← Search

Mihai Surdeanu

27 accepted papers

2025

Can LLMs Judge Debates? Evaluating Non-Linear Reasoning via Argumentation Theory Semantics

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at linear reasoning tasks but remain underexplored on non-linear structures such as those found in natural debates, which are best expressed as argument graphs. We evaluate whether LLMs can approximate structured reasoning from Computational Argumentation Theory (C

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CopySpec: Accelerating LLMs with Speculative Copy-and-Paste

EMNLP 2025

We introduce CopySpec, a simple yet effective technique to tackle the inefficiencies LLMs face when generating responses that closely resemble previous outputs or responses that can be verbatim extracted from context. CopySpec identifies repeated sequences in the model’s chat history or context and

2025

How Is LLM Reasoning Distracted by Irrelevant Context? An Analysis Using a Controlled Benchmark

EMNLP 2025

We introduce Grade School Math with Distracting Context (GSM-DC), a synthetic benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models’ (LLMs) reasoning robustness against systematically controlled irrelevant context (IC). GSM-DC constructs symbolic reasoning graphs with precise distractor injections, enabling r

2025

MorphNLI: A Stepwise Approach to Natural Language Inference Using Text Morphing

NAACL 2025findings

We introduce MorphNLI, a modular step-by-step approach to natural language inference (NLI). When classifying the premise-hypothesis pairs into entailment, contradiction, neutral, we use a language model to generate the necessary edits to incrementally transform (i.e., morph) the premise into the hyp…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Lies Characters Tell: Utilizing Large Language Models to Normalize Adversarial Unicode Perturbations

ACL 2025finding

Homoglyphs, Unicode characters that are visually homogeneous to Latin letters, are widely used to mask offensive content. Dynamic strategies are needed to combat homoglyphs as the Unicode library is ever-expanding and new substitution possibilities for Latin letters continuously emerge. The present…

2025

Variable Layerwise Quantization: A Simple and Effective Approach to Quantize LLMs

ACL 2025finding

We present a simple meta quantization approach that quantizes different layers of a large language model (LLM) at different bit levels, and is independent of the underlying quantization technique. Specifically, we quantize the most important layers to higher bit precision and less important layers t…

2024

Active Learning Design Choices for NER with Transformers

COLING 2024main

We explore multiple important choices that have not been analyzed in conjunction regarding active learning for token classification using transformer networks. These choices are: (i) how to select what to annotate, (ii) decide whether to annotate entire sentences or smaller sentence fragments, (iii)…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Best of Both Worlds: A Pliable and Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Relation Classification

NAACL 2024findings

This paper introduces a novel neuro-symbolic architecture for relation classification (RC) that combines rule-based methods with contemporary deep learning techniques. This approach capitalizes on the strengths of both paradigms: the adaptability of rule-based systems and the generalization power of…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Change Is the Only Constant: Dynamic LLM Slicing based on Layer Redundancy

EMNLP 2024finding

This paper introduces a novel model compression approach through dynamic layer-specific pruning in Large Language Models (LLMs), enhancing the traditional methodology established by SliceGPT. By transitioning from constant to dynamic slicing, our method leverages the newly proposed Layer Redundancy…

2024

ELLEN: Extremely Lightly Supervised Learning for Efficient Named Entity Recognition

COLING 2024main

In this work, we revisit the problem of semi-supervised named entity recognition (NER) focusing on extremely light supervision, consisting of a lexicon containing only 10 examples per class. We introduce ELLEN, a simple, fully modular, neuro-symbolic method that blends fine-tuned language models wit…

2024

Time Travel in LLMs: Tracing Data Contamination in Large Language Models

ICLR 2024spotlight

Data contamination, i.e., the presence of test data from downstream tasks in the training data of large language models (LLMs), is a potential major issue in measuring LLMs' real effectiveness on other tasks. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for identifying data contamination within…

2024

Towards Realistic Few-Shot Relation Extraction: A New Meta Dataset and Evaluation

COLING 2024main

We introduce a meta dataset for few-shot relation extraction, which includes two datasets derived from existing supervised relation extraction datasets – NYT29 (Takanobu et al., 2019; Nayak and Ng, 2020) and WIKI- DATA (Sorokin and Gurevych, 2017) – as well as a few-shot form of the TACRED dataset (…

2024

When and Where Did it Happen? An Encoder-Decoder Model to Identify Scenario Context

EMNLP 2024finding

We introduce a neural architecture finetuned for the task of scenario context generation: The relevant location and time of an event or entity mentioned in text. Contextualizing information extraction helps to scope the validity of automated finings when aggregating them as knowledge graphs. Our app…

2023

Hiding in Plain Sight: Tweets with Hate Speech Masked by Homoglyphs

EMNLP 2023short findings

To avoid detection by current NLP monitoring applications, progenitors of hate speech often replace one or more letters in offensive words with homoglyphs, visually similar Unicode characters. Harvesting real-world hate speech containing homoglyphs is challenging due to the vast replacement possibil…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Information Extraction from Legal Wills: How Well Does GPT-4 Do?

EMNLP 2023short findings

This work presents a manually annotated dataset for Information Extraction (IE) from legal wills, and relevant in-context learning experiments on the dataset. The dataset consists of entities, binary relations between the entities (e.g., relations between testator and beneficiary), and n-ary events…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

It’s not Sexually Suggestive; It’s Educative | Separating Sex Education from Suggestive Content on TikTok videos

ACL 2023findings

We introduce SexTok, a multi-modal dataset composed of TikTok videos labeled as sexually suggestive (from the annotator’s point of view), sex-educational content, or neither. Such a dataset is necessary to address the challenge of distinguishing between sexually suggestive content and virtual sex ed…

2023

NEUROSTRUCTURAL DECODING: Neural Text Generation with Structural Constraints

ACL 2023long

Text generation often involves producing coherent and grammatically correct texts that also satisfy a given set of semantic constraints. While most approaches for conditional text generation have primarily focused on lexical constraints, they often struggle to effectively incorporate syntactic const…

2022

A Human-machine Interface for Few-shot Rule Synthesis for Information Extraction

NAACL 2022system demonstrations

We propose a system that assists a user in constructing transparent information extraction models, consisting of patterns (or rules) written in a declarative language, through program synthesis. Users of our system can specify their requirements through the use of examples,which are collected with a…

2022

BioNLI: Generating a Biomedical NLI Dataset Using Lexico-semantic Constraints for Adversarial Examples

EMNLP 2022finding

Natural language inference (NLI) is critical in many domains requiring complex decision-making, such as the biomedical domain. We introduce a novel semi-supervised procedure that bootstraps biomedical NLI datasets from positive entailment examples present in abstracts of biomedical publications. We…

2022

Validity Assessment of Legal Will Statements as Natural Language Inference

EMNLP 2022finding

This work introduces a natural language inference (NLI) dataset that focuses on the validity of statements in legal wills. This dataset is unique because: (a) each entailment decision requires three inputs: the statement from the will, the law, and the conditions that hold at the time of the testato…

2021

Data and Model Distillation as a Solution for Domain-transferable Fact Verification

NAACL 2021long

While neural networks produce state-of-the-art performance in several NLP tasks, they generally depend heavily on lexicalized information, which transfer poorly between domains. We present a combination of two strategies to mitigate this dependence on lexicalized information in fact verification tas…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Explainable Multi-hop Verbal Reasoning Through Internal Monologue

NAACL 2021long

Many state-of-the-art (SOTA) language models have achieved high accuracy on several multi-hop reasoning problems. However, these approaches tend to not be interpretable because they do not make the intermediate reasoning steps explicit. Moreover, models trained on simpler tasks tend to fail when dir…

2021

How May I Help You? Using Neural Text Simplification to Improve Downstream NLP Tasks

EMNLP 2021finding

The general goal of text simplification (TS) is to reduce text complexity for human consumption. In this paper, we investigate another potential use of neural TS: assisting machines performing natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We evaluate the use of neural TS in two ways: simplifying input te…

2021

If You Want to Go Far Go Together: Unsupervised Joint Candidate Evidence Retrieval for Multi-hop Question Answering

NAACL 2021long

Multi-hop reasoning requires aggregation and inference from multiple facts. To retrieve such facts, we propose a simple approach that retrieves and reranks set of evidence facts jointly. Our approach first generates unsupervised clusters of sentences as candidate evidence by accounting links between…

2021

Students Who Study Together Learn Better: On the Importance of Collective Knowledge Distillation for Domain Transfer in Fact Verification

EMNLP 2021main

While neural networks produce state-of-the- art performance in several NLP tasks, they generally depend heavily on lexicalized information, which transfer poorly between domains. Previous works have proposed delexicalization as a form of knowledge distillation to reduce the dependency on such lexica…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

An Unsupervised Method for Learning Representations of Multi-word Expressions for Semantic Classification

COLING 2020main

This paper explores an unsupervised approach to learning a compositional representation function for multi-word expressions (MWEs), and evaluates it on the Tratz dataset, which associates two-word expressions with the semantic relation between the compound constituents (e.g. the label employer is as…