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Nancy F. Chen

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5 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

AdaMCoT: Rethinking Cross-Lingual Factual Reasoning Through Adaptive Multilingual Chain-of-Thought

Zheng Weihua
Xin Huang
Zhengyuan Liu
Tarun Kumar Vangani
Bowei Zou
Xiyan Tao
Yuhao Wu
AiTi Aw

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive multilingual capabilities through pretraining on diverse corpora. While these models show strong reasoning abilities, their performance varies significantly across languages due to imbalanced training data distribution. Existing approaches using sample-level translation for extensive multilingual pretraining and cross-lingual tuning face scalability challenges and often fail to capture nuanced reasoning processes across languages. In this paper, we introduce **AdaMCoT** (Adaptive Multilingual Chain-of-Thought), a framework that enhances multilingual factual reasoning by dynamically routing thought processes in intermediary “thinking languages” before generating target-language responses. AdaMCoT leverages a language-agnostic core and incorporates an adaptive, reward-based mechanism for selecting optimal reasoning pathways without requiring additional pretraining. Our comprehensive evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates substantial improvements in both factual reasoning quality and cross-lingual consistency, with particularly strong performance gains in low-resource language settings. An in-depth analysis of the model’s hidden states and semantic space further elucidates the underlying mechanism of our method. The results suggest that adaptive reasoning paths can effectively bridge the performance gap between high- and low-resource languages while maintaining cultural and linguistic nuances.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MEDSAGE: Enhancing Robustness of Medical Dialogue Summarization to ASR Errors with LLM-generated Synthetic Dialogues

Kuluhan Binici
Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap
Viktor Schlegel
Andy T. Liu
Vijay Prakash Dwivedi
Thanh-Tung Nguyen
Xiaoxue Gao
Nancy F. Chen

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are pivotal in transcribing speech into text, yet the errors they introduce can significantly degrade the performance of downstream tasks like summarization. This issue is particularly pronounced in clinical dialogue summarization, a low-resource domain where supervised data for fine-tuning is scarce, necessitating the use of ASR models as black-box solutions. Employing conventional data augmentation for enhancing the noise robustness of summarization models is not feasible either due to the unavailability of sufficient medical dialogue audio recordings and corresponding ASR transcripts. To address this challenge, we propose MEDSAGE, an approach for generating synthetic samples for data augmentation using Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we leverage the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs and instruct them to generate ASR-like errors based on a few available medical dialogue examples with audio recordings. Experimental results show that LLMs can effectively model ASR noise, and incorporating this noisy data into the training process significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of medical dialogue summarization systems. This approach addresses the challenges of noisy ASR outputs in critical applications, offering a robust solution to enhance the reliability of clinical dialogue summarization.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Preference Optimization for Reasoning with Pseudo Feedback

Fangkai Jiao
Geyang Guo
Xingxing Zhang
Nancy F. Chen
Shafiq Joty
Furu Wei

Preference optimization techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are frequently employed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in domains like mathematical reasoning and coding, typically following supervised fine-tuning. These methods rely on high-quality labels for reasoning tasks to generate preference pairs; however, the availability of reasoning datasets with human-verified labels is limited. In this study, we introduce a novel approach to generate pseudo feedback for reasoning tasks by framing the labeling of solutions to reason problems as an evaluation against associated \emph{test cases}. We explore two forms of pseudo feedback based on test cases: one generated by frontier LLMs and the other by extending self-consistency to multi-test-case. We conduct experiments on both mathematical reasoning and coding tasks using pseudo feedback for preference optimization, and observe improvements across both tasks. Specifically, using Mathstral-7B as our base model, we improve MATH results from 58.3 to 68.6, surpassing both NuminaMath-72B and GPT-4-Turbo-1106-preview. In GSM8K and College Math, our scores increase from 85.6 to 90.3 and from 34.3 to 42.3, respectively. Building on Deepseek-coder-7B-v1.5, we achieve a score of 24.3 on LiveCodeBench (from 21.1), surpassing Claude-3-Haiku.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Have We Solved The Hard Problem? It’s Not Easy! Contextual Lexical Contrast as a Means to Probe Neural Coherence

Wenqiang Lei
Yisong Miao
Runpeng Xie
Bonnie Webber
Meichun Liu
Tat-Seng Chua
Nancy F. Chen

Lexical cohesion is a fundamental mechanism for text which requires a pair of words to be interpreted as a certain type of lexical relation (e. g. , similarity) to understand a coherent context; we refer to such relations as the contextual lexical relation. However, work on lexical cohesion has not modeled context comprehensively in considering lexical relations due to the lack of linguistic resources. In this paper, we take initial steps to address contextual lexical relations by focusing on the contrast relation, as it is a well-known relation though it is more subtle and relatively less resourced. We present a corpus named Cont2 Lex to make Contextual Lexical Contrast Recognition a computationally feasible task. We benchmark this task with widely-adopted semantic representations; we discover that contextual embeddings (e. g. BERT) generally outperform static embeddings (e. g. Glove), but barely go beyond 70% in accuracy performance. In addition, we find that all embeddings perform better when CLC occurs within the same sentence, suggesting possible limitations of current computational coherence models. Another intriguing discovery is the improvement of BERT in CLC is largely attributed to its modeling of CLC word pairs co-occurring with other word repetitions. Such observations imply that the progress made in lexical coherence modeling remains relatively primitive even for semantic representations such as BERT that have been empowering numerous standard NLP tasks to approach human benchmarks. Through presenting our corpus and benchmark, we attempt to seed initial discussions and endeavors in advancing semantic representations from modeling syntactic and semantic levels to coherence and discourse levels1.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Learning Reasoning Paths over Semantic Graphs for Video-grounded Dialogues

Hung Le 0003
Nancy F. Chen
Steven C. H. Hoi

Compared to traditional visual question answering, video-grounded dialogues require additional reasoning over dialogue context to answer questions in a multi-turn setting. Previous approaches to video-grounded dialogues mostly use dialogue context as a simple text input without modelling the inherent information flows at the turn level. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Reasoning Paths in Dialogue Context (PDC). PDC model discovers information flows among dialogue turns through a semantic graph constructed based on lexical components in each question and answer. PDC model then learns to predict reasoning paths over this semantic graph. Our path prediction model predicts a path from the current turn through past dialogue turns that contain additional visual cues to answer the current question. Our reasoning model sequentially processes both visual and textual information through this reasoning path and the propagated features are used to generate the answer. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and provide additional insights on how models use semantic dependencies in a dialogue context to retrieve visual cues.

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