Lu Liu


2025

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TurnBack: A Geospatial Route Cognition Benchmark for Large Language Models through Reverse Route
Hongyi Luo | Qing Cheng | Daniel Matos | Hari Krishna Gadi | Yanfeng Zhang | Lu Liu | Yongliang Wang | Niclas Zeller | Daniel Cremers | Liqiu Meng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Humans can interpret geospatial information through natural language, while the geospatial cognition capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remain underexplored. Prior research in this domain has been constrained by non-quantifiable metrics, limited evaluation datasets; unclear research hierarchies further compound these limitations. Therefore, we propose a scalable benchmark and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the geospatial route cognition of LLMs. We create a large-scale evaluation dataset comprised of 36000 routes from 12 metropolises. Then, we introduce PathBuilder, a novel tool for converting natural language instructions into navigation routes, and vice versa, bridging the gap between geospatial information and natural language. Finally, we propose a new evaluation framework and metrics to rigorously assess 9 state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, on the task of route reversal. The benchmark reveals that LLMs exhibit limited ability to reverse routes: most of the reverse routes neither return to the starting point nor are similar to the optimal route. Additionally, LLMs face challenges such as low robustness in route generation and high confidence for their incorrect answers.

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DeMAC: Enhancing Multi-Agent Coordination with Dynamic DAG and Manager-Player Feedback
Yuhan Liu | Cong Xu | Lu Liu | Yihua Wang | Feiyu Chen | Qi Jia | Yaqian Zhao | Zhichun Wang | Xiang Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in tackling multifaceted problems through advanced understanding and reasoning. However, they struggle to adapt to evolving task dependencies and to handle uncertainties, such as shifting priorities or unpredictable disruptions. These constraints undermine their ability to dynamically adjust long-term strategies and inter-agent collaboration. To address these challenges, we propose DeMAC, a Dynamic Environment-Aware Manager-Player Agents Coordination framework that enhances multi-agent coordination through long-term strategic planning. DeMAC uses a dynamically updated directed acyclic graph (DAG) and a Manager-Player Dual-Feedback mechanism to align strategic and operational decisions. Moreover, DeMAC enables agents to maintain collaboration and dynamically adapt to changing environmental conditions, outperforming traditional reinforcement learning and human-agent collaboration in the Overcooked simulation. Experimental results highlight DeMAC’s ability to tackle complex coordination tasks, demonstrating its potential to advance LLM-based MAS in dynamic, complex task dependency environments.

2020

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Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing by POS-Guided Word Reordering
Lu Liu | Yi Zhou | Jianhan Xu | Xiaoqing Zheng | Kai-Wei Chang | Xuanjing Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

We propose a novel approach to cross-lingual dependency parsing based on word reordering. The words in each sentence of a source language corpus are rearranged to meet the word order in a target language under the guidance of a part-of-speech based language model (LM). To obtain the highest reordering score under the LM, a population-based optimization algorithm and its genetic operators are designed to deal with the combinatorial nature of such word reordering. A parser trained on the reordered corpus then can be used to parse sentences in the target language. We demonstrate through extensive experimentation that our approach achieves better or comparable results across 25 target languages (1.73% increase in average), and outperforms a baseline by a significant margin on the languages that are greatly different from the source one. For example, when transferring the English parser to Hindi and Latin, our approach outperforms the baseline by 15.3% and 6.7% respectively.

2019

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Generating Responses with a Specific Emotion in Dialog
Zhenqiao Song | Xiaoqing Zheng | Lu Liu | Mu Xu | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

It is desirable for dialog systems to have capability to express specific emotions during a conversation, which has a direct, quantifiable impact on improvement of their usability and user satisfaction. After a careful investigation of real-life conversation data, we found that there are at least two ways to express emotions with language. One is to describe emotional states by explicitly using strong emotional words; another is to increase the intensity of the emotional experiences by implicitly combining neutral words in distinct ways. We propose an emotional dialogue system (EmoDS) that can generate the meaningful responses with a coherent structure for a post, and meanwhile express the desired emotion explicitly or implicitly within a unified framework. Experimental results showed EmoDS performed better than the baselines in BLEU, diversity and the quality of emotional expression.

2018

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BLCU_NLP at SemEval-2018 Task 12: An Ensemble Model for Argument Reasoning Based on Hierarchical Attention
Meiqian Zhao | Chunhua Liu | Lu Liu | Yan Zhao | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

To comprehend an argument and fill the gap between claims and reasons, it is vital to find the implicit supporting warrants behind. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical attention model to identify the right warrant which explains why the reason stands for the claim. Our model focuses not only on the similar part between warrants and other information but also on the contradictory part between two opposing warrants. In addition, we use the ensemble method for different models. Our model achieves an accuracy of 61%, ranking second in this task. Experimental results demonstrate that our model is effective to make correct choices.