Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning, Haonan Song, Dandan Tu, Qixun Zhang, Yuxiang He, Bibo Cai, Ting Liu. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Recent studies provide large language models (LLMs) with textual task-solving experiences via prompts to improve their performance.However, previous methods rely on substantial human labor or time to gather such experiences for each task, which is impractical given the growing variety of task types in user queries to LLMs.To address this issue, we design an autonomous experience transfer framework to explore whether LLMs can mimic human cognitive intelligence to autonomously transfer experience from existing source tasks to newly encountered target tasks. This not only allows the acquisition of experience without extensive costs of previous methods, but also offers a novel path for the generalization of LLMs.Experimental results on 13 datasets demonstrate that our framework effectively improves the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of each module in the framework.

Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Bibo Cai, Ting Liu, Bing Qin. 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). 2025.

This study investigates a novel commonsense inference task that comprises reasoning about the subsequent events chains and probable consumption intents, given an event described in brief free-form text. For instance, given the event “fall in love”, the system anticipates ensuing events such as “get married”→“be pregnant”→“have a baby”. Concurrently, the system predicts the likely consumption intents of the event participants, such as purchasing “jewelry”, “maternity clothing”, and “baby food”. The event chains generated in this process provide explicit, meaningful explanations, aiding the understanding of inferred consumption intents. To facilitate this study, we construct a new crowdsourced corpus: x-ECON. This corpus comprises 10,144 event chains and 150 event-related product categories, offering a wide range of everyday consumer events and situations. We introduce a baseline reasoning framework that not only infers consumption intent but also generates an event chain to explain its inference. Our experimental results suggest that involving the event chain reasoning in the event-consumption reasoning system can help improve the neural networks' reason about the probable consumption intents of the event participants. Additionally, our method demonstrates the applicability of our approach in improving the performance of recommendation systems, by highlighting the role of explainable commonsense inference on the consumption intent. We also evaluated the performance of ChatGPT on our x-ECON dataset, showing that explainable event-consumption commonsense reasoning is a challenging task for large language models.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks. However, they still struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. This is because the previous LLMs-based reasoning systems have the theoretical incompleteness issue. As a result, it can only address a limited set of simple reasoning problems, which significantly decreases their generalization ability. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, named Generalizable and Faithful Reasoner (GFaiR), which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation. Resolution refutation has the capability to solve all first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction, so our system’s completeness can be improved by introducing resolution refutation. Experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms previous works by achieving state-of-the-art performances in complex scenarios while maintaining performances in simple scenarios. Besides, we observe that GFaiR is faithful to its reasoning process.

Understanding temporal commonsense concepts, such as times of occurrence and durations is crucial for event-centric language understanding. Reasoning about such temporal concepts in a complex context requires reasoning over both the stated context and the world knowledge that underlines it. A recent study shows massive pre-trained LM still struggle with such temporal reasoning under complex contexts (e.g., dialog) because they only implicitly encode the relevant contexts and fail to explicitly uncover the underlying logical compositions for complex inference, thus may not be robust enough. In this work, we propose to augment LMs with the temporal logic induction ability, which frames the temporal reasoning by defining three modular components: temporal dependency inducer and temporal concept defuzzifier and logic validator. The former two components disentangle the explicit/implicit dependency between temporal concepts across context (before, after, ...) and the specific meaning of fuzzy temporal concepts, respectively, while the validator combines the intermediate reasoning clues for robust contextual reasoning about the temporal concepts. Extensive experimental results on TIMEDIAL, a challenging dataset for temporal reasoning over dialog, show that our method, Logic Induction Enhanced Contextualized TEmporal Reasoning (LECTER), can yield great improvements over the traditional language model for temporal reasoning.

Acquiring high-quality temporal common sense (TCS) knowledge from free-form text is a crucial but challenging problem for event-centric natural language understanding, due to the language reporting bias problem: people rarely report the commonly observed events but highlight the special cases. For example, one may rarely report "I get up from bed in 1 minute", but we can observe "It takes me an hour to get up from bed every morning'' in text. Models directly trained upon such corpus would capture distorted TCS knowledge, which could influence the model performance. Prior work addresses this issue mainly by exploiting the interactions among temporal dimensions (e.g., duration, temporal relation between events) in a multi-task view. However, this line of work suffers the limitation of implicit, inadequate and unexplainable interactions modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel neural-logic based Soft Logic Enhanced Event Temporal Reasoning (SLEER) model for acquiring unbiased TCS knowledge, in which the complementary relationship among dimensions are explicitly represented as logic rules and modeled by t-norm fuzzy logics. SLEER can utilize logic rules to regularize its inference process. Experimental results on four intrinsic evaluation datasets and two extrinsic datasets show the efficiency of our proposed method.

Identifying user consumption intention from social media is of great interests to downstream applications. Since such task is domain-dependent, deep neural networks have been applied to learn transferable features for adapting models from a source domain to a target domain. A basic idea to solve this problem is reducing the distribution difference between the source domain and the target domain such that the transfer error can be bounded. However, the feature transferability drops dramatically in higher layers of deep neural networks with increasing domain discrepancy. Hence, previous work has to use a few target domain annotated data to train domain-specific layers. In this paper, we propose a deep transfer learning framework for consumption intention identification, to reduce the data bias and enhance the transferability in domain-specific layers. In our framework, the representation of the domain-specific layer is mapped to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, where the mean embeddings of different domain distributions can be explicitly matched. By using an optimal tree kernel method for measuring the mean embedding matching, the domain discrepancy can be effectively reduced. The framework can learn transferable features in a completely unsupervised manner with statistical guarantees. Experimental results on five different domain datasets show that our approach dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and it is general enough to be applied to more scenarios. The source code and datasets can be found at http://ir.hit.edu.cn/$\scriptsize{\sim}$xding/index\_english.htm.