← Search

Xian-Ling Mao

41 accepted papers

2026

WikiREVIEW: A Multi-Perspective Review Framework for Automatic Wiki-Style Article Generation

AAAI 2026technical

As a knowledge-intensive and challenging task, automatic generation of long-form wiki-style articles has garnered increasing attention from researchers due to its ability to efficiently integrate, organize and present vast amounts of both structured and unstructured knowledge. To the best of our kn

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Automatic Evaluation for Text-to-image Generation: Task-decomposed Framework, Distilled Training, and Meta-evaluation Benchmark

ACL 2025long

Driven by the remarkable progress in diffusion models, text-to-image generation has achieved substantial advancements, underscoring the urgent need for robust automatic quality assessment. This task is inherently complex, requiring evaluations that range from object presence and attribute correctnes…

2025

Distribution-Consistency-Guided Multi-modal Hashing

AAAI 2025technical

Multi-modal hashing methods have gained popularity due to their fast speed and low storage requirements. Among them, the supervised methods demonstrate better performance by utilizing labels as supervisory signals compared with unsupervised methods. Currently, for almost all supervised multi-modal h…

2025

SEOE: A Scalable and Reliable Semantic Evaluation Framework for Open Domain Event Detection

ACL 2025long

Automatic evaluation for Open Domain Event Detection (ODED) is a highly challenging task, because ODED is characterized by a vast diversity of un-constrained output labels from various domains. Nearly all existing evaluation methods for ODED usually first construct evaluation benchmarks with limited…

2025

SQLWOZ: A Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with SQL-Based Dialogue State Representation for Complex User Requirements

EMNLP 2025

High-quality datasets are essential for building effective task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. The existing TOD datasets often present overly simplified interactions, where users incrementally express straightforward requests that can be managed with basic slot-value style dialogue states, such as

2025

Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback

EMNLP 2025

Critique ability, a meta-cognitive capability of humans, presents significant challenges for LLMs to improve. While utilizing human annotation can enhance critique ability effectively, most recent works primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using critiques generated by a single LLM like GPT

2024

CriticEval: Evaluating Large-scale Language Model as Critic

NeurIPS 2024poster

Critique ability, i.e., the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and rectify flaws in responses, is crucial for their applications in self-improvement and scalable oversight. While numerous studies have been proposed to evaluate critique ability of LLMs, their comprehensiveness and…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Personalized Topic Selection Model for Topic-Grounded Dialogue

ACL 2024findings

Recently, the topic-grounded dialogue (TGD) system has become increasingly popular as its powerful capability to actively guide users to accomplish specific tasks through topic-guided conversations. Most existing works utilize side information (e.g. topics or personas) in isolation to enhance the to…

2024

Position Debiasing Fine-Tuning for Causal Perception in Long-Term Dialogue

IJCAI 2024poster

The core of the dialogue system is to generate relevant, informative, and human-like responses based on extensive dialogue history. Recently, dialogue generation domain has seen mainstream adoption of large language models (LLMs), due to its powerful capability in generating utterances. However, the…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training

ACL 2024long

We propose ProtLLM, a versatile cross-modal large language model (LLM) for both protein-centric and protein-language tasks. ProtLLM features a unique dynamic protein mounting mechanism, enabling it to handle complex inputs where the natural language text is interspersed with an arbitrary number of p…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: From Complex Modularity to Zero-Shot Autonomous Agent

ACL 2024long

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are predominantly designed to be composed of several functional modules (e.g. dialogue state tracker, dialogue policy, natural language generation) whether they are pipeline or end-to-end architectures. However, this modular design not only heavily relies on mass…

2024

SciMRC: Multi-perspective Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension

COLING 2024main

Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension (SMRC) aims to facilitate the understanding of scientific texts through human-machine interactions. While existing dataset has significantly contributed to this field, it predominantly focus on single-perspective question-answer pairs, thereby overlooking the…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Span Graph Transformer for Document-Level Named Entity Recognition

AAAI 2024technical

Named Entity Recognition (NER), which aims to identify the span and category of entities within text, is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent NER approaches have featured pre-trained transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) as a crucial encoding component to achieve state-of-the…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Span-based Unified Named Entity Recognition Framework via Contrastive Learning

IJCAI 2024poster

Traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are typically designed for domain-specific datasets and limited to fixed predefined types, resulting in difficulty generalizing to new domains. Recently, prompt-based generative methods attempt to mitigate this constraint by training models jointly…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

An Empirical Study on the Language Modal in Visual Question Answering

IJCAI 2023poster

Generalization beyond in-domain experience to out-of-distribution data is of paramount significance in the AI domain. Of late, state-of-the-art Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have shown impressive performance on in-domain data, partially due to the language prior bias which, however, hinders…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking

ACL 2023findings

Annotating long-document question answering (long-document QA) pairs is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate the problem, it might be possible to generate long-document QA pairs via unsupervised question answering (UQA) methods. However, existing UQA tasks are based on short documents, and can…

2023

Bridging The Gap: Entailment Fused-T5 for Open-retrieval Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension

ACL 2023long

Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversational interaction scenes. Machines are required to make a decision of “Yes/No/Inquire” or generate a follow-up question when the decision is “Inquire” based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user q…

2023

Can Cross-Lingual Transferability of Multilingual Transformers Be Activated Without End-Task Data?

