Papers with understanding tasks
LOT: A Story-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Chinese Long Text Understanding and Generation (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for natural language processing focus on understanding or generating short texts . lack of standardized benchmarks makes it difficult to assess and compare models . |
| Approach: | They propose a story-centric benchmark for Chinese long text modeling that aggregates two understanding tasks and two generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms similar-sized models on understanding and generation tasks. |
Prompt Tuning for Unified Multimodal Pretrained Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has demonstrated success in natural language pretraining and even vision pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply prompt tuning to a unified sequence-to-sequence pretrained model by adding a sequence of learnable embeddings to each layer and finetuning the pretrained models on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other parameter-efficient tuning methods on multimodal models and is robust against adversarial attacks. |
Toward Building General Foundation Models for Language, Vision, and Vision-Language Understanding Tasks (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing foundation models can only perform the best in one type of understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for training a general foundation model, X-FM, using text, image, and image-text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing foundation models on language, vision, and vision-language understanding tasks. |
Evaluating Morphological Compositional Generalization in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Mete Ismayilzada, Defne Circi, Jonne Sälevä, Hale Sirin, Abdullatif Köksal, Bhuwan Dhingra, Antoine Bosselut, Duygu Ataman, Lonneke Van Der Plas
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in various natural language generation and understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They define morphemes as compositional primitives and design a suite of generative and discriminative tasks to assess morphological productivity and systematicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can identify individual morphological combinations better than chance, but their performance lacks systematicity, leading to significant accuracy gaps compared to humans. |
Do GPTs Produce Less Literal Translations? (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are general-purpose language models capable of many natural language generation or understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how LLMs differ qualitatively from standard Neural Machine Translation models by measuring literalness and monotonicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve close to state-of-the-art translation performance under few-shot prompting . the results are backed up by human evaluations and a newer MT quality metrics . |
Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in self-attention (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained language models are parameter efficient . fine- tuning the models requires multiple copies of the parameters, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose to use kernel-based adapters to tune only a few parameters while freezing the rest of the parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve or improve strong performance over a diverse set of natural language generation and understanding tasks. |
CAMEL-Bench: A Comprehensive Arabic LMM Benchmark (2025.findings-naacl)
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Sara Ghaboura, Ahmed Heakl, Omkar Thawakar, Ali Husain Salem Abdulla Alharthi, Ines Riahi, Abduljalil Radman, Jorma Laaksonen, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan, Rao Muhammad Anwer
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a significant interest in developing large multimodal models capable of performing various visual reasoning and understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Arabic as a language to evaluate large multi-modal models capable of performing visual reasoning and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark comprises eight diverse domains and 38 sub-domains to represent a large population of over 400 million speakers. |
Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongkang Wu, Meng Han, Yutao Zhu, Lei Li, Xinyu Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanhang Ren, Zhicheng Dou, Zhao Cao
| Challenge: | SylloBase is a benchmark for syllogistic reasoning, a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to learn syllogistic reasoning on a set of templates and to use them to generate and understand slogisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns, and contains both automatically and manually constructed samples. |
Programmable Annotation with Diversed Heuristics and Data Denoising (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural natural language generation and understanding models require massive amounts of annotated data to be competitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a data programming framework that can jointly construct labeled data for language generation and understanding tasks by allowing annotators to modify an automatically-inferred alignment rule set between sequence labels and text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality data within a 1.48 BLEU and 6.42 slot F1 of 100% human-labeled data with just 100 labeled data samples outperforming benchmark annotation frameworks and other semi-supervised approaches. |
ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhongyi Zhou, Yichen Zhu, Minjie Zhu, Junjie Wen, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Weibin Meng, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng, Yi Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language-action models prioritize robotic action mastery . however, models trained on visual-text pairs struggle to interpret multimodal data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks and achieves six times higher performance on visual question-answering datasets. |
