Zhoujia Zhang


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that belong to the same person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2025

pdf bib
Logical Consistency is Vital: Neural-Symbolic Information Retrieval for Negative-Constraint Queries
Ganlin Xu | Zhoujia Zhang | Wangyi Mei | Jiaqing Liang | Weijia Lu | Xiaodong Zhang | Zhifei Yang | Xiaofeng Ma | Yanghua Xiao | Deqing Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Information retrieval plays a crucial role in resource localization. Current dense retrievers retrieve the relevant documents within a corpus via embedding similarities, which compute similarities between dense vectors mainly depending on word co-occurrence between queries and documents, but overlook the real query intents. Thus, they often retrieve numerous irrelevant documents. Particularly in the scenarios of complex queries such as negative-constraint queries, their retrieval performance could be catastrophic. To address the issue, we propose a neuro-symbolic information retrieval method, namely NS-IR, that leverages first-order logic (FOL) to optimize the embeddings of naive natural language by considering the logical consistency between queries and documents. Specifically, we introduce two novel techniques, logic alignment and connective constraint, to re-rank candidate documents, thereby enhancing retrieval relevance. Furthermore, we construct a new dataset NegConstraint including negative-constraint queries to evaluate our NS-IR’s performance on such complex IR scenarios. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NS-IR not only achieves superior zero-shot retrieval performance on web search and low-resource retrieval tasks, but also performs better on negative-constraint queries. Our scource code and dataset are available at https://github.com/xgl-git/NS-IR-main.