Ning Wang


2025

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Investigating and Enhancing the Robustness of Large Multimodal Models Against Temporal Inconsistency
Jiafeng Liang | Shixin Jiang | Xuan Dong | Ning Wang | Zheng Chu | Hui Su | Jinlan Fu | Ming Liu | See-Kiong Ng | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance on general video comprehension benchmarks. Nevertheless, for broader applications, the robustness of their temporal analysis capability needs to be thoroughly investigated yet predominantly ignored. Motivated by this, we propose a novel temporal robustness benchmark (TemRobBench), which introduces temporal inconsistency perturbations separately at the visual and textual modalities to assess the robustness of models. We evaluate 16 mainstream LMMs and find that they exhibit over-reliance on prior knowledge and textual context in adversarial environments, while ignoring the actual temporal dynamics in the video. To mitigate this issue, we design panoramic direct preference optimization (PanoDPO), which encourages LMMs to incorporate both visual and linguistic feature preferences simultaneously. Experimental results show that PanoDPO can effectively enhance the model’s robustness and reliability in temporal analysis.

2024

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General Collaborative Framework between Large Language Model and Experts for Universal Information Extraction
K Bao | Ning Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Recently, unified information extraction has garnered widespread attention from the NLP community, which aims to use a unified paradigm to perform various information extraction tasks. However, prevalent unified IE approaches inevitably encounter challenges such as noise interference, abstract label semantics, and diverse span granularity. In this paper, we first present three problematic assumptions regarding the capabilities of unified information extraction model. Furthermore, we propose the General Collaborative Information Extraction (GCIE) framework to address these challenges in universal information extraction tasks. Specifically, GCIE consists of a general Recognizer as well as multiple task-specific Experts for recognizing predefined types and extracting spans respectively. The Recognizer is a large language model, while the Experts comprise a series of smaller language models. Together, they collaborate in a two-stage pipeline to perform unified information extraction. Extensive empirical experiments on 6 IE tasks and several datasets, validate the effectiveness and generality of our approach.

2021

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Learning Models for Suicide Prediction from Social Media Posts
Ning Wang | Luo Fan | Yuvraj Shivtare | Varsha Badal | Koduvayur Subbalakshmi | Rajarathnam Chandramouli | Ellen Lee
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access

We propose a deep learning architecture and test three other machine learning models to automatically detect individuals that will attempt suicide within (1) 30 days and (2) six months, using their social media post data provided in the CL-Psych-Challenge. Additionally, we create and extract three sets of handcrafted features for suicide detection based on the three-stage theory of suicide and prior work on emotions and the use of pronouns among persons exhibiting suicidal ideations. Extensive experimentations show that some of the traditional machine learning methods outperform the baseline with an F1 score of 0.741 and F2 score of 0.833 on subtask 1 (prediction of a suicide attempt 30 days prior). However, the proposed deep learning method outperforms the baseline with F1 score of 0.737 and F2 score of 0.843 on subtask2 (prediction of suicide 6 months prior).

2020

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Personalized Early Stage Alzheimer’s Disease Detection: A Case Study of President Reagan’s Speeches
Ning Wang | Fan Luo | Vishal Peddagangireddy | Koduvayur Subbalakshmi | Rajarathnam Chandramouli
Proceedings of the 19th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-related global healthcare cost is estimated to be $1 trillion by 2050. Currently, there is no cure for this disease; however, clinical studies show that early diagnosis and intervention helps to extend the quality of life and inform technologies for personalized mental healthcare. Clinical research indicates that the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease lead to dementia and other mental health issues. As a result, the language capabilities of patient start to decline. In this paper, we show that machine learning-based unsupervised clustering of and anomaly detection with linguistic biomarkers are promising approaches for intuitive visualization and personalized early stage detection of Alzheimer’s disease. We demonstrate this approach on 10 year’s (1980 to 1989) of President Ronald Reagan’s speech data set. Key linguistic biomarkers that indicate early-stage AD are identified. Experimental results show that Reagan had early onset of Alzheimer’s sometime between 1983 and 1987. This finding is corroborated by prior work that analyzed his interviews using a statistical technique. The proposed technique also identifies the exact speeches that reflect linguistic biomarkers for early stage AD.

2010

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Cross-Domain Speech Disfluency Detection
Kallirroi Georgila | Ning Wang | Jonathan Gratch
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

2007

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Integrating Complementary Features from Vocal Source and Vocal Tract for Speaker Identification
Nengheng Zheng | Tan Lee | Ning Wang | P. C. Ching
International Journal of Computational Linguistics & Chinese Language Processing, Volume 12, Number 3, September 2007: Special Issue on Invited Papers from ISCSLP 2006