Papers by Zhen Wan
CroAno : A Crowd Annotation Platform for Improving Label Consistency of Chinese NER Dataset (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Baoli Zhang, Zhucong Li, Zhen Gan, Yubo Chen, Jing Wan, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Shengping Liu, Yafei Shi
| Challenge: | Existing crowd annotation tools for named entity recognition (NER) focus on efficiency and don't consider consistency of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a crowd annotation platform for Chinese named entity recognition (NER) CroAno provides a systematic solution for improving label consistency of Chinese NER datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform improves label consistency of Chinese NER datasets. |
Graph Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Radiology Findings Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating impression generation have limited the relationship between extra knowledge and the original findings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automating impression generation that exploits extra knowledge and original findings . they propose combining key words and their relations to extract critical information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits extra knowledge and the original findings in an integrated way . the state-of-the-art results on two datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method . |
Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Previous Sign Language Translation methods have relied on gloss annotations to improve performance, but labeling high-quality glosses is labor-intensive and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Large Language Model (LLM) into SLT by factorizing learning into two stages to improve the learning curve. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three SLT datasets conducted under the gloss-free setting. |
Reformulating Domain Adaptation of Large Language Models as Adapt-Retrieve-Revise: A Case Study on Chinese Legal Domain (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models like GPT-4 have demonstrated astonishing zero-shot capabilities in general domain tasks, but they often generate content with hallucinations in specific domains such as Chinese law. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting large language models (LLMs) to Chinese legal domains by reformulating generation as an adapt-retrieve-revise process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in the Chinese legal domain by +33.6 points in the zero-shot setting. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
Seeking Diverse Reasoning Logic: Controlled Equation Expression Generation for Solving Math Word Problems (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve Math Word Problems rely on human annotation . empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown and multiple-un unknown benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on single-unknown and multiple-un unknown benchmarks with 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unequal datasets. |
Rapidly Developing High-quality Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models with Minimal Human Effort: A Case Study on Japanese (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have aimed to refine their capacity to accurately follow human instructions and navigate intricate scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a set of instructions to translate English into Japanese and then generates Japanese instruction data using GPT-4. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Japanese-Alpaca models in the evaluation benchmarks without human references. |
What Language Do Non-English-Centric Large Language Models Think in? (2025.findings-acl)
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Chengzhi Zhong, Qianying Liu, Fei Cheng, Junfeng Jiang, Zhen Wan, Chenhui Chu, Yugo Murawaki, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | Despite their robust performance in English, these models often exhibit reduced proficiency in non-English languages, and their outputs may reflect an inherent bias toward English-centric perspectives. |
| Approach: | They categorize non-English-centric large language models into two groups: CPMs and BLMs, which are pre-trained on a balanced mix of multiple languages from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit a pronounced internal preference for English tokens when projected into the vocabulary space. |
Evaluating Saliency Explanations in NLP by Crowdsourcing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a crowdsourced method to evaluate saliency methods in NLP is proposed . saliencies are difficult for humans to understand, and can cause psychological harm . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate saliency methods in NLP by crowdsourcing . they recruited 800 crowd workers and empirically evaluated seven salience methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates saliency methods on two datasets using crowdsourced data . it shows that the results are comparable to existing methods on NLP and CV fields . |
Relation Extraction with Weighted Contrastive Pre-training on Distant Supervision (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the intrinsic noise of distant supervision during the pre-training stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a weighted contrastive learning method that explicitly reduces noise . they leverage supervised data to estimate reliability and reduce noise compared to non-weighted baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the noise of distant supervision and estimates reliability of pre-training instances. |
Rescue Implicit and Long-tail Cases: Nearest Neighbor Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RE models are incapable of handling implicit expressions and long-tail relation types due to language complexity and data sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance relation extraction using k nearest neighbors (kNN-RE) kNN is a nearest-neighbor search tool that allows the model to consult training relations at test time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best model to date on ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80 datasets and outperformed the best on i2b2 and Wik80 dataset. |
