Harper Hua, Zhen Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Meng-Chieh Lee, Sheng Guan, Qi Zhu, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Yunfei Bai, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yuqing Yang, Qi Zhu, Zhen Han, Boran Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Meng-Chieh Lee, Qi Zhu, Costas Mavromatis, Zhen Han, Soji Adeshina, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala, Christos Faloutsos. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Costas Mavromatis, Soji Adeshina, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Zhen Han, Qi Zhu, Ian Robinson, Bryan Thompson, Huzefa Rangwala, George Karypis. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Can integrating spectral and curvature signals unlock new potential in graph representation learning? Non-Euclidean geometries, particularly Riemannian manifolds such as hyperbolic (negative curvature) and spherical (positive curvature), offer powerful inductive biases for embedding complex graph structures like scale-free, hierarchical, and cyclic patterns. Meanwhile, spectral filtering excels at processing signal variations across graphs, making it effective in homophilic and heterophilic settings. Leveraging both can significantly enhance the learned representations. To this end, we propose Spectro-Riemannian Graph Neural Networks (CUSP) - the first graph representation learning paradigm that unifies both CUrvature (geometric) and SPectral insights. CUSP is a mixed-curvature spectral GNN that learns spectral filters to optimize node embeddings in products of constant curvature manifolds (hyperbolic, spherical, and Euclidean). Specifically, CUSP introduces three novel components: (a) Cusp Laplacian, an extension of the traditional graph Laplacian based on Ollivier-Ricci curvature, designed to capture the curvature signals better; (b) Cusp Filtering, which employs multiple Riemannian graph filters to obtain cues from various bands in the eigenspectrum; and (c) Cusp Pooling, a hierarchical attention mechanism combined with a curvature-based positional encoding to assess the relative importance of differently curved substructures in our graph. Empirical evaluation across eight homophilic and heterophilic datasets demonstrates the superiority of CUSP in node classification and link prediction tasks, with a gain of up to 5.3\% over state-of-the-art models.

Frontier large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various knowledge-intensive enterprise tasks. However, these models are primarily trained on unstructured, general knowledge, which limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications-particularly when tasks involve structured data sources or sensitive enterprise information. We propose the first Structured Knowledge for Large Language Models Workshop - SKnow-LLM, which aims to bridge this gap by promoting research on innovative methodologies and practical applications in this area. Through keynote talks, panel discussions and paper presentations, the workshop will foster in-depth discussions on recent advances, identify existing challenges, and explore promising directions for integrating structured knowledge into LLMs.

The most recent pointwise Large Language Model (LLM) rankers have achieved remarkable ranking results. However, these rankers are hindered by two major drawbacks: (1) they fail to follow a standardized comparison guidance during the ranking process, and (2) they struggle with comprehensive considerations when dealing with diverse semantics of the query and complicated info in the passages. To address these shortcomings, we propose to build a zero-shot pointwise ranker that first recruits a virtual annotation team to generate query-based criteria from various perspectives and then uses these criteria to conduct an ensemble passage evaluation. Additionally, we are among the first to explore how criteria can be generated automatically and used in text ranking tasks. Our method, tested on eight datasets from the BEIR benchmark, demonstrates that incorporating this multi-perspective criteria ensemble approach significantly enhanced the performance of pointwise LLM rankers.

Recently, the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning graph neural networks has been intensively studied and applied in a wide range of graph mining tasks. Its success is generally attributed to the structural consistency between pre-training and downstream datasets, which, however, does not hold in many real-world scenarios. Existing works have shown that the structural divergence between pre-training and downstream graphs significantly limits the transferability when using the vanilla fine-tuning strategy. This divergence leads to model overfitting on pre-training graphs and causes difficulties in capturing the structural properties of the downstream graphs. In this paper, we identify the fundamental cause of structural divergence as the discrepancy of generative patterns between the pre-training and downstream graphs. Furthermore, we propose G-Tuning to preserve the generative patterns of downstream graphs. Given a downstream graph G, the core idea is to tune the pre-trained GNN so that it can reconstruct the generative patterns of G, the graphon W. However, the exact reconstruction of a graphon is known to be computationally expensive. To overcome this challenge, we provide a theoretical analysis that establishes the existence of a set of alternative graphons called graphon bases for any given graphon. By utilizing a linear combination of these graphon bases, we can efficiently approximate W. This theoretical finding forms the basis of our model, as it enables effective learning of the graphon bases and their associated coefficients. Compared with existing algorithms, G-Tuning demonstrates consistent performance improvement in 7 in-domain and 7 out-of-domain transfer learning experiments.

