Demo Data from VLDB 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Aizan Zafar
dblp:336/3183
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers
4as first author
8since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-1932-0595ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 3 first-author · 6 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
Question answering and dialogue systems · 50% Information extraction and text analysis · 50% |
Topics — the 2 heaviest of 2, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis › named entity recognition
biomedical named entity recognition |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | CDialog: A Multi-turn Covid-19 Conversation Dataset for Entity-Aware Dialog Generation · EMNLP 2022 |
Natural language and speech › Question answering and dialogue systems › dialogue generation
medical dialogue generation |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | CDialog: A Multi-turn Covid-19 Conversation Dataset for Entity-Aware Dialog Generation · EMNLP 2022 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
pre-trained language model · 0.6entity annotation · 0.6
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | GAEA: A Geolocation Aware Conversational AssistantabstractImage geolocalization, in which an AI model traditionally predicts the precise GPS coordinates of an image, is a challenging task with many downstream applications. However, the user cannot utilize the model to further their knowledge beyond the GPS coordinates; the model lacks an understanding of the location and the conversational ability to communicate with the user. In recent days, with the tremendous progress of large multimodal models (LMMs), both proprietary and open-source researchers have attempted to geolocalize images using LMMs. However, the issues remain unaddressed; beyond general tasks, for more specialized downstream tasks, such as geolocalization, LMMs struggle. In this work, we propose solving this problem by introducing a conversational model, GAEA, that provides information regarding the location of an image as the user requires. No large-scale dataset exists that enables the training of such a model. Thus, we propose GAEA-1.4M, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 800k images and approximately 1.4M question-answer pairs, constructed by leveraging OpenStreetMap (OSM) attributes and geographical context clues. For quantitative evaluation, we propose a diverse benchmark, GAEA-Bench, comprising 3.5k image-text pairs to evaluate conversational capabilities equipped with diverse question types. We consider 11 state- of-the-art open-source and proprietary LMMs and demonstrate that GAEA significantly outperforms the best open-source model, LLaVA-OneVision, by 18.2% and the best proprietary model, GPT-4o, by 7.2%. Our dataset, model and codes are available https://ucf-crcv.github.io/GAEA. Ron Campos, Ashmal Vayani, Parth Parag Kulkarni, Rohit Gupta 0012, Aizan Zafar, Aritra Dutta, Mubarak Shah |
WACV | 5 |
| 2025 | MedEx: Enhancing Medical Question-Answering with First-Order Logic based Reasoning and Knowledge InjectionabstractIn medical question-answering, traditional knowledge triples often fail due to superfluous data and their inability to capture complex relationships between symptoms and treatments across diseases. This limits models’ ability to provide accurate, contextually relevant responses. To overcome this, we introduce MedEx, which employs First-Order Logic (FOL)-based reasoning to model intricate relationships between diseases and treatments. We construct FOL-based triplets that encode the interplay of symptoms, diseases, and treatments, capturing not only surface-level data but also the logical constraints of the medical domain. MedEx encodes the discourse (questions and context) using a transformer-based unit, enhancing context comprehension. These encodings are processed by a Knowledge Injection Cell that integrates knowledge graph triples via a Graph Attention Network. The Logic Fusion Cell then combines medical-specific logical rule triples (e.g., co-occurrence, causation, diagnosis) with knowledge triples and extracts answers through a feed-forward layer. Our analysis demonstrates MedEx’s effectiveness and generalization across medical question-answering tasks. By merging logical reasoning with knowledge, MedEx provides precise medical answers and adapts its logical rules based on training data nuances. Aizan Zafar, Kshitij Mishra, Asif Ekbal |
COLING | 1 |
| 2024 | Are my answers medically accurate? Exploiting medical knowledge graphs for medical question answering
Aizan Zafar, Deeksha Varshney, Sovan Kumar Sahoo, Amitava Das 0001, Asif Ekbal |
Appl. Intell. | 1 |
| 2024 | KI-MAG: A knowledge-infused abstractive question answering system in medical domain
Aizan Zafar, Sovan Kumar Sahoo, Harsh Bhardawaj, Amitava Das 0001, Asif Ekbal |
Neurocomputing | 1 |
| 2024 | KIMedQA: towards building knowledge-enhanced medical QA models
Aizan Zafar, Sovan Kumar Sahoo, Deeksha Varshney, Amitava Das 0001, Asif Ekbal |
J. Intell. Inf. Syst. | 1 |
| 2023 | End to End Sign Language Translation via Multitask LearningabstractSign language translation (SLT) is usually seen as a two-step process of continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) and gloss-to-text translation. We propose a novel, Transformer-based architecture to jointly perform CSLR and sign-translation in an end-to-end fashion. We extend the ordinary Transformer decoder with two channels to support multitasking, where each channel is devoted to solving a particular problem. To control the memory footprint of our model, channels are designed to share most of their parameters with each other. However, each channel still has a dedicated set of parameters that is fine-tuned with respect to the channel's task. In order to evaluate the proposed architecture, we focus on translating German signs into English sequences and use the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014 T corpus in our experiments. Evaluation results along with detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that the mixture of information provided by the multitask decoder was successful and enabled us to achieve superior performance in comparison to other SLT models. Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay, Aizan Zafar, Asif Ekbal, Mohammed Hasanuzzaman |
IJCNN | 2 |
| 2023 | Knowledge graph assisted end-to-end medical dialog generation
Deeksha Varshney, Aizan Zafar, Niranshu Kumar Behra, Asif Ekbal |
Artif. Intell. Medicine | 2 |
| 2022 | CDialog: A Multi-turn Covid-19 Conversation Dataset for Entity-Aware Dialog GenerationabstractThe development of conversational agents to interact with patients and deliver clinical advice has attracted the interest of many researchers, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.The training of an end-to-end neural based dialog system, on the other hand, is hampered by a lack of multi-turn medical dialog corpus.We make the very first attempt to release a highquality multi-turn Medical Dialog dataset relating to Covid-19 disease named CDialog, with over 1K conversations collected from the online medical counselling websites.We annotate each utterance of the conversation with seven different categories of medical entities, including diseases, symptoms, medical tests, medical history, remedies, medications and other aspects as additional labels.Finally, we propose a novel neural medical dialog system based on the CDialog dataset to advance future research on developing automated medical dialog systems.We use pre-trained language models for dialogue generation, incorporating annotated medical entities, to generate a virtual doctor's response that addresses the patient's query.Experimental results show that the proposed dialog models perform comparably better when supplemented with entity information and hence can improve the response quality. Deeksha Varshney, Aizan Zafar, Niranshu Kumar Behra, Asif Ekbal |
EMNLP | 2 |