphs as a soft prompt, enabling efficient fact- checking in a single inference call. |
C3KG: A Chinese Commonsense Conversation Knowledge Graph (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense knowledge bases organize tuples in an isolated manner, causing problems for chatbots . |
| Approach: | They create a Chinese commonsense conversation knowledge graph which integrates social commonsensm and dialog flow information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph incorporates social commonsense knowledge and dialog flow information. |
ReAgent: Reversible Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Hop QA (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhao Xinjie, Fan Gao, Xingyu Song, Yingjian Chen, Rui Yang, Yanran Fu, Yuyang Wang, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering (QA) is a central challenge in natural language processing . early mistakes can cause errors and undermine the final result, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible multi-agent reasoning framework that backtracks to earlier valid states when conflicts arise. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluation shows that the framework improves on forward-only benchmarks by 6% . the approach enables agents to backtrack to valid states when conflicts arise . |
Reward-Shifted Speculative Sampling Is An Efficient Test-Time Weak-to-Strong Aligner (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on test-time alignment, where additional compute is allocated during inference to enhance LLM safety and reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-shifted speculative sampling algorithm that aligns a draft model with human preferences while the target model remains unchanged. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves superior gold reward scores at a significantly reduced inference cost in test-time weak-to-strong alignment experiments. |
Distinguishability Calibration to In-Context Learning (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models generate similar output embeddings which makes it difficult to discriminate for the prompt-based classifier. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration method which rotates the embedding feature into a new metric space and adapts the ratio of each dimension to a uniform distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the distinguishability of learning embeddings on three datasets under various settings. |