Graph machine learning (GML) is effective in many business applications. However, making GML easy to use and applicable to industry applications with massive datasets remain challenging. We developed GraphStorm, which provides an end-to-end solution for scalable graph construction, graph model training and inference. GraphStorm has the following desirable properties: (a) Easy to use: it can perform graph construction and model training and inference with just a single command; (b) Expert-friendly: GraphStorm contains many advanced GML modeling techniques to handle complex graph data and improve model performance; (c) Scalable: every component in GraphStorm can operate on graphs with billions of nodes and can scale model training and inference to different hardware without changing any code. GraphStorm has been used and deployed for over a dozen billion-scale industry applications after its release in May 2023. It is open-sourced in Github: https://github.com/awslabs/graphstorm.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior capabilities in understanding and zero-shot learning on textual data, promising significant advances for many text-related domains. In the graph domain, various real-world scenarios also involve textual data, where tasks and node features can be described by text. These text-attributed graphs (TAGs) have broad applications in social media, recommendation systems, etc. Thus, this paper explores how to utilize LLMs to model TAGs. Previous methods for TAG modeling are based on million-scale LMs. When scaled up to billion-scale LLMs, they face huge challenges in computational costs. Additionally, they also ignore the zero-shot inference capabilities of LLMs. Therefore, we propose GraphAdapter, which uses a graph neural network (GNN) as an efficient adapter in collaboration with LLMs to tackle TAGs. In terms of efficiency, the GNN adapter introduces only a few trainable parameters and can be trained with low computation costs. The entire framework is trained using auto-regression on node text (next token prediction). Once trained, GraphAdapter can be seamlessly fine-tuned with task-specific prompts for various downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments across multiple real-world TAGs, GraphAdapter based on Llama 2 gains an average improvement of approximately 5% in terms of node classification. Furthermore, GraphAdapter can also adapt to other language models, including RoBERTa, GPT-2. The promising results demonstrate that GNNs can serve as effective adapters for LLMs in TAG modeling.

A real-world text corpus sometimes comprises not only text documents, but also semantic links between them (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic network are linked by citations and co-authorships).Text documents and semantic connections form a text-rich network, which empowers a wide range of downstream tasks such as classification and retrieval.However, pretraining methods for such structures are still lacking, making it difficult to build one generic model that can be adapted to various tasks on text-rich networks.Current pretraining objectives, such as masked language modeling, purely model texts and do not take interdocument structure information into consideration.To this end, we propose our PretrAining on TexT-Rich NetwOrk framework PATTON.PATTON 1 includes two pretraining strategies: network-contextualized masked language modeling and masked node prediction, to capture the inherent dependency between textual attributes and network structure.We conduct experiments on four downstream tasks in five datasets from both academic and e-commerce domains, where PATTON outperforms baselines significantly and consistently.

Representation learning on networks aims to derive a meaningful vector representation for each node, thereby facilitating downstream tasks such as link prediction, node classification, and node clustering. In heterogeneous text-rich networks, this task is more challenging due to (1) presence or absence of text: Some nodes are associated with rich textual information, while others are not; (2) diversity of types: Nodes and edges of multiple types form a heterogeneous network structure. As pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in obtaining widely generalizable text representations, a substantial amount of effort has been made to incorporate PLMs into representation learning on text-rich networks. However, few of them can jointly consider heterogeneous structure (network) information as well as rich textual semantic information of each node effectively. In this paper, we propose Heterformer, a Heterogeneous Network-Empowered Transformer that performs contextualized text encoding and heterogeneous structure encoding in a unified model. Specifically, we inject heterogeneous structure information into each Transformer layer when encoding node texts. Meanwhile, Heterformer is capable of characterizing node/edge type heterogeneity and encoding nodes with or without texts. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three tasks (i.e., link prediction, node classification, and node clustering) on three large-scale datasets from different domains, where Heterformer outperforms competitive baselines significantly and consistently. The code can be found at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Heterformer.

