Papers by Yuanzhe Zhang
MenatQA: A New Dataset for Testing the Temporal Comprehension and Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown nearly saturated performance on many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct multiple sensitive factors time QA which encompasses three temporal factors . they test current mainstream LLMs with different parameter sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates three temporal factors with 2,853 samples . the results show that LLMs fall behind smaller models on these factors . |
CMQA: A Dataset of Conditional Question Answering with Multiple-Span Answers (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets only contain unconditional and parallel answers . conditional question answering with hierarchical multi-span answers is challenging for the community to solve . |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional question answering task with hierarchical multi-span answers . they propose CMQA, which contains conditional and hierarchic samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to build more reliable and sophisticated QA systems. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
Interpreting Sentiment Composition with Latent Semantic Tree (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current researches on sentiment classification are shifting from improving model performance to interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a new tree form capable of interpreting sentiment composition in a principled way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tree can explain sentiment composition in a principled way. |
Scene Restoring for Narrative Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Narrative passages describe a chain of events, which helps the machine understand the passage comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to let machine read narrative passages with their prior knowledge . they build a scene graph using Atomic as external knowledge and encode it with GDIN . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on a Story Cloze Test and CosmosQA datasets. |
LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)
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Rindra Ramamonjison, Timothy Yu, Linzi Xing, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiaorui Li, Xiaojin Fu, Xiongwei Han, Yuanzhe Chen, Ren Li, Kun Mao, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages. |
Hetero-Designer: Automated Design of Multi-Agent Systems with Heterogeneous LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to design LLM-based Multi-agent systems are constrained by homogeneous LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated design of heterogeneous-LLMs-based MAS with a binary-star transformer and an autoregressive graph generation pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline is high-performing on various benchmarks and extensible to unseen LLMs and roles. |
SudokuFill: A Multi-Agent Progressive Filling Framework for Document-Level Scientific Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yang Li, Yajiao Wang, Yu Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Maodi Hu, Mengting Zhang, Xi Sun, Hua Yue, Zhixiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is a key bottleneck for turning unstructured papers into computable knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific information extraction framework that solves a Sudoku problem as a progressive filling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the GPT-4o model on a document-level adjuvant dataset. |
Awakening Augmented Generation: Learning to Awaken Internal Knowledge of Large Language Models for Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that Large Language Models model rich knowledge, but it is often not activated and awakened. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages richer context to enhance question answering . Explicit awakening fine-tunes a context generator to create a synthetic, compressed document that functions as symbolic context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics the human ability to answer questions using only thinking and recalling to compensate for knowledge gaps. |
Datasets for Scientific Literature Understanding: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empowering machines to understand scientific literature is crucial for accelerating scientific discovery and advancing the AI for Science paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy that organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
Bridge-Coder: Transferring Model Capabilities from High-Resource to Low-Resource Programming Language (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating code for high-resource programming languages (HRPLs) however, they struggle significantly with low-resourced programming languages such as D, exacerbating the digital divide. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate LRPL data using LLM's general knowledge, HRPL proficiency, and in-context learning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on R, D, Racket, and Bash, while maintaining the same quality. |
On the In-context Generation of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have the ability of in-context generation (ICG) when given an in-text prompt, they can implicitly recognize the pattern of the examples and complete the prompt in the desired way. |
| Approach: | They propose a plausible latent variable model to model the distribution of pretrained corpora and formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the distribution of pretrained corpora and then formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction. |
Alignment Rationale for Natural Language Inference (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation methods pick prominent features, but alignments between words or phrases are more enlightening clues to explain the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate alignment rationale explanations for co-attention based models in NLI by feature selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more faithful and human-readable compared with existing methods. |
Biomedical Concept Normalization by Leveraging Hypernyms (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Biomedical Concept Normalization (BCN) is widely used in biomedical text processing . despite numerous surface variants of biomedically-defined concepts, it remains challenging and unsolved. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses hypernyms and synonyms to facilitate BCN . they use list-wise training to make use of both hypernies and synonym entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model on the NCBI dataset. |
MIE: A Medical Information Extractor towards Medical Dialogues (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | EMRs are important but many doctors suffer from writing them, which is time-consuming and tedious. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic conversion of medical dialogues to EMRs using a window-sliding style . they propose a medical information extractor (MIE) that extracts medical information from medical dialogue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts medical information from doctor-patient dialogues. |
Machine Reading Comprehension Using Structural Knowledge Graph-aware Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale datasets specify that external knowledge is required to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages external knowledge to construct sub-graphs for entities in machine comprehension context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ReCoRD dataset. |
A Hierarchical Explanation Generation Method Based on Feature Interaction Detection (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on hierarchical attributions tends to limit text groups to a continuous text span, which is difficult for humans to read. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which captures feature interactions and converts non-hierarchical explanations into hierarchical versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can convert ubiquitous non-hierarchical explanations into their corresponding hierarchical versions. |
SKIntern: Internalizing Symbolic Knowledge for Distilling Better CoT Capabilities into Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have high computational costs and privacy concerns due to their high computational expenses and data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5% while reducing inference costs by up to 4 across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of domain (OOD) tasks. |
Enhancing Multiple-choice Machine Reading Comprehension by Punishing Illogical Interpretations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice MRC is one of the most studied tasks in MRC due to the convenience of evaluation and the flexibility of answer format. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple-choice MRC to explain a trained model and reveal how it arrives at the prediction by punishing illogical attributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance without external information and model structure change without any external information. |
Generative Calibration for In-context Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning is one of the most exciting features of large language models . performance is sensitive to various configurations of the prompt, such as the choice or order of the training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to calibrate the in-context predictive distribution by adjusting the label marginal . they find that the proposed method outperforms the ICL and state-of-the-art calibration methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 27% absolute in macro-F1. |
Logic Traps in Evaluating Attribution Scores (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Modern deep learning models are notoriously opaque, which has motivated the development of methods for interpreting how deep models predict. |
| Approach: | They propose to review existing methods for evaluating attribution scores and summarize the logic traps in these methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that they do not contain logic traps and that they are not reliable. |
Representative Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning with Two-Stage Determinantal Point Process (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods tend to select different demonstrations for each test instance, which is time-consuming and poses limitations in practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to select a representative subset of in-context demonstrations that can prompt different test instances in a specific task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to generate representative in-context demonstrations. |