William Headden


2025

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Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning
Haoyu Han | Yaochen Xie | Hui Liu | Xianfeng Tang | Sreyashi Nag | William Headden | Yang Li | Chen Luo | Shuiwang Ji | Qi He | Jiliang Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks; however, they still encounter challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences. This challenge is particularly pronounced in tasks involving multi-step processes, such as logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering, where understanding implicit relationships between entities and leveraging multi-hop connections in the given context are crucial. Graphs, as fundamental data structures, explicitly represent pairwise relationships between entities, thereby offering the potential to enhance LLMs’ reasoning capabilities. External graphs have proven effective in supporting LLMs across multiple tasks. However, in many reasoning tasks, no pre-existing graph structure is provided. Can we structure implicit knowledge derived from context into graphs to assist LLMs in reasoning? In this paper, we propose Reasoning with Graphs (RwG) by first constructing explicit graphs from the context and then leveraging these graphs to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks.

2020

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Learn to Cross-lingual Transfer with Meta Graph Learning Across Heterogeneous Languages
Zheng Li | Mukul Kumar | William Headden | Bing Yin | Ying Wei | Yu Zhang | Qiang Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recent emergence of multilingual pre-training language model (mPLM) has enabled breakthroughs on various downstream cross-lingual transfer (CLT) tasks. However, mPLM-based methods usually involve two problems: (1) simply fine-tuning may not adapt general-purpose multilingual representations to be task-aware on low-resource languages; (2) ignore how cross-lingual adaptation happens for downstream tasks. To address the issues, we propose a meta graph learning (MGL) method. Unlike prior works that transfer from scratch, MGL can learn to cross-lingual transfer by extracting meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences (tasks), making mPLM insensitive to low-resource languages. Besides, for each CLT task, MGL formulates its transfer process as information propagation over a dynamic graph, where the geometric structure can automatically capture intrinsic language relationships to explicitly guide cross-lingual transfer. Empirically, extensive experiments on both public and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the MGL method.

2012

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A Phrase-Discovering Topic Model Using Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Processes
Robert Lindsey | William Headden | Michael Stipicevic
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning