Papers with in-domain training
Zero-Shot Transfer Learning with Synthesized Data for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing techniques for zero-shot transfer learning for multi-domain dialogue state tracking are expensive and require human errors, delays in annotation, and normalization issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot transfer learning technique where training data are synthesized from an abstract dialogue model and the ontology of the domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves the state of the art on the multi-domain dialogue state tracking dataset by 21%. |
A Recorded Debating Dataset (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Shachar Mirkin, Michal Jacovi, Tamar Lavee, Hong-Kwang Kuo, Samuel Thomas, Leslie Sager, Lili Kotlerman, Elad Venezian, Noam Slonim
| Challenge: | Existing research in computational argumentation and debating technologies focuses on argumentation mining, but other tasks are being addressed as well. |
| Approach: | They describe a dataset of debating speeches in English that is used for research . they use an automatic speech recognition system to produce a more "nLP-friendly" text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 60 speeches on various controversial topics, each in five formats corresponding to different stages in production. |
DISCOSQA: A Knowledge Base Question Answering System for Space Debris based on Program Induction (2023.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a system that can answer complex natural language queries is developed for the European Space Agency . space debris are uncontrolled artificial objects left in orbit during normal operations or due to malfunctions . |
| Approach: | They propose a query-based system that can answer queries in natural language . it generates a program sketch from a natural language question and executes it against the database . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can answer queries in natural language based on a natural language question generated by a query program . the system reduces overfitting and shortcut learning even with limited training data, the authors say . |
Y’all should read this! Identifying Plurality in Second-Person Personal Pronouns in English Texts (D19-55)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Various languages, such as Spanish, Hebrew, or French, have different words to distinguish between singular "you" and plural "you". |
| Approach: | They train a model to distinguish between the single/plural ‘you’ in English using in-domain training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves reasonable accuracy, but there is room for improvement in the domain-transfer scenario. |
Negation Detection in Dutch Spoken Human-Computer Conversations (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing negation detection methods in English are not available. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a Dutch dialogue corpus with negation cues and their scopes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect negation cues and scope in Dutch dialogues with high precision and recall. |
Abstract Meaning Representation for Multi-Document Summarization (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation of natural language based on linguistic theory . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) as a content representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is fully data-driven and flexible. |
Generate then Select: Open-ended Visual Question Answering Guided by World Knowledge (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xingyu Fu, Sheng Zhang, Gukyeong Kwon, Pramuditha Perera, Henghui Zhu, Yuhao Zhang, Alexander Hanbo Li, William Yang Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Patrick Ng, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to reason over visual and natural language inputs using world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new VQA pipeline that deploys a generate-then-select strategy guided by world knowledge for the first time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline expands the knowledge coverage from in-domain training data by 4.1% on OK-VQA, without additional computation cost. |
Assessing Out-of-Domain Language Model Performance from Few Examples (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models exhibit impressive generalization capabilities, but behave unpredictably under certain domain shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate attributions into a few-shot model predicting out-of-domain (OOD) performance task to find out if models agree with pathological heuristics that may indicate worse generalization capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based model-learning model can perform better on a few-shot example set, and incorporate feature attributions to improve it. |
RobustQA: Benchmarking the Robustness of Domain Adaptation for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rujun Han, Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Juliette Burger, William Yang Wang, Zhiheng Huang, Bing Xiang, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Existing ODQA datasets consist mainly of Wikipedia corpus, and are insufficient to study models’ generalizability across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate ODQA's domain robustness using Wikipedia corpus . they annotate QA pairs in retrieval datasets with rigorous quality control . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves model performance on annotated QA pairs in retrieval datasets with rigorous quality control. |
Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models can only recognize pre-defined in-domain slot types from a limited slot set. |
| Approach: | They introduce a task, Novel Slot Detection, in the task-oriented dialogue system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on two public NSD datasets and proposes strong baselines . it aims to identify a sequence of tokens and extract semantic constituents from user queries . |
Improving Domain Adaptation Translation with Domain Invariant and Specific Information (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are based on the encoder-decoder architecture, which makes them overfitting to frequent observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to explicitly model out-of-domain information in an encoder-decoder framework . they propose combining out- of-domain training data with out-out-of domain data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multiple data sets. |
ODIST: Open World Classification via Distributionally Shifted Instances (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work to achieve open-world classification capability in natural language processing and computer vision focuses on decision boundary finding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can create out-of-domain instances from in-domain training instances with the help of a pre-trained generative language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can create out-of-domain instances from the in-domain training instances with the help of a pre-trained generative language model. |
Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Dependency Parsing via Improved Contextualized Word Representations (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep neural network models have improved parsing performance on in-domain texts . however, the problem is to improve performance on out-of-domain text data when there is only a small-scale out-domain labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial learning and fine-tuning BERT to improve contextualized word representations on out-of-domain texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve consistent improvement and fine-tune BERT processes boost parsing accuracy by a large margin. |
SQATIN: Supervised Instruction Tuning Meets Question Answering for Improved Dialogue NLU (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems support users in execution of specific, well-defined tasks through natural language interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dialog NLU based on instruction tuning and question-answering-based formulation of ID and VE tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing models in training and cross-domain transfer and significantly outperforms existing large language models in performance and inference efficiency. |
Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QA (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as medicine and law . current LLM performance in closed domain is lacking, even on traditional tasks such as Natural Language Inference . |
| Approach: | They investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift . they find that LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly in extractive question answering tasks under domain drift . the proposed model can generalize to domains that require specific knowledge without training . |
Improving Machine Translation of Educational Content via Crowdsourcing (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Maximiliana Behnke, Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone, Rico Sennrich, Vilelmini Sosoni, Thanasis Naskos, Eirini Takoulidou, Maria Stasimioti, Menno van Zaanen, Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, Panayota Georgakopoulou, Valia Kordoni, Markus Egg, Katia Lida Kermanidis
| Challenge: | Using crowdsourcing to train neural machine translation models is expensive and expensive . professional outsourcing of bilingual data is expensive if the translations are of a lower quality . |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of crowdsourcing on the quality of in-domain training data . they use translations of MOOCs from English to eleven languages to fine-tune machine translation models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on general-domain training data and with pre-existing in-domain corpora. |
Cheap Character Noise for OCR-Robust Multilingual Embeddings (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Optical character recognition (OCR) is a key component of the digitization of historical documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes existing multilingual models using noisy texts and a contrastive loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the training data of existing models using noisy texts and a contrastive loss. |
LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them given the error location (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in poor performance overall. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a backtracking setup to test the correction abilities of LLMs on their mistake-finding ability to find logical mistakes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 5 reasoning tasks, showing that it can correct logical mistakes without ground truth labels or training data. |
Decouple knowledge from paramters for plug-and-play language modeling (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have made impressive results in a wide range of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training model with editable and scalable key-value memory and leverage knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples the knowledge storage from model parameters with an editable and scalable key-value memory and leverages knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’. |
Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tingyu Song, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Zhuoning Guo, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao, Shu Wu
| Challenge: | Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a complex task in multimodal understanding . current CIR benchmarks lack a robust evaluation pipeline and limited query categories . |
| Approach: | They construct a fine-grained CIR benchmark that allows for precise control over modification types and content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 5,000 high-quality queries structured across five main categories and fifteen subcategories. |