Papers with discriminative models
A Generative Approach for Mitigating Structural Biases in Natural Language Inference (2022.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Natural language inference datasets contain artifacts and biases that allow models to perform poorly by using a biased subset of the input without considering the remainder features. |
| Approach: | They reformulate a natural language inference task as a generative task . they find that this approach is highly robust to large amounts of bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is highly robust to large amounts of bias. |
A Computational Framework to Identify Self-Aspects in Text (2025.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | a Ph.D. proposal aims to identify Self-aspects in text, which are underexplored in natural language processing . many aspects of the Self align with psychological and other well-researched phenomena . |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a computational framework to identify Self-aspects in text . they will use an ontology of Self-facets and an annotated gold-standard dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework will evaluate discriminative models, generative large language models, embedding-based retrieval approaches against four main criteria: interpretability, ground-truth adherence, accuracy, and computational efficiency. |
A Cross-Domain Transferable Neural Coherence Model (P19-1)
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Peng Xu, Hamidreza Saghir, Jin Sung Kang, Teng Long, Avishek Joey Bose, Yanshuai Cao, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
| Challenge: | Existing coherence models do not generalize to unseen categories of text . previous work advocates for generative models for cross-domain generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a local discriminative neural model with a smaller negative sampling space that can discriminate against incorrect orderings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a standard benchmark dataset on the Wall Street Journal corpus and multiple challenging settings on Wikipedia articles. |
Autoregressive Structured Prediction with Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in NLP towards using pretrained language models for a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to model structures as sequences of actions in autoregressive manner with PLMs . their approach allows in-structure dependencies to be learned without any loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on all structured prediction tasks. |
Prompt Perturbation Consistency Learning for Robust Language Models (2024.findings-eacl)
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Yao Qiang, Subhrangshu Nandi, Ninareh Mehrabi, Greg Ver Steeg, Anoop Kumar, Anna Rumshisky, Aram Galstyan
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on a number of natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce the performance drop of large language models by regularizing the divergence between losses from clean and perturbed samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach recovers on average 59% and 69% of the performance drop for IC and SF tasks while using ten times fewer augmented data samples. |
Who Taught You That? Tracing Teachers in Model Distillation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2006, show that model distillation can imbue efficient small language models with task-specific capabilities competitive with expensive teacher LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill outputs from a large teacher model to a small student model . they propose to use part-of-speech templates as higher-order linguistic features capable of capturing distinctive signals from teacher models that persist in distilled student outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model distillation technique can imbue efficient small language models with task-specific capabilities competitive with (expensive) teacher LLMs. |
Am I Me or You? State-of-the-Art Dialogue Models Cannot Maintain an Identity (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art open-domain dialogue models fail to maintain character identity throughout discourse . despite improvements in accuracy and self-contradiction, agents take on the role of interlocutor . |
| Approach: | They formalize and quantify the deficiency in character identity modeling by using human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models reduce mistaken identity issues by nearly 65% according to human annotators while improving engagingness. |
Gracefully Filtering Backdoor Samples for Generative Large Language Models without Retraining (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor defense methods are ineffective for generative large language models . generative LLMs output sequences of high-dimensional token logits instead of low-dimensional classification logits . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages sample-wise gradients to identify backdoor samples without retraining LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines significantly in identifying backdoor samples without retraining LLMs. |
Neural Generative Rhetorical Structure Parsing (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RST parsing use discriminative models, but these are less sample efficient and datasets are typically small. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level RNN grammar with a bottom-up traversal order and a beam search algorithm that keeps track of both structure-and word-generating actions without exhibit-ing this branching bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a discriminative model with the same features by 2.6 F1points and achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art. |
PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Commonsense Knowledge Base (CSKB) Population aims at reasoning over unseen entities and assertions on CSKBs, but it requires out-of-domain generalization ability as the source CSMB for training is of a relatively smaller scale (1M) . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning framework that uses a teacher model to provide pseudo labels on the unlabeled candidate dataset for a student model to learn from. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve the backbone model KG-BERT (RoBERTa-large) by 3.3 points on the overall performance and especially, 5.3 points on out-of-domain performance. |
Cross-Lingual Syntactic Transfer through Unsupervised Adaptation of Invertible Projections (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current systems for syntactic analysis tasks rely heavily on large scale annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a generative model with a structured prior that uses labeled source and unlabeled target data jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing tasks on English as the only source corpus and on a wide range of target languages. |
MiniELM: A Lightweight and Adaptive Query Rewriting Framework for E-Commerce Search Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rewriting query terms struggle with natural language understanding . generative methods face high inference latency and cost in offline settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid pipeline for rewriting query queries using offline knowledge distillation and online reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves query relevance, diversity, adaptability and cost-effective evaluation without manual annotations on Amazon ESCI dataset. |
Hierarchical CVAE for Fine-Grained Hate Speech Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on automated hate speech detection focuses on binary classification or on differentiating among a small set of categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to discriminate among 40 hate groups of 13 different hate group categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms discriminative models on a fine-grained hate speech classification task. |
Enhancing the Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation in Latent Space (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate opendomain dialogues are limited due to the one-to-many nature of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised setting to obtain a smooth latent space that captures discourse-level context information and implicitly models more references in latent spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on two real-world dialogue datasets. |
Unsupervised Neural Word Segmentation for Chinese via Segmental Language Modeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to unsupervised Chinese word segmentation (CWS) are discriminative and generative, but they are non-trivial. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural generative model for fully unsupervised Chinese word segmentation (CWS) their approach explicitly focuses on the segmental nature of Chinese, and preserves several properties of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive performance to the state-of-the-art models on four datasets from SIGHAN 2005 bakeoff. |
From Discrimination to Generation: Low-Resource Intent Detection with Language Model Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies fine-tune discriminative models on specific defined intent classes, preventing them from being directly adopted to new intent domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained generative intent model to detect new intents from different domains with no parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines that need further fine-tuning or domain-specific samples. |
Discriminatively-Tuned Generative Classifiers for Robust Natural Language Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown advantages of generative classifiers in terms of data efficiency and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative classifier for natural language inference (NLI) they compare it to discriminative models and large-scale pretrained models like BERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifier outperforms discriminative and pretrained baselines across several challenging NLI experimental settings, including small training sets, imbalanced label distributions, and label noise. |
Rank, Chunk and Expand: Lineage-Oriented Reasoning for Taxonomy Expansion (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing taxonomy expansion methods struggle with representation limits and generalization, while generative methods process all candidates at once, introducing noise and exceeding context limits. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that combines discriminative ranking and generative reasoning for efficient taxonomy expansion. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LORex improves accuracy by 12% and similarity by 5% over state-of-the-art methods. |
DiffusionSL: Sequence Labeling via Tag Diffusion Process (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Sequence Labeling (SL) is a long-standing field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes a conditional discrete diffusion model for generating discrete tag data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms gpt-3.5-turbo on multiple benchmark datasets and tasks. |
GenKIE: Robust Generative Multimodal Document Key Information Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Key information extraction (KIE) is a key application for information retrieval and text mining. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel generative end-to-end model, named GenKIE, to address the KIE task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizes over different types of documents and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Reflective Agreement: Combining Self-Mixture of Agents with a Sequence Tagger for Robust Event Extraction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction are limited in their ability to recall nuanced or rare events. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid approach that leverages a self-mixture of agents and a discriminative sequence tagger to resolve ambiguities and enhance overall event prediction quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across three benchmark datasets. |
On the Role of Discriminative Models in Generative Relation Extraction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction (RE) are discriminative and generative . previous studies show that discriminative models can support generative RE . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages discriminative models to produce a top-k set of candidate relations and integrates this knowledge into generative models via in-context or prompt learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on five widely used RE benchmarks. |