ACL 2023findings

Pretrained multilingual Transformers have achieved great success in cross-lingual transfer learning. Current methods typically activate the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers by fine-tuning them on end-task data. However, the methods cannot perform cross-lingual transfer when…

2023

Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control

EMNLP 2023long findings

Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

AAAI 2023technical

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) has become an emerging task in sentiment analysis research, aiming to extract triplets of the aspect term, its corresponding opinion term, and its associated sentiment polarity from a given sentence. Recently, many neural networks based models with differen…

2023

TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation

ACL 2023long

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to timely trace the dynamic interests of users through dialogues and generate relevant responses for item recommendations. Recently, various external knowledge bases (especially knowledge graphs) are incorporated into CRS to enhance the understanding of c…

2023

Towards Hierarchical Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendation with Hypergraph-based Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2023poster

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to timely and proactively acquire user dynamic preferred attributes through conversations for item recommendation. In each turn of CRS, there naturally have two decision-making processes with different roles that influence each other: 1) director, whic…

2022

BiSyn-GAT+: Bi-Syntax Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

ACL 2022findings

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to align aspects and corresponding sentiments for aspect-specific sentiment polarity inference. It is challenging because a sentence may contain multiple aspects or complicated (e.g., conditional, coordinating…

2022

Capturing Global Structural Information in Long Document Question Answering with Compressive Graph Selector Network

EMNLP 2022main

Long document question answering is a challenging task due to its demands for complex reasoning over long text. Previous works usually take long documents as non-structured flat texts or only consider the local structure in long documents. However, these methods usually ignore the global structure o…

2022

ET5: A Novel End-to-end Framework for Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension

COLING 2022main

Conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) aims to assist computers to understand an natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. Existing methods typically require three steps: (1) decision making based on entailment reas…

2022

Gated Mechanism Enhanced Multi-Task Learning for Dialog Routing

COLING 2022main

Currently, human-bot symbiosis dialog systems, e.g. pre- and after-sales in E-commerce, are ubiquitous, and the dialog routing component is essential to improve the overall efficiency, reduce human resource cost and increase user experience. To satisfy this requirement, existing methods are mostly h…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

HCL-TAT: A Hybrid Contrastive Learning Method for Few-shot Event Detection with Task-Adaptive Threshold

EMNLP 2022finding

Event detection has been suffering from constantly emerging event types with lack of sufficient data. Existing works formulate the new problem as few-shot event detection (FSED), and employ two-stage or unified models based on meta-learning to address the problem. However, these methods fall far sho…

2022

On the Representation Collapse of Sparse Mixture of Experts

NeurIPS 2022accept

Sparse mixture of experts provides larger model capacity while requiring a constant computational overhead. It employs the routing mechanism to distribute input tokens to the best-matched experts according to their hidden representations. However, learning such a routing mechanism encourages token c…

2022

Sequential Topic Selection Model with Latent Variable for Topic-Grounded Dialogue

EMNLP 2022finding

Recently, topic-grounded dialogue system has attracted significant attention due to its effectiveness in predicting the next topic to yield better responses via the historical context and given topic sequence. However, almost all existing topic prediction solutions focus on only the current conversa…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

Unsupervised Question Answering via Answer Diversifying

COLING 2022main

Unsupervised question answering is an attractive task due to its independence on labeled data. Previous works usually make use of heuristic rules as well as pre-trained models to construct data and train QA models. However, most of these works regard named entity (NE) as the only answer type, which…

2022

XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA

ACL 2022long

In this paper, we introduce ELECTRA-style tasks to cross-lingual language model pre-training. Specifically, we present two pre-training tasks, namely multilingual replaced token detection, and translation replaced token detection. Besides, we pretrain the model, named as XLM-E, on both multilingual…

2021

Comprehensive Study: How the Context Information of Different Granularity Affects Dialogue State Tracking?

ACL 2021long

Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays a key role in task-oriented dialogue systems to monitor the user’s goal. In general, there are two strategies to track a dialogue state: predicting it from scratch and updating it from previous state. The scratch-based strategy obtains each slot value by inquiring…

2021

Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment

ACL 2021long

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task. Specifically, the model first self-label word alignments for parallel se…

2021

InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training

NAACL 2021long

In this work, we present an information-theoretic framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. The unified view helps us to better understand the existing methods for learning cross-lingual represen…

Cited by 371SourcePDFScholar
2021

mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs

EMNLP 2021main

Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on massive monolingual texts, which has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. In this paper, we improve multilingual text-to-text transfer Transformer with translation pairs (mT6). Specifically, we explore three cross-lingual text…

2020

MLS3RDUH: Deep Unsupervised Hashing via Manifold based Local Semantic Similarity Structure Reconstructing

IJCAI 2020poster

Most of the unsupervised hashing methods usually map images into semantic similarity-preserving hash codes by constructing local semantic similarity structure as guiding information, i.e., treating each point similar to its k nearest neighbours. However, for an image, some of its k nearest neighbour…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar