Ziqiang Zhang
2026
Natural-Language Policies to Executable Decisions: An Interpretable Large Language Model Framework
Ziqiang Zhang | Jing Ma | Zilong Wang | Jiayuan Chen | Yi Qiao | Yu He | Wei Zhang | Dai Cheng | Xiaoyu Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Ziqiang Zhang | Jing Ma | Zilong Wang | Jiayuan Chen | Yi Qiao | Yu He | Wei Zhang | Dai Cheng | Xiaoyu Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Pricing automation in large-scale tourism is challenging because travel orders are highly unstructured, while pricing policies are complex, rapidly evolving, and inherently open-ended. Traditional rule engines are brittle and costly to maintain, whereas unconstrained LLM agents lack the reliability and auditability required for financial decisions. We present a production-grade LLM-powered pricing system with a strict decision boundary: LLMs perform structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection, while all numeric pricing, including total-price computation, is executed deterministically. Policies are compiled into interpretable condition trees, enabling open-ended support for new clauses and evolving rules without code changes, while exposing auditable artifacts for human-in-the-loop control. Periodic fine-tuning on logged traces further improves tree induction and path matching. Deployed at a municipal state-owned tourism enterprise across 7 scenic sites and 12 business categories with 1,500+ operators and 1,000+ active policies, the system processed 3,960 orders in six months, reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3, and cut per-order handling time from 10 minutes to <2 minutes.
2022
The YiTrans Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2022 Offline Shared Task
Ziqiang Zhang | Junyi Ao
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)
Ziqiang Zhang | Junyi Ao
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)
This paper describes the submission of our end-to-end YiTrans speech translation system for the IWSLT 2022 offline task, which translates from English audio to German, Chinese, and Japanese. The YiTrans system is built on large-scale pre-trained encoder-decoder models. More specifically, we first design a multi-stage pre-training strategy to build a multi-modality model with a large amount of labeled and unlabeled data. We then fine-tune the corresponding components of the model for the downstream speech translation tasks. Moreover, we make various efforts to improve performance, such as data filtering, data augmentation, speech segmentation, model ensemble, and so on. Experimental results show that our YiTrans system obtains a significant improvement than the strong baseline on three translation directions, and it achieves +5.2 BLEU improvements over last year’s optimal end-to-end system on tst2021 English-German.
SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training
Ziqiang Zhang | Long Zhou | Junyi Ao | Shujie Liu | Lirong Dai | Jinyu Li | Furu Wei
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ziqiang Zhang | Long Zhou | Junyi Ao | Shujie Liu | Lirong Dai | Jinyu Li | Furu Wei
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid development of single-modal pre-training has prompted researchers to pay more attention to cross-modal pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model, SpeechUT, to connect the representations of a speech encoder and a text decoder with a shared unit encoder. Leveraging hidden-unit as an interface to align speech and text, we can decompose the speech-to-text model into a speech-to-unit model and a unit-to-text model, which can be jointly pre-trained with unpaired speech and text data respectively. Our proposed SpeechUT is fine-tuned and evaluated on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) tasks. Experimental results show that SpeechUT gets substantial improvements over strong baselines, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks. To better understand the proposed SpeechUT, detailed analyses are conducted. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/SpeechUT.