Papers by Ying Zheng
Integrating User History into Heterogeneous Graph for Dialogue Act Recognition (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models cannot fully recognize the specific expressions given by users due to the informality and diversity of natural language expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Heterogeneous User History graph convolution network which utilizes the user’s historical answers grouped by DA labels as additional clues to recognize the DA label of utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets and shows that it integrates user’s historical answers. |
CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-long)
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Jingheng Ye, Zishan Xu, Yinghui Li, Linlin Song, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Ruitong Liu, Xin Su, Zifei Shan
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, but the interpretabilty of these metrics has been neglected. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-based metric that describes four aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-corrections, under-correcties, and over-corrects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric reveals critical qualities and locates drawbacks of GEC systems. |
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters (2024.acl-long)
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Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Zhongli Li, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on misspelled characters, ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult to correct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese character checking to identify and correct wrong characters in texts by human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. |
It is AI’s Turn to Ask Humans a Question: Question-Answer Pair Generation for Children’s Story Books (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) techniques are created mainly to answer questions asked by humans, but in educational applications, teachers often need to decide what questions to ask . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fairytale-themed storybook as input to generate QA pairs that can test a student's comprehension skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art QAG baseline systems and builds an interactive story-telling application for the future real-world deployment. |
Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task. |
CLEME: Debiasing Multi-reference Evaluation for Grammatical Error Correction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating the performance of Grammatical Error Correction systems is a challenging task due to its subjectivity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate GEC systems in multi-reference evaluation setting . they use consistent edit boundaries to eliminate bias caused by inconsistent edit boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric eliminates bias caused by inconsistent edit boundaries on six English reference sets. |
An Efficient Framework for Whole-Page Reranking via Single-Modal Supervision (2026.acl-industry)
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Zishuai Zhang, Sihao Yu, null Xiewenyi, Ying Nie, Junfeng Wang, Zhiming Zheng, Dawei Yin, Hainan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing whole-page reranking methods require large-scale expert annotations to achieve high-quality results. |
| Approach: | They propose a whole-page reranking framework that converts single-modal rankers into page-level guidance by constructing budget-aware candidates for cross-modal annotations and distilling intra-modality preferences to align relevance scales across modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation costs by 70-90% while outperforming fully-annotated reranking baselines. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the learning of data-scarce target domains have negative transfer due to the data distributions between source and target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a reinforced selector to select helpful data for transfer learning and a Wasserstein-based discriminator to maximize the distance between the selected data and target data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on three real-world text mining tasks. |
GRIL: Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Integrated Learning with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jialin Chen, Houyu Zhang, Seongjun Yun, Alejandro Mottini, Rex Ying, Xiang Song, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Zheng Li, Qingjun Cui
| Challenge: | Existing graph RAGs decouple retrieval and reasoning processes, preventing adaptability . existing graph Raggings depend heavily on ground-truth entities, which are often unavailable in open-domain settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph retriever that is trained end-to-end with large-scale graphs . structure and semantic features are encoded via soft tokens and the verbalized graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large-scale graph retrieval models by grounding it with external knowledge. |
MKT: A Multi-Stage Knowledge Transfer Framework to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-Domain Chinese Spelling Correction (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Peng Xing, Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Xinnian Liang, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shu-Yu Guo, Hai-Tao Zheng, Wenhao Jiang, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) is a model that detects and corrects spelling errors in given sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic model with an evolving teacher model and dynamic distillation weights for knowledge transfer in each domain rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic framework is based on an evolving teacher model and dynamic distillation weights for knowledge transfer in each domain, rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge. |
Answer-driven Deep Question Generation based on Reinforcement Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for deep question generation focus on enhancing document representations, but little attention is paid to the answer information. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep question generation model that makes better use of the target answer as a guidance to facilitate question generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in automatic and human evaluations on the hotpotQA dataset. |
Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-brain mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms three classic and three latest Transformer models and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
Punctuation-Steered Representation Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PeFT) are limited due to their prohibitive size and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes punctuation representations to achieve performance improvements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by altering the representation space alone . but it results in suboptimal performance due to the effects of the method on the output . |
Summarize before Aggregate: A Global-to-local Heterogeneous Graph Inference Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on modeling emotion influences with utterance-level features, with little attention paid on phrase-level semantic connection between utterrances. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage Summarization and Aggregation Graph Inference Network which integrates inference for topic-related emotional phrases and local dependency reasoning over neighbouring utterances in a global-to-local fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three CER benchmark datasets. |
Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness (2023.findings-acl)
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Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Qin Liu, Wenbin Lai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan, Weifeng Ge
| Challenge: | Existing defense approaches focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
MetaTS: Meta Teacher-Student Network for Multilingual Sequence Labeling with Minimal Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sequence labeling aims to predict fine-grained sequences of labels for text, but lack of token-level annotated data hinders the effectiveness of supervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta Teacher-Student (MetaTS) Network to alleviate data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta learning method alleviates data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. |
Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables LLM agents to solve tasks through planning, tool use, and iterative revision, but outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from sparse, delayed rewards and weak step-level credit assignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-integrated reasoning approach that localizes the first irrecoverable step and leverages it for fine-grained credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong Agentic RL benchmarks in math, science QA, and code execution with additional gains in Pass@K and Major@K scaling, rollout ranking quality, and tool-call efficiency. |
Chinese Relation Extraction with Multi-Grained Information and External Linguistic Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chinese relation extraction suffer from segmentation errors and ambiguity of polysemy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-grained lattice framework for Chinese relation extraction . they incorporate word-level information into character sequence inputs to avoid segmentation errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets in distinct domains. |
Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, Runze Wang, Huiyu Bai, Zouying Cao, Xiaoyong Zhu, Yu Cheng, Bo Zheng, Wei Chen, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Natural language is the de facto communication medium for LLM-based agents, but it presents a fundamental constraint . natural language downsampling limits the depth and nuance of information that can be transmitted . et al.: inter-agent latent space communication is a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that leverages the last hidden states of an LLM as a representation of its thought for direct communication. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms fine-tuned chain-of-thought prompting and single-agent baselines even across heterogeneous models. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
Think and Recall: Layer-Level Prompting for Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for lifelong model editing suffer from limitations in usability, such as requiring additional training corpora or lacking support for reversible and detachable edits. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method for knowledge retrieval and storage, i.e., Layer-Level Prompting, which enables seamless and efficient lifelong model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on question answering and hallucination benchmarks across different LLMs. |
Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract aspects and sentiments are limited due to lack of annotated sequence data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Selective Adversarial Learning method to align latent correlation vectors . they propose tagging a set of aspect boundary tags and sentiment tags to create a joint label space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn weights for words to achieve fine-grained adaptation. |
Disentangling Task Relations for Few-shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Hierarchical Task Clustering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Few-Shot Text Classification are limited by their global knowledge-shared mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised hierarchical task clustering method to address task heterogeneity . they use prior knowledge from historical tasks to leverage prior knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn a classifier efficiently with few examples . it disentangles the underlying relations between tasks to improve interpretability . |
Retrieval-Augmented Process Reward Model for Generalizable Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced mathematical reasoning, but they still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the logical validity of reasoning steps . they retrieves semantically similar questions and steps for PRM as a warmup . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple real-world datasets. |
CFinBench: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Ying Nie, Binwei Yan, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liu, Haoyu Wang, Wei He, Binfan Zheng, Weihao Wang, Qiang Li, Weijian Sun, Yunhe Wang, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging task like finance, has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the financial knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in China. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date for LLMs in finance. |
Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Morality Attacks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pluralism alignment is the goal of creating AI that can coexist with and serve morally multifaceted humanity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use jailbreak attacks to manipulate LLMs’ judgment over pluralistic values by using a morality dataset with 10.4K instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the persuasion abilities of LLMs to produce moral content over pluralistic values. |
Learn to Cross-lingual Transfer with Meta Graph Learning Across Heterogeneous Languages (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing mPLM-based methods focus on designing costly model pre-training while ignoring equally crucial downstream adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta graph learning method that extracts meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences to learn to cross-lingual transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn to cross-lingual transfer by extracting meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences (tasks) it can also capture intrinsic language relationships to explicitly guide cross-linguistic transfer. |
Seek-and-Solve: Benchmarking MLLMs for Visual Clue-Driven Reasoning in Daily Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomin Li, Tala Wang, Zichen Zhong, Ying Zhang, Zirui Zheng, Takashi Isobe, Dezhuang Li, Huchuan Lu, You He, Xu Jia
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ pre-existing knowledge or perceptual understanding, often neglecting the critical capability of reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark designed for visual clue-driven reasoning in daily scenarios that combines rigorous grounding in authentic daily activities and challenging query design that necessitates more than surface-level perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies visual clues and their ability to provide robust reasoning in daily scenarios. |