Demi Zhang


2025

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FIDELITY: Fine-grained Interpretable Distillation for Effective Language Insights and Topic Yielding
Divyansh Singh | Brodie Mather | Demi Zhang | Patrick Lehman | Justin Ho | Bonnie J Dorr
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

The rapid expansion of text data has increased the need for effective methods to distill meaningful information from large datasets. Traditional and state-of-the-art approaches have made significant strides in topic modeling, yet they fall short in generating contextually specific and semantically intuitive topics, particularly in dynamic environments and low-resource languages. Additionally, multi-document summarization systems often struggle with issues like redundancy, scalability, and maintaining readability. We introduce FIDELITY (Fine-grained Interpretable Distillation for Effective Language Insights and Topic Yielding), a hybrid method that combines topic modeling and text summarization to produce fine-grained, semantically rich, and contextually relevant output. FIDELITY enhances dataset accessibility and interpretability, outperforming traditional models in topic diversity, similarity, and in the ability to process new, unseen documents. Additionally, it demonstrates robust multilingual capabilities, effectively handling low-resource languages like Tagalog. This makes FIDELITY a powerful tool for distilling and understanding complex textual data, providing detailed insights while maintaining the necessary granularity for practical applications.

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PANDA - Paired Anti-hate Narratives Dataset from Asia: Using an LLM-as-a-Judge to Create the First Chinese Counterspeech Dataset
Michael Bennie | Demi Zhang | Bushi Xiao | Jing Cao | Chryseis Xinyi Liu | Jian Meng | Alayo Tripp
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Counterspeech Generation

Despite the global prevalence of Modern Standard Chinese language, counterspeech (CS) resources for Chinese remain virtually nonexistent. To address this gap in East Asian counterspeech research we introduce the a corpus of Modern Standard Mandarin counterspeech that focuses on combating hate speech in Mainland China. This paper proposes a novel approach of generating CS by using an LLM-as-a-Judge, simulated annealing, LLMs zero-shot CN generation and a round-robin algorithm. This is followed by manual verification for quality and contextual relevance. This paper details the methodology for creating effective counterspeech in Chinese and other non-Eurocentric languages, including unique cultural patterns of which groups are maligned and linguistic patterns in what kinds of discourse markers are programmatically marked as hate speech (HS). Analysis of the generated corpora, we provide strong evidence for the lack of open-source, properly labeled Chinese hate speech data and the limitations of using an LLM-as-Judge to score possible answers in Chinese. Moreover, the present corpus servers as the first East Asian language based CS corpus and provides an essential resource for future research on counterspeech generation and evaluation.

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CODEOFCONDUCT at Multilingual Counterspeech Generation: A Context-Aware Model for Robust Counterspeech Generation in Low-Resource Languages
Michael Bennie | Bushi Xiao | Chryseis Xinyi Liu | Demi Zhang | Jian Meng | Alayo Tripp
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Counterspeech Generation

This paper introduces a context-aware model for robust counterspeech generation, which achieved significant success in the MCG-COLING-2025 shared task. Our approach particularly excelled in low-resource language settings. By leveraging a simulated annealing algorithm fine-tuned on multilingual datasets, the model generates factually accurate responses to hate speech. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across four languages (Basque, English, Italian, and Spanish), with our system ranking first for Basque, second for Italian, and third for both English and Spanish. Notably, our model swept all three top positions for Basque, highlighting its effectiveness in low-resource scenarios. Evaluation of the shared task employs both traditional metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, Novelty) and the LLM-based JudgeLM. We present a detailed analysis of our results, including error cases and potential improvements. This work contributes to the growing body of research on multilingual counterspeech generation, offering insights into developing robust models that can adapt to diverse linguistic and cultural contexts in the fight against online hate speech.

2024

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Modeling Bilingual Sentence Processing: Evaluating RNN and Transformer Architectures for Cross-Language Structural Priming
Demi Zhang | Bushi Xiao | Chao Gao | Sangpil Youm | Bonnie J Dorr
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024)

This study evaluates the performance of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Transformer models in replicating cross-language structural priming, a key indicator of abstract grammatical representations in human language processing. Focusing on Chinese-English priming, which involves two typologically distinct languages, we examine how these models handle the robust phenomenon of structural priming, where exposure to a particular sentence structure increases the likelihood of selecting a similar structure subsequently. Our findings indicate that transformers outperform RNNs in generating primed sentence structures, with accuracy rates that exceed 25.84% to 33. 33%. This challenges the conventional belief that human sentence processing primarily involves recurrent and immediate processing and suggests a role for cue-based retrieval mechanisms. This work contributes to our understanding of how computational models may reflect human cognitive processes across diverse language families.