Peilin Zhou
2026
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations
Hongbin Na | Zimu Wang | Zhaoming Chen | Peilin Zhou | Yining Hua | Grace Ziqi Zhou | Haiyang Zhang | Tao Shen | Wei Wang | John Torous | Shaoxiong Ji | Ling Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hongbin Na | Zimu Wang | Zhaoming Chen | Peilin Zhou | Yining Hua | Grace Ziqi Zhou | Haiyang Zhang | Tao Shen | Wei Wang | John Torous | Shaoxiong Ji | Ling Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Psychological defenses are strategies, often automatic, that people use to manage distress. Rigid use or overuse of defenses is negatively linked to mental health and shapes what speakers disclose and how they accept or resist help. However, defenses are complex and difficult to reliably measure, particularly in clinical dialogues. We introduce PsyDefConv, a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level, and DMRS Co-Pilot, a four-stage pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. The corpus contains 200 dialogues and 4,709 utterances, including 2,336 help seeker turns, with double-blind labeling reaching Cohen’s kappa of 0.639. In a counterbalanced study, the co-pilot reduced average annotation time by 24.0%. In expert review, it averaged 4.62 for evidence supportiveness, 4.44 for clinical plausibility, and 4.40 for insight on a seven-point scale. Benchmarks with strong large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate clear headroom, with the best macro F1-score around 30% and a tendency to overpredict mature defenses. Corpus analyses confirm that mature defenses are most common and reveal emotion-specific deviations. We release the corpus, annotations, code, and prompts to support research on defensive functioning in language.
2025
DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction
Jian Chen | Zhenyan Chen | Xuming Hu | Peilin Zhou | Yining Hua | Han Fang | Cissy Hing Yee Choy | Xinmei Ke | Jingfeng Luo | Zixuan Yuan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Jian Chen | Zhenyan Chen | Xuming Hu | Peilin Zhou | Yining Hua | Han Fang | Cissy Hing Yee Choy | Xinmei Ke | Jingfeng Luo | Zixuan Yuan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) provides a new model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users by converting natural language queries into SQL commands. Recent advancements, particularly those integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, have made significant strides in enhancing NL2SQL performance. However, challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction by LLMs remain major bottlenecks, often leading to errors in SQL generation. While existing datasets aim to mitigate these issues by fine-tuning models, they struggle with over-fragmentation of tasks and lack of domain-specific keyword annotations, limiting their effectiveness.To address these limitations, we present DeKeyNLU, a novel dataset which contains 1,500 meticulously annotated QA pairs aimed at refining task decomposition and enhancing keyword extraction precision for the RAG pipeline. Fine-tuned with DeKeyNLU, we propose DeKeySQL, a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three distinct modules for user question understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy. We benchmarked multiple model configurations within DeKeySQL RAG pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning with DeKeyNLU significantly improves SQL generation accuracy on both BIRD (62.31% to 69.10%) and Spider (84.2% to 88.7%) dev datasets.
2024
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering
Jian Chen | Peilin Zhou | Yining Hua | Loh Xin | Kehui Chen | Ziyuan Li | Bing Zhu | Junwei Liang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jian Chen | Peilin Zhou | Yining Hua | Loh Xin | Kehui Chen | Ziyuan Li | Bing Zhu | Junwei Liang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Accurate evaluation of financial question answering (QA) systems necessitates a comprehensive dataset encompassing diverse question types and contexts. However, current financial QA datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. This work introduces FinTextQA, a novel dataset for long-form question answering (LFQA) in finance. FinTextQA comprises 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites.Moreover, we developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based LFQA system, comprising an embedder, retriever, reranker, and generator. A multi-faceted evaluation approach, including human ranking, automatic metrics, and GPT-4 scoring, was employed to benchmark the performance of different LFQA system configurations under heightened noisy conditions. The results indicate that: (1) Among all compared generators, Baichuan2-7B competes closely with GPT-3.5-turbo in accuracy score; (2) The most effective system configuration on our dataset involved setting the embedder, retriever, reranker, and generator as Ada2, Automated Merged Retrieval, Bge-Reranker-Base, and Baichuan2-7B, respectively; (3) models are less susceptible to noise after the length of contexts reaching a specific threshold. The dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/GPS-Lab/FinTextQA.