Zhifeng Hao


2025

pdf bib
CACA: Context-Aware Cross-Attention Network for Extractive Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Bingfeng Chen | Haoran Xu | Yongqi Luo | Boyan Xu | Ruichu Cai | Zhifeng Hao
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction(ASQP) enhances the scope of aspect-based sentiment analysis by introducing the necessity to predict both explicit and implicit aspect and opinion terms. Existing leading generative ASQP approaches do not modeling the contextual relationship of the review sentence to predict implicit terms. However, introducing the contextual information into the pre-trained language models framework is non-trivial due to the inflexibility of the generative encoder-decoder architecture. To well utilize the contextual information, we propose an extractive ASQP framework, CACA, which features with Context-Aware Cross-Attention Network. When implicit terms are present, the Context-Aware Cross-Attention Network enhances the alignment of aspects and opinions, through alternating updates of explicit and implicit representations. Additionally, contrastive learning is introduced in the implicit representation learning process. Experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CACA. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/CACA.

pdf bib
Emotion Transfer with Enhanced Prototype for Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Kun Peng | Cong Cao | Hao Peng | Guanlin Wu | Zhifeng Hao | Lei Jiang | Yanbing Liu | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Current Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) research follows a closed-domain assumption. However, there is no clear consensus on emotion classification in psychology, which presents a challenge for models when it comes to recognizing previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (UERC) task for the first time and propose **ProEmoTrans**, a solid prototype-based emotion transfer framework. This prototype-based approach shows promise but still faces key challenges: First, implicit expressions complicate emotion definition, which we address by proposing an LLM-enhanced description approach. Second, utterance encoding in long conversations is difficult, which we tackle with a proposed parameter-free mechanism for efficient encoding and overfitting prevention. Finally, the Markovian flow nature of emotions is hard to transfer, which we address with an improved Attention Viterbi Decoding (AVD) method to transfer seen emotion transitions to unseen emotions. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our method serves as a strong baseline for preliminary exploration in this new area.

pdf bib
GenLink: Generation-Driven Schema-Linking via Multi-Model Learning for Text-to-SQL
Zhifeng Hao | Junqi Huang | Shaobin Shi | Ruichu Cai | Boyan Xu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Schema linking is widely recognized as a key factor in improving text-to-SQL performance. Supervised fine-tuning approaches enhance SQL generation quality by explicitly fine-tuning schema linking as an extraction task. However, they suffer from two major limitations: (i) The training corpus of small language models restricts their cross-domain generalization ability. (ii) The extraction-based fine-tuning process struggles to capture complex linking patterns. To address these issues, we propose GenLink, a generation-driven schema-linking framework based on multi-model learning. Instead of explicitly extracting schema elements, GenLink enhances linking through a generation-based learning process, effectively capturing implicit schema relationships. By integrating multiple small language models, GenLink improves schema-linking recall rate and ensures robust cross-domain adaptability. Experimental results on the BIRD and Spider benchmarks validate the effectiveness of GenLink, achieving execution accuracies of 67.34% (BIRD), 89.7% (Spider development set), and 87.8% (Spider test set), demonstrating its superiority in handling diverse and complex database schemas.

pdf bib
đť’®2IT: Stepwise Syntax Integration Tuning for Large Language Models in Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Bingfeng Chen | Chenjie Qiu | Yifeng Xie | Boyan Xu | Ruichu Cai | Zhifeng Hao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

pdf bib
Track-SQL: Enhancing Generative Language Models with Dual-Extractive Modules for Schema and Context Tracking in Multi-turn Text-to-SQL
Bingfeng Chen | Shaobin Shi | Yongqi Luo | Boyan Xu | Ruichu Cai | Zhifeng Hao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Generative language models have shown significant potential in single-turn Text-to-SQL. However, their performance does not extend equivalently to multi-turn Text-to-SQL. This is primarily due to generative language models’ inadequacy in handling the complexities of context information and dynamic schema linking in multi-turn interactions. In this paper, we propose a framework named Track-SQL, which enhances generative language models with dual-extractive modules designed to track schema and contextual changes in multi-turn Text-to-SQL. Specifically, Track-SQL incorporates a Semantic-enhanced Schema Extractor and a Schema-aware Context Extractor. Experimental results demonstrate that Track-SQL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SparC and CoSQL datasets. Furthermore, detailed ablation studies reveal that Track-SQL significantly improves execution accuracy in multi-turn interactions by 7.1% and 9.55% on these datasets, respectively. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/Track-SQL.

pdf bib
Handling Missing Entities in Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition: Integrated Recall and Retrieval Augmentation
Ruichu Cai | Junhao Lu | Zhongjie Chen | Boyan Xu | Zhifeng Hao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (ZS-NER) aims to recognize entities in unseen domains without specific annotated data. A key challenge is handling missing entities while ensuring accurate type recognition, hindered by: 1) the pre-training assumption that each entity has a single type, overlooking diversity, and 2) insufficient contextual knowledge for type reasoning. To address this, we propose IRRA (Integrated Recall and Retrieval Augmentation), a novel two-stage framework leveraging large language model techniques. In the Recall Augmented Entity Extracting stage, we built a perturbed dataset to induce the model to exhibit missing or erroneous extracted entities. Based on this, we trained an enhanced model to correct these errors. This approach can improve the ZS-NER’s recall rate. In the Retrieval Augmented Type Correcting stage, we employ Retrieval-Augmented Generation techniques to locate entity-related unannotated contexts, with the additional contextual information significantly improving the accuracy of type correcting. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our IRRA, with significant improvements in zero-shot cross-domain settings validated through both auto-evaluated metrics and analysis. Our implementation will be open-sourced athttps://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/IRRA.

2024

pdf bib
S2GSL: Incorporating Segment to Syntactic Enhanced Graph Structure Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Bingfeng Chen | Qihan Ouyang | Yongqi Luo | Boyan Xu | Ruichu Cai | Zhifeng Hao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Previous graph-based approaches in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis(ABSA) have demonstrated impressive performance by utilizing graph neural networks and attention mechanisms to learn structures of static dependency trees and dynamic latent trees. However, incorporating both semantic and syntactic information simultaneously within complex global structures can introduce irrelevant contexts and syntactic dependencies during the process of graph structure learning, potentially resulting in inaccurate predictions. In order to address the issues above, we propose S2GSL, incorporating Segment to Syntactic enhanced Graph Structure Learning for ABSA. Specifically, S2GSL is featured with a segment-aware semantic graph learning and a syntax-based latent graph learning enabling the removal of irrelevant contexts and dependencies, respectively. We further propose a self-adaptive aggregation network that facilitates the fusion of two graph learning branches, thereby achieving complementarity across diverse structures. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.