Due to the exponential growth of scientific publications on the Web, there is a pressing need to tag each paper with fine-grained topics so that researchers can track their interested fields of study rather than drowning in the whole literature. Scientific literature tagging is beyond a pure multi-label text classification task because papers on the Web are prevalently accompanied by metadata information such as venues, authors, and references, which may serve as additional signals to infer relevant tags. Although there have been studies making use of metadata in academic paper classification, their focus is often restricted to one or two scientific fields (e.g., computer science and biomedicine) and to one specific model. In this work, we systematically study the effect of metadata on scientific literature tagging across 19 fields. We select three representative multi-label classifiers (i.e., a bag-of-words model, a sequence-based model, and a pre-trained language model) and explore their performance change in scientific literature tagging when metadata are fed to the classifiers as additional features. We observe some ubiquitous patterns of metadata’s effects across all fields (e.g., venues are consistently beneficial to paper tagging in almost all cases), as well as some unique patterns in fields other than computer science and biomedicine, which are not explored in previous studies.

There has been a recent surge of interest in designing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for semi-supervised learning tasks. Unfortunately this work has assumed that the nodes labeled for use in training were selected uniformly at random (i.e. are an IID sample). However in many real world scenarios gathering labels for graph nodes is both expensive and inherently biased -- so this assumption can not be met. GNNs can suffer poor generalization when this occurs, by overfitting to superfluous regularities present in the training data. In this work we present a method, Shift-Robust GNN (SR-GNN), designed to account for distributional differences between biased training data and the graph's true inference distribution. SR-GNN adapts GNN models for the presence of distributional shifts between the nodes which have had labels provided for training and the rest of the dataset. We illustrate the effectiveness of SR-GNN in a variety of experiments with biased training datasets on common GNN benchmark datasets for semi-supervised learning, where we see that SR-GNN outperforms other GNN baselines by accuracy, eliminating at least (~40%) of the negative effects introduced by biased training data. On the largest dataset we consider, ogb-arxiv, we observe an 2% absolute improvement over the baseline and reduce 30% of the negative effects.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved superior performance in various applications, but training dedicated GNNs can be costly for large-scale graphs. Some recent work started to study the pre-training of GNNs. However, none of them provide theoretical insights into the design of their frameworks, or clear requirements and guarantees towards their transferability. In this work, we establish a theoretically grounded and practically useful framework for the transfer learning of GNNs. Firstly, we propose a novel view towards the essential graph information and advocate the capturing of it as the goal of transferable GNN training, which motivates the design of EGI (Ego-Graph Information maximization) to analytically achieve this goal. Secondly,when node features are structure-relevant, we conduct an analysis of EGI transferability regarding the difference between the local graph Laplacians of the source and target graphs. We conduct controlled synthetic experiments to directly justify our theoretical conclusions. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world network datasets show consistent results in the analyzed setting of direct-transfering, while those on large-scale knowledge graphs show promising results in the more practical setting of transfering with fine-tuning.

Multi-document summarization, which summarizes a set of documents with a small number of phrases or sentences, provides a concise and critical essence of the documents. Existing multi-document summarization methods ignore the fact that there often exist many relevant documents that provide surrounding background knowledge, which can help generate a salient and discriminative summary for a given set of documents. In this paper, we propose a novel method, SUMDocS (Surrounding-aware Unsupervised Multi-Document Summarization), which incorporates rich surrounding (topically related) documents to help improve the quality of extractive summarization without human supervision. Specifically, we propose a joint optimization algorithm to unify global novelty (i.e., category-level frequent and discriminative), local consistency (i.e., locally frequent, co-occurring), and local saliency (i.e., salient from its surroundings) such that the obtained summary captures the characteristics of the target documents. Extensive experiments on news and scientific domains demonstrate the superior performance of our method when the unlabeled surrounding corpus is utilized.

Commonly adopted metrics for extractive summarization focus on lexical overlap at the token level.In this paper, we present a facetaware evaluation setup for better assessment of the information coverage in extracted summaries.Specifically, we treat each sentence in the reference summary as a facet, identify the sentences in the document that express the semantics of each facet as support sentences of the facet, and automatically evaluate extractive summarization methods by comparing the indices of extracted sentences and support sentences of all the facets in the reference summary.To facilitate this new evaluation setup, we construct an extractive version of the CNN/Daily Mail dataset and perform a thorough quantitative investigation, through which we demonstrate that facet-aware evaluation manifests better correlation with human judgment than ROUGE, enables fine-grained evaluation as well as comparative analysis, and reveals valuable insights of state-of-the-art summarization methods. 1 1 Data can be found at https://github.com/ morningmoni/FAR.Reference: Three people in Kansas have died from a listeria outbreak.Lexical Overlap: But they did not appear identical to listeria samples taken from patients infected in the Kansas outbreak.(ROUGE-1 F1=37.0,multiple token matches but totally different semantics) Manual Extract: Five people were infected and three died in the past year in Kansas from listeria that might be linked to blue bell creameries products, according to the CDC.(ROUGE-1 F1=36.9, semantics covered but lower ROUGE due to the presence of other details)

