Papers with semantic matching
Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to recommend items are categorized into attribute-based and generation-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent items in natural language and formulate a conversational recommender system that can be optimized in a single stage without relying on non-textual metadata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. |
Scene-robust Natural Language Video Localization via Learning Domain-invariant Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on improving performance with the assumption of independently identical data distribution while ignoring out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a scene-robust NLVL problem and a generalizable framework to learn a robust model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns generalizable domain-invariant representations by alignment and decomposition. |
Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing information retrieval datasets cannot capture abstract semantic associations well. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that retrieves relevant plots from the book for a query using a labeled dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to evaluate the performance of IR models on the novel task Plot Retrieval. |
Knowledge-Enhanced Named Entity Disambiguation for Short Text (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity disambiguation are weak for short text . performance of existing methods drops dramatically for short texts . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced method for named entity disambiguation . they use factual knowledge graph and conceptual knowledge graph to provide additional knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvement on a large manually annotated short-text dataset and the state-of-the-art on three standard datasets. |
Scientific Paper Retrieval with LLM-Guided Semantic-Based Ranking (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies also use large language models (LLMs) for query understanding, but these methods lack grounding in corpus-specific knowledge and may generate unreliable or unfaithful content. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper retrieval framework that combines large language models (LLMs) with a concept-based semantic index to capture scientific concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of various base retrievers, surpasses strong existing LLM-based baselines, and remains highly efficient. |
DABERT: Dual Attention Enhanced BERT for Semantic Matching (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for semantic sentence matching lack the ability to capture subtle differences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer-based pre-trained language model to capture fine-grained differences in sentence pairs by introducing a dual attention module and a fusion module to learn the aggregation of difference and affinity features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture fine-grained differences in sentence pairs. |
CRAFT: Training-Free Cascaded Retrieval for Tabular QA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open-domain table question answering require retraining or fine-tuning on new datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot, cascaded retrieval approach that uses a sparse retrieval model to filter a subset of candidates before applying more expensive dense models as re-rankers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art retrieval models on the NQ-Tables dataset. |
Structure-Aware Quantized Retrieval for Long-Document Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional long-document QA/RAG pipelines suffer from context fragmentation . Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can encode hierarchy, but deep GNNs tend to over-smooth representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns hierarchical graph representations with a universal token vocabulary and integrates explicit structure into retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures universal hierarchical patterns rather than overfitting to specific layouts. |
Dealing with Typos for BERT-based Passage Retrieval and Ranking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to passage retrieval and ranking rely on pre-trained deep language models that model the semantic matching between queries and passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a typos-aware training framework for DR and BERT to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models respond and adapt to keyword typos occurring in queries, and significantly improve their retrieval and ranking effectiveness. |
Distance-Adaptive Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embedding with Bidirectional Rotation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models measure the plausibility of triplets either through semantic matching or distance scoring functions. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine semantic matching with entity’s geometric distance to better measure the plausibility of triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on well-known knowledge graph completion benchmark datasets. |
Beyond Sequences: Two-dimensional Representation and Dependency Encoding for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing code generation approaches represent code as a linear sequence of tokens, but positional encodings compromise generalization . explicit positional encoders sacrifice permutation invariance, imposes a strict order on the input sequence . |
| Approach: | They propose to represent code snippets as two-dimensional entities with explicit encodings . they propose to use dictionary learning to perform semantic matching between code lines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the hierarchical and spatial structure of code, especially the dependencies between code lines. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification Towards Question-Answering with Reinforced Bidirectional Attention Network (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect sentiment classification focus on non-interactive reviews . a new task aims to predict sentiment polarities for specific aspects from interactive reviews based on annotated corpus . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to predict aspects from interactive QA style reviews using an annotated corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with state-of-the-art methods against a high-quality corpus of data. |
LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for personalization in large language models are understudied . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for training and evaluating language models for producing personalized outputs using a set of seven personalized tasks . they propose two retrieval augmentation approaches that retrieve personal items from each user profile for personalizing language model outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective for a set of zero-shot and fine-tuned language models and highlights the impact of personalization in various natural language tasks. |
CNM: An Interpretable Complex-valued Network for Matching (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on quantum physics models language understanding using quantum probability . |
| Approach: | They propose a quantum-theoretic framework that unifies different linguistic units in a single complex-valued vector space and a complex-valuable network for semantic matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performances to strong CNN and RNN baselines on two benchmarking question answering (QA) datasets. |
CoSQA: 20,000+ Web Queries for Code Search and Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using deep neural networks to find codes is difficult . we present a dataset that includes 20,604 labels for natural language queries and codes . |
| Approach: | They introduce a contrastive learning method to enhance text-code matching . they find that CoSQA improves the accuracy of code question answering by 5.1% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of code question answering by 5.1% and improves by 10.5% on a CodeBERT model. |
Rethinking LLM-Based Recommendations: A Personalized Query-Driven Parallel Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Query-to-Recommendation framework integrates large langucage models into recommendation systems . but it faces training-induced bias and bottlenecks from serialized architecture . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel recommendation framework that decouples LLMs from candidate pre-selection and direct retrieval over the entire item pool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples LLMs from candidate pre-selection and enables direct retrieval over the entire item pool. |
RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.naacl-main)
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Yingqi Qu, Yuchen Ding, Jing Liu, Kai Liu, Ruiyang Ren, Wayne Xin Zhao, Daxiang Dong, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering uses dense passage retrieval to find answers . however, it is difficult to effectively train a dual-encoder due to discrepancy between training and inference . |
| Approach: | They propose an optimized training approach to improve dense passage retrieval using RocketQA . they propose cross-batch negatives, denoised hard negatives and data augmentation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions. |
Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved while the redundant pieces are ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose to have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history during the training phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on the semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. |
Bridging the Gap between Relevance Matching and Semantic Matching for Short Text Similarity Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for relevance and semantic matching cannot be easily adapted to the other. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
Reinforced Query Reasoners for Reasoning-intensive Retrieval Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval of information excel at textual and semantic matching but struggle in reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of small-scale language models for query reasoning and rewriting in reasoning-intensive retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a BRIGHT benchmark with BM25 retrievers. |
Pre-training Cross-Modal Retrieval by Expansive Lexicon-Patch Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale vision-language pre-training relies on image-text global alignment by contrastive learning and is further boosted by fine-grained alignment in a weakly contrastive manner for cross-modal retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose expansive lexicon-patch alignment (ELA) to align image patches with a vocabulary rather than only the words explicitly in the text for annotation-free alignment and information augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on cross-modal retrieval and can learn representative fine-grained information. |
Emotion Trajectory-aware Retrieval for Markov-driven Emotion Anticipation in LLM-based Emotional Support Conversation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing strategies focus on planning the next-turn dialogue strategies, while external strategy planners focus on generating empathetic responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov-driven emotion anticipation framework with emotion trajectory-aware retrieval for LLM-based ESC, which anticipates future emotion states to guide strategy planning and achieve sustained emotional support. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can anticipate future emotions and achieve sustained emotional support on two datasets with two models. |