What Media Frames Reveal About Stance: A Dataset and Study about Memes in Climate Change Discourse (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Media framing is a method of shaping public perceptions of issues, but the interaction between stance and media frame remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of climate-change memes annotated with stance and media frames to conceptualize and computationally explore this interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,184 climate-change memes sourced from 47 subreddits and enables analysis of frame prominence over time and communities. |
Few-Shot Table Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-Training Baseline (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have demonstrated their effectiveness for few-shot table understanding, but few-shoot table understanding is rarely explored due to the deficiency of public table pre-training corpus and well-defined downstream benchmark tasks. |
| Approach: | They establish a benchmark dataset and use it to explore few-shot table understanding in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the few-shot table understanding in Chinese. |
A Corpus for Understanding and Generating Moral Stories (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks for evaluating story understanding and generation focus on reasoning plots from context, but they focus on bridging plots with implied morals. |
| Approach: | They propose two understanding tasks and two generation tasks to assess machines' ability to bridge story plots and implied morals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are based on a dataset of Chinese and English moral stories . they show that the proposed models can perform better than existing models . |
Optimus: Organizing Sentences via Pre-trained Modeling of a Latent Space (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for language understanding and understanding can be trained to provide contextualized representations of words based on text data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale language VAE model Optimus that is pre-trained on large text corpus and fine-tuned for various language generation and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art on VAE language modeling benchmarks. |
TableDreamer: Progressive and Weakness-guided Data Synthesis from Scratch for Table Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table instruction tuning are limited due to limited data diversity and lack of data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakness-guided data synthesis framework for table instruction tuning that explores the vast input space of table understanding tasks and then iterates through the input space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the average accuracy of Llama3.1-8B-instruct by 11.62% with 27K GPT-4o synthetic data and outperforms state-of-the-art data synthesis baselines which use more training data. |
Leakage-Adjusted Simulatability: Can Models Generate Non-Trivial Explanations of Their Behavior in Natural Language? (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that generate NL explanations for tasks have been evaluated on the basis of surface-level similarities to human explanations, both through automatic metrics like BLEU and human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model as a proxy for a human observer to evaluate NL explanations from the model simulatability perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-generated explanations are evaluated on the basis of surface-level similarities to human explanations, both through automatic metrics like BLEU and human evaluations. |
Modeling Human Mental States with an Entity-based Narrative Graph (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Understanding narrative text requires capturing characters’ motivations, goals, and mental states. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-based Narrative Graph (ENG) to model the internal-states of characters in a story and evaluate it on two narrative understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two narrative understanding tasks: predicting character mental states, and desire fulfillment. |
Multi-target Backdoor Attacks for Code Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work for backdoor attacks on neural code models insert triggers into task-specific data for code-related downstream tasks, limiting the scope of attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose task-agnostic backdoor attacks for code pre-trained models . they use two learning strategies to implant backdoors into code understanding and generation models - Poisoned Seq2Seq learning and token representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is pre-trained with two learning strategies to support the multi-target attack of downstream code understanding and generation tasks. |
LOLA – An Open-Source Massively Multilingual Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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Nikit Srivastava, Denis Kuchelev, Tatiana Moteu Ngoli, Kshitij Shetty, Michael Roeder, Hamada Zahera, Diego Moussallem, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
| Challenge: | Using a sparse Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture, our model is highly efficient and efficient across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual large language model trained on more than 160 languages using a sparse Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on natural language generation and understanding tasks while avoiding the common pitfalls of multilinguality. |
LLM4RE: A Data-centric Feasibility Study for Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Relation Extraction (RE) is a critical step in information extraction due to its wide-scale applicability for downstream applications such as Knowledge Base creation and Question Answering (QA). |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct the first feasibility analysis to explore the viability of Large Language Models for RE by investigating their robustness to various RE scenarios stemming from data-specific characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are robust to various RE scenarios stemming from data-specific characteristics, but their performance is not yet fully understood. |
M3AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emerging approach to sharing knowledge online. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset with human annotations for multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. |
