Papers with Natural language
Voxel-informed Language Grounding (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Embodied robotic agents can be used to ground objects using 3D geometry . despite typically being paired with 2D images, natural language describes a fundamentally 3D world . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages 3D geometric information to ground natural language . they show that VLG significantly improves grounding accuracy on SNARE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves grounding accuracy on SNARE, an object reference game task. |
The Why and The How: A Survey on Natural Language Interaction in Visualization (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that different forms of natural language-based interaction prove suitable to support users in accomplishing various visualization tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of visualization tasks and a classification system to illustrate the state-of-the-art of natural language-based interaction in visualization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can support annotations, recommendations, explanations, and documentation tasks. |
Text2Mol: Cross-Modal Molecule Retrieval with Natural Language Queries (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing databases contain tens of millions of molecules; PubChem alone has 110 million compounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to retrieve molecules using natural language descriptions as queries . they construct a paired dataset of molecules and their corresponding text descriptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves results from 0.372 to 0.499 MRR. |
Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of emerging ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits the cognitive mechanisms of chaining and multimodal knowledge to predict emergent compositional expressions through time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework predicts emergent compositions through time using cognitive mechanisms . it is based on modal knowledge and categorizing models of chaining in a syntactically parsed English corpus . |
Logical Transformers: Infusing Logical Structures into Pre-Trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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Borui Wang, Qiuyuan Huang, Budhaditya Deb, Aaron Halfaker, Liqun Shao, Daniel McDuff, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models that ignore the logical structures underlying natural language text often lack the ability to capture and encode key logical information in the input sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct logic-aware input embeddings for transformer language models through logic detection, logic mapping and hierarchical logical projections and then develop a new modeling paradigm that can upgrade existing transformer language model into logical transformers to boost their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve superior performance on four important and challenging tasks. |
Divide, Link, and Conquer: Recall-oriented Schema Linking for NL-to-SQL via Question Decomposition (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Open-source LLMs often depend on large proprietary models, which introduce serious privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that improves SQL generation for smaller LLMs . they propose to apply question decomposition at the schema linking stage rather than during SQL generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves schema linking recall by 25.1% and execution accuracy by 8.2% on the BIRD benchmark. |
System-Level Natural Language Feedback (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on NL feedback focus on instance-level approaches to refine specific examples, but we present a framework for system-level use of NL. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for system-level use of natural language feedback . they use feedback to formalize system-design decisions in a human-in-the-loop-process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves search query and dialog response generation and human written instance-level feedback brings further gains over GPT-3.5 written feedback. |
Meta-Learning to Compositionally Generalize (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that neural networks struggle with compositional generalization . prior work asserts that there are fundamental differences between cognitive and connectionist architectures that make compositional globalization unlikely. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning augmented version of supervised learning that optimizes for out-of-distribution generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization performance on COGS and SCAN datasets. |
FiD-Ex: Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Extractive Rationale Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained sequence to sequence models are effective in making and generating NL explanations, but they have many shortcomings. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses sentence markers to eliminate explanation fabrication . they use fusion-in-decoder architecture to handle long input contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on the ERASER explainability benchmark. |
Clarifying Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Text (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Natural language consists of implicit and underspecified phrases, which can cause misunderstandings. |
| Approach: | They propose to use wikiHow to extract human clarifications that resolve an implicit or underspecified phrase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to generate alternate clarifications, which may or may not be compatible with the human clarification. |
QBridge: Bridging Natural Language and SQL via Gold Query Rewriting with Agentic Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) is an intuitive interface for querying structured data . but real user questions are noisy, ambiguous, and weakly grounded to database semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic feedback-driven NL2SQL framework that bridges natural language and SQL via Gold Query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong prompting and agentic baselines on spider, BIRD, and three robustness variants on NL2SQL. |
Learning to Ask for Conversational Machine Learning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical analysis across three domains shows that learned question-asking strategies expedite classifier training by asking appropriate questions at different points in the learning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework where the learner’s actions correspond to question types and the reward for asking a question is based on how the teacher’s response changes performance of the resulting machine learning model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms a random policy on learning classification tasks, but the dialog looks contrived from a human perspective. |
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual question answering models seek to answer questions about images . ambiguity can exist at all levels of linguistic analysis, but disagreements can be difficult to detect and resolve . |
| Approach: | They develop a question-generation model which integrates group information without supervision and uses a dataset of ambiguous examples to annotate answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate answer group information without supervision and is able to fill knowledge gaps and convey requests. |
tagE: Enabling an Embodied Agent to Understand Human Instructions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for natural language understanding (NLU) are limited due to the inherent ambiguity and incompleteness inherent in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a system to extract tasks from natural language instructions and map them to robots' established collection of skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baseline models in the training and evaluation of a dataset featuring complex instructions. |
Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Weize Chen, Chenfei Yuan, Jiarui Yuan, Yusheng Su, Chen Qian, Cheng Yang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, but its utility in LLMs has not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | They propose to allow LLMs to choose the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating, and to automate the selection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed format improves reasoning efficiency and reduces token usage while maintaining communicative effectiveness. |
COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Natural language is characterized by compositionality: meaning of complex expressions is constructed from the meanings of its constituent parts. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing dataset based on a fragment of English to assess compositional generalization abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize meanings in a given sentence in 96–99% of the tests, but generalization accuracy is lower and the generalization sensitivity is higher. |
Each graph is a new language: Graph Learning with LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Natural language is used to describe graphs, but graph descriptions become verbose and only relying on attribute embeddings limits LLM’s ability to capture adequate graph structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-defined language for large language model that translates the graph into a corpus instead of graph descriptions and pre-trains LLMs on this corpus to adequately understand the graph. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms description-based and embedding-based baselines by efficiently modeling different orders of neighbors. |