Network embedding is an influential graph mining technique for representing nodes in a graph as distributed vectors. However, the majority of network embedding methods focus on learning a single vector representation for each node, which has been recently criticized for not being capable of modeling multiple aspects of a node. To capture the multiple aspects of each node, existing studies mainly rely on offline graph clustering performed prior to the actual embedding, which results in the cluster membership of each node (i.e., node aspect distribution) fixed throughout training of the embedding model. We argue that this not only makes each node always have the same aspect distribution regardless of its dynamic context, but also hinders the end-to-end training of the model that eventually leads to the final embedding quality largely dependent on the clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for multi-aspect network embedding, called asp2vec, in which the aspects of each node are dynamically assigned based on its local context. More precisely, among multiple aspects, we dynamically assign a single aspect to each node based on its current context, and our aspect selection module is end-to-end differentiable via the Gumbel-Softmax trick. We also introduce the aspect regularization framework to capture the interactions among the multiple aspects in terms of relatedness and diversity. We further demonstrate that our proposed framework can be readily extended to heterogeneous networks. Extensive experiments towards various downstream tasks on various types of homogeneous networks and a heterogeneous network demonstrate the superiority of asp2vec.

Knowledge graph (e.g. Freebase, YAGO) is a multi-relational graph representing rich factual information among entities of various types. Entity alignment is the key step towards knowledge graph integration from multiple sources. It aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs that refer to the same real world entity. However, current entity alignment systems overlook the sparsity of different knowledge graphs and can not align multi-type entities by one single model. In this paper, we present a Collective Graph neural network for Multi-type entity Alignment, called CG-MuAlign. Different from previous work, CG-MuAlign jointly aligns multiple types of entities, collectively leverages the neighborhood information and generalizes to unlabeled entity types. Specifically, we propose novel collective aggregation function tailored for this task, that (1) relieves the incompleteness of knowledge graphs via both cross-graph and self attentions, (2) scales up efficiently with mini-batch training paradigm and effective neighborhood sampling strategy. We conduct experiments on real world knowledge graphs with millions of entities and observe the superior performance beyond existing methods. In addition, the running time of our approach is much less than the current state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

Many real-world tasks solved by heterogeneous network embedding methods can be cast as modeling the likelihood of a pairwise relationship between two nodes. For example, the goal of author identification task is to model the likelihood of a paper being written by an author (paper-author pairwise relationship). Existing taskguided embedding methods are node-centric in that they simply measure the similarity between the node embeddings to compute the likelihood of a pairwise relationship between two nodes. However, we claim that for task-guided embeddings, it is crucial to focus on directly modeling the pairwise relationship. In this paper, we propose a novel task-guided pair embedding framework in heterogeneous network, called TaPEm, that directly models the relationship between a pair of nodes that are related to a specific task (e.g., paper-author relationship in author identification). To this end, we 1) propose to learn a pair embedding under the guidance of its associated context path, i.e., a sequence of nodes between the pair, and 2) devise the pair validity classifier to distinguish whether the pair is valid with respect to the specific task at hand. By introducing pair embeddings that capture the semantics behind the pairwise relationships, we are able to learn the fine-grained pairwise relationship between two nodes, which is paramount for task-guided embedding methods. Extensive experiments on author identification task demonstrate that TaPEm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially for authors with few publication records.

