Papers by Yongjing Yin
Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typology from the source language or when pre-training data is limited in size. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the XTREME task and also for low-resource languages in unsupervised sentence retrieval. |
Multi-Granularity Optimization for Non-Autoregressive Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive machine translation suffers severe performance deterioration due to the naive independence assumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which collects model behaviours on translation segments of various granularities and integrates feedback for backpropagation to reduce latency. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms baseline models trained with cross-entropy loss and achieves the best performance on WMT’16 EnRo and highly competitive results on WTM’14 EnDe. |
Contrastive Learning with Prompt-derived Virtual Semantic Prototypes for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on instance-wise contrastive learning, attempting to construct positive pairs with textual data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Contrastive learning method with Prompt-derived Virtual semantic prototypes that constructs virtual semantic prototype to each instance and derives negative prototypes by using the negative form of the prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on semantic textual similarity, transfer, and clustering tasks compared to baselines. |
DualNER: A Dual-Teaching framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) are limited to high-resource languages like English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to make full use of annotated source and unlabeled target language text for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes full use of both annotated source and unlabeled target language text for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER). |
Iterative Dual Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative dual domain adaptation framework for neural machine translation that uses multiple corpora to perform bidirectional translation knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
Recurrent Attention for Neural Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research questions the importance of dot-product self-attention in Transformer models and shows that most attention heads learn simple positional patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel mechanism to replace dot-product self-attention with a recurrent atteNtion mechanism that directly learns attention weights without token-to-token interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the Transformer model on translation tasks with fewer parameters and inference time. |
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations . Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant method in machine translation research . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness . the proposed methods are validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics . |
On Compositional Generalization of Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models have shown competitive performance in benchmarks such as WMT, but there are significant issues such as robustness, domain generalization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for NMT models from the perspective of compositional generalization and quantitatively analyze the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well under traditional metrics, but is low in out-of-domain and low-resource conditions. |
Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation with Word-Level Domain Context Discrimination (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-French multi-domain translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use mixed-domain parallel sentences to construct a unified model that allows translation to switch between different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model distinguishes and exploits word-level domain contexts on Chinese-English and English-French translation tasks. |
Improving Machine Translation with Large Language Models: A Preliminary Study with Cooperative Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Commercial machine translation engines are proficient in addressing the majority of translation requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine NMT and MT-oriented LLMs to achieve superior translation quality by combining their strengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle complex scenarios beyond the capability of NMT alone. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
A Novel Graph-based Multi-modal Fusion Encoder for Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal neural machine translation models do not fully exploit fine-grained semantic correspondences between semantic units of different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based multi-modal fusion encoder that exploits fine-grained semantic correspondences between different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoder significantly extends the conventional text-based translation by taking images as additional inputs. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models suffer limitation in compositional generalization, resulting in weakened translation performance on unseen compounds. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce categorization to the contextualized representations to improve generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24% on a dedicated MT dataset. |
Task-guided Disentangled Tuning for Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are fine-tuned on task-specific datasets, but fail to capture task- specific patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which disentangles task-relevant signals from entangled representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization of representations by disentangling task-relevant signals from the entangled representations. |
Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text generation models follow the sequence-to-sequence paradigm . generative grammar suggests humans generate language by learning language grammar . |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-guided generation schema that searches the syntax tree in a top-down direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms autoregressive baselines on paraphrase generation and machine translation. |
What Have We Achieved on Non-autoregressive Translation? (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that non-autoregressive (NAT) methods underperform autoregressive methods (AT) however, their evaluation using BLEU has been shown to weakly correlate with human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate four representative NAT methods using BLEU to narrow the performance gap between autoregressive and autoregressive translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods underperform NAT and autoregressive methods under more reliable evaluation metrics. |
Empirical Prior for Text Autoencoders (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders (VAE) are used to train generative models with latent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose a transition from Variational Autoencoders (VAE) to text autoencodeurs (AE) which model a compact latent space and preserves the capability of the language model itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates higher quality and more diverse text than the VAE-based Transformer baselines, and is more efficient than previous approaches. |
LexMatcher: Dictionary-centric Data Curation for LLM-based Machine Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | emergence of large language models (LLMs) has brought about new opportunities for machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for data curation that supplements the infrequent senses of polysemous words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms established baselines on the WMT2022 test sets and is applicable to other pre-trained models. |
Consistency Regularization Training for Compositional Generalization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing neural models have difficulty generalizing to unseen combinations of seen components. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the capability of Transformer on compositional generalization by consistency regularization training without modifying model architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on semantic parsing and machine translation benchmarks. |
Prompt-Driven Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models still face various challenges including fragility and lack of style flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate prompts into neural machine translation to improve translation control and style flexibility. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method improves translation control and quality and improves human-in-the-loop translation. |
Semformer: Transformer Language Models with Semantic Planning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural language models (LLMs) employ teacher forcing to predict tokens based on preceding ground truth tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for training a Transformer language model that explicitly models the semantic planning of response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits near-perfect performance and mitigates shortcut learning. |