Speech-Hands: A Self-Reflection Voice Agentic Approach to Speech Recognition and Audio Reasoning with Omni Perception (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jinchuan Tian, Hanrong Ye, Ankita Pasad, Szu-Wei Fu, Arushi Goel, Ryo Hachiuma, Shizhe Diao, Kunal Dhawan, Sreyan Ghosh, Yusuke Hirota, Zhehuai Chen, Rafael Valle, Chenhui Chu, Shinji Watanabe, Boris Ginsburg, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
| Challenge: | naively fine-tuning an omni-model on speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance . Xie and Wu's framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. |
| Approach: | They propose a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: trusting itself versus external audio perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the OpenASR leaderboard by 12.1% WER and high F1 on audio QA decisions. |
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Yahan Yu, Jinchuan Tian, Sheng Li, Ke Hu, Zhehuai Chen, Shinji Watanabe, Fei Cheng, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | SIQ quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Approach: | They propose a human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice) that quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice. |
Causal Tree Extraction from Medical Case Reports: A Novel Task for Experts-like Text Comprehension (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract causal relationships from medical case reports are insufficient for capturing causal relationships of an entire case. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that generates a causal tree with the primary disease as the root and extracts causal relationships from a medical case report. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline method by 20.2 points in the human evaluation and introduces evaluation metrics that reflect clinician preferences. |
CoVoGER: A Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Speech-to-text Generative Error Correction with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models can fix recognition or translation errors that traditional rescoring cannot fix. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for GER that covers both ASR and speech-to-text translation across 15 languages and 28 language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is built on common voice 20.0 and CoVoST-2 with Whisper and SeamlessM4T. |
Sign2Vis: Automated Data Visualization from Sign Language (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate natural language descriptions into visualization queries focus on spoken languages, not sign languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a sign language interface that enables the DHH community to engage more fully with data analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interface can be used by the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. |
GPT-RE: In-context Learning for Relation Extraction using Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to in-context learning (ICL) are lacking in relation extraction (RE) . emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 represents a significant advancement in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate task-aware representations into demonstration retrieval and enrich the demonstrations with gold label-induced reasoning logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA and competitive performances on the Semeval and SciERC datasets. |
When do Contrastive Word Alignments Improve Many-to-many Neural Machine Translation? (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve pre-training for many-to-many neural machine translation use manual cleaning of bilingual dictionaries, which are unavailable for most language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a word-level contrastive objective to leverage word alignments for many-to-many neural machine translation (NMT) Empirical results show that this leads to 0.8 BLEU gains for several language pairs. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed objective leads to 0.8 BLEU gains for several language pairs. |
Leveraging High-Resource English Corpora for Cross-lingual Domain Adaptation in Low-Resource Japanese Medicine via Continued Pre-training (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kazuma Kobayashi, Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Yuma Tsuta, Xin Zhao, Junfeng Jiang, Jiahao Huang, Zhiyi Huang, Yusuke Oda, Rio Yokota, Yuki Arase, Daisuke Kawahara, Akiko Aizawa, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | low-resource language corpora in professional domains like medicine hinder cross-lingual domain adaptation of pre-trained large language models. |
| Approach: | They examine how linguistic features affect performance on a Japanese–English medical knowledge benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leverage English-language resources in medical domains while ensuring sufficient coverage of language-specific expressions in a target language. |
NeKo: Cross-Modality Post-Recognition Error Correction with Tasks-Guided Mixture-of-Experts Language Model (2025.acl-industry)
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Yen-Ting Lin, Zhehuai Chen, Piotr Zelasko, Zhen Wan, Xuesong Yang, Zih-Ching Chen, Krishna C Puvvada, Ke Hu, Szu-Wei Fu, Jun Wei Chiu, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Chao-Han Huck Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a model on a mixture of domain datasets require separate correction language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task correction MoE that trains experts to become an "expert" of speech-to-text, language-totext and vision-to text datasets by learning to route each dataset’s tokens to its mapped expert. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3.5 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet on the Open ASR Leaderboard and reaches an average relative 5.0% WER reduction and substantial improvements in BLEU scores. |