2025
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AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment
Xiaochong Lan
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Jie Feng
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Yinxing Liu
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Xinleishi
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Yong Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Ranking online reviews by their intrinsic quality is a critical task for e-commerce platforms and information services, impacting user experience and business outcomes. However, quality is a domain-dependent and dynamic concept, making its assessment a formidable challenge. Traditional methods relying on hand-crafted features are unscalable across domains and fail to adapt to evolving content patterns, while modern deep learning approaches often produce black-box models that lack interpretability and may prioritize semantics over quality. To address these challenges, we propose AutoQual, an LLM-based agent framework that automates the discovery of interpretable features. While demonstrated on review quality assessment, AutoQual is designed as a general framework for transforming tacit knowledge embedded in data into explicit, computable features. It mimics a human research process, iteratively generating feature hypotheses through reflection, operationalizing them via autonomous tool implementation, and accumulating experience in a persistent memory. We deploy our method on a large-scale online platform with a billion-level user base. Large-scale A/B testing confirms its effectiveness, increasing average reviews viewed per user by 0.79% and the conversion rate of review readers by 0.27%.
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Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models
Xiaochong Lan
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Zhiguang Han
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Yiming Cheng
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Li Sheng
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Jie Feng
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Chen Gao
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Yong Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Limited access to mental healthcare resources hinders timely depression diagnosis, leading to detrimental outcomes.Social media platforms present a valuable data source for early detection, yet this task faces two significant challenges: 1) the need for medical knowledge to distinguish clinical depression from transient mood changes, and 2) the dual requirement for high accuracy and model explainability.To address this, we propose DORIS, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs).To integrate medical knowledge, DORIS utilizes LLMs to annotate user texts against established medical diagnostic criteria and to summarize historical posts into temporal mood courses.These medically-informed features are then used to train an accurate Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT) classifier.Explainability is achieved by generating justifications for predictions based on the LLM-derived symptom annotations and mood course analyses.Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness as well as interpretability of our method, highlighting its potential as a supportive clinical tool.
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Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models
Xiaochong Lan
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Jie Feng
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Yizhou Sun
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Chen Gao
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Jiahuan Lei
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Xinleishi Xinleishi
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Hengliang Luo
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Yong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Living needs are the needs people generate in their daily lives for survival and well-being. On life service platforms like Meituan, user purchases are driven by living needs, making accurate living need predictions crucial for personalized service recommendations. Traditional approaches treat this prediction as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture the diversity and complexity of living needs. In this work, we redefine living need prediction as an open-set classification problem and propose PIGEON, a novel system leveraging large language models (LLMs) for unrestricted need prediction. PIGEON first employs a behavior-aware record retriever to help LLMs understand user preferences, then incorporates Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs. For evaluation and application, we design a recall module based on a fine-tuned text embedding model that links flexible need descriptions to appropriate life services. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PIGEON significantly outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37%. Human evaluation validates the reasonableness and specificity of our predictions. Additionally, we employ instruction tuning to enable smaller LLMs to achieve competitive performance, supporting practical deployment.