Table-To-Text generation and pre-training with TabT5 (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are limited when it comes to structured or semi-structured domains like tables. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder model that generates natural language text based on tables and textual inputs. |
| Outcome: | TabT5 achieves 15% increase in sequence accuracy on spreadsheet formula prediction and data-to-text generation domains. |
Direct Fact Retrieval from Knowledge Graphs without Entity Linking (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve facts from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) require additional labels and may accumulate errors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly retrieves facts from KGs given input text based on their representational similarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multiple fact retrieval tasks. |
TURNA: A Turkish Encoder-Decoder Language Model for Enhanced Understanding and Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing have favored well-resourced English-centric models, resulting in a significant gap with low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model for the low-resource language Turkish that is capable of both natural language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms multilingual models in understanding and generation tasks and competes with monolingual models for understanding tasks. |
DeepResonance: Enhancing Multimodal Music Understanding via Music-centric Multi-way Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in music large language models have significantly improved music understanding tasks, but the potential of incorporating additional modalities such as images, videos and textual music features remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal music understanding LLM fine-tuned via multi-way instruction tuning with multi-ways aligned music, text, image, and video data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across six music understanding tasks and zero-shot scenarios. |
CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models for Natural Languages (NL) like BERT and GPT have been shown to transfer well to Programming Languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified pre-trained encoder-decoder Transformer model that leverages the code semantics conveyed from the developer-assigned identifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on understanding and generation tasks and can capture semantic information from code. |
TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of pretrained language models (LMs) for text-based natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained language model that jointly learns representations for NL sentences and (semi-)structured tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs best on the weakly-supervised semantic parsing benchmark WikiTableQuestions while performing competitively on the text-to-SQL dataset Spider. |
Quantifying Contamination in Evaluating Code Generation Capabilities of Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models are contaminated with data from pretraining and finetuning tasks. |
| Approach: | They perform extensive analysis on the factors that affect model memorization and generalization, such as model size, problem difficulty, and question length. |
| Outcome: | The results show that models perform better on the subset of the benchmarks where similar solutions are seen during training. |
NameGuess: Column Name Expansion for Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is used for storing and organizing information in web and enterprise applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to expand column names as a natural language generation problem by conditioning on table content and column header names to improve auto-regressive models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves auto-regressive models on table content and column header names to match human performance. |
MATA: Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable and Flexible Table Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have significantly improved table understanding tasks . practical deployment of TableQA systems presents several persistent challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent TableQA framework that leverages multiple reasoning paths and tools built with small language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and efficient reasoning while avoiding excessive LLM inference. |
Multi-LMentry: Can Multilingual LLMs Solve Elementary Tasks Across Languages? (2025.emnlp-main)
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Luca Moroni, Javier Aula-Blasco, Simone Conia, Irene Baucells, Naiara Perez, Silvia Paniagua Suárez, Anna Sallés, Malte Ostendorff, Júlia Falcão, Guijin Son, Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre, Roberto Navigli, Marta Villegas
| Challenge: | a recent study focused on complex, high-level tasks, but LMentry is limited to English . a multilingual evaluation of large language models is needed to address this gap, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a compact benchmark that enables systematic evaluation of large language models . they propose to use tasks that are trivial for humans but remain surprisingly difficult for LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is limited to English, leaving its insights linguistically narrow. |
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenxin An, Zhihui Xie, Xiaonan Li, Ming Zhong, Shansan Gong, Lei Li, Jun Zhang, Jingjing Xu, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing research on long-context scaling in language models has focused on managing lengthy input prompts instead of producing long outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level curriculum learning framework that shifts a model’s focus from interpreting long chain-of-thoughts to generating them. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on rigorous reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and GPQA Diamond, show that the proposed approach surpasses standard fine-tuning by over 10% while maintaining robust performance on understanding tasks. |