Text-rich heterogeneous information networks (text-rich HINs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications. Hypernymy, also known as is-a relation or subclass-of relation, lays in the core of many knowledge graphs and benefits many downstream applications. Existing methods of hypernymy discovery either leverage textual patterns to extract explicitly mentioned hypernym-hyponym pairs, or learn a distributional representation for each term of interest based its context. These approaches rely on statistical signals from the textual corpus, and their effectiveness would therefore be hindered when the signals from the corpus are not sufficient for all terms of interest. In this work, we propose to discover hypernymy in text-rich HINs, which can introduce additional high-quality signals. We develop a new framework, named HyperMine, that exploits multi-granular contexts and combines signals from both text and network without human labeled data. HyperMine extends the definition of "context" to the scenario of text-rich HIN. For example, we can define typed nodes and communities as contexts. These contexts encode signals of different granularities and we feed them into a hypernymy inference model. HyperMine learns this model using weak supervision acquired based on high-precision textual patterns. Extensive experiments on two large real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HyperMine and the utility of modeling context granularity. We further show a case study that a high-quality taxonomy can be generated solely based on the hypernymy discovered by HyperMine.

Extracting entities and their relations from text is an important task for understanding massive text corpora. Open information extraction (IE) systems mine relation tuples (i.e., entity arguments and a predicate string to describe their relation) from sentences. These relation tuples are not confined to a predefined schema for the relations of interests. However, current Open IE systems focus on modeling local context information in a sentence to extract relation tuples, while ignoring the fact that global statistics in a large corpus can be collectively leveraged to identify high-quality sentence-level extractions. In this paper, we propose a novel Open IE system, called ReMine, which integrates local context signals and global structural signals in a unified, distant-supervision framework. Leveraging facts from external knowledge bases as supervision, the new system can be applied to many different domains to facilitate sentence-level tuple extractions using corpus-level statistics. Our system operates by solving a joint optimization problem to unify (1) segmenting entity/relation phrases in individual sentences based on local context; and (2) measuring the quality of tuples extracted from individual sentences with a translating-based objective. Learning the two subtasks jointly helps correct errors produced in each subtask so that they can mutually enhance each other. Experiments on two real-world corpora from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness, generality, and robustness of ReMine when compared to state-of-the-art open IE systems.

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications. In the meantime, network embedding has emerged as a convenient tool to mine and learn from networked data. As a result, it is of interest to develop HIN embedding methods. However, the heterogeneity in HINs introduces not only rich information but also potentially incompatible semantics, which poses special challenges to embedding learning in HINs. With the intention to preserve the rich yet potentially incompatible information in HIN embedding, we propose to study the problem of comprehensive transcription of heterogeneous information networks. The comprehensive transcription of HINs also provides an easy-to-use approach to unleash the power of HINs, since it requires no additional supervision, expertise, or feature engineering. To cope with the challenges in the comprehensive transcription of HINs, we propose the HEER algorithm, which embeds HINs via edge representations that are further coupled with properly-learned heterogeneous metrics. To corroborate the efficacy of HEER, we conducted experiments on two large-scale real-words datasets with an edge reconstruction task and multiple case studies. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HEER model and the utility of edge representations and heterogeneous metrics. The code and data are available at https://github.com/GentleZhu/HEER.

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications. Due to the heterogeneity in HINs, the typed edges may not fully align with each other. In order to capture the semantic subtlety, we propose the concept of aspects with each aspect being a unit representing one underlying semantic facet. Meanwhile, network embedding has emerged as a powerful method for learning network representation, where the learned embedding can be used as features in various downstream applications. Therefore, we are motivated to propose a novel embedding learning framework-ASPEM-to preserve the semantic information in HINs based on multiple aspects. Instead of preserving information of the network in one semantic space, ASPEM encapsulates information regarding each aspect individually. In order to select aspects for embedding purpose, we further devise a solution for ASPEM based on dataset-wide statistics. To corroborate the efficacy of ASPEM, we conducted experiments on two real-words datasets with two types of applications-classification and link prediction. Experiment results demonstrate that ASPEM can outperform baseline network embedding learning methods by considering multiple aspects, where the aspects can be selected from the given HIN in an unsupervised manner.

Relation extraction is a fundamental task in information extraction.Most existing methods have heavy reliance on annotations labeled by human experts, which are costly and time-consuming.To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel framework, REHESSION, to conduct relation extractor learning using annotations from heterogeneous information source, e.g., knowledge base and domain heuristics.These annotations, referred as heterogeneous supervision, often conflict with each other, which brings a new challenge to the original relation extraction task: how to infer the true label from noisy labels for a given instance.Identifying context information as the backbone of both relation extraction and true label discovery, we adopt embedding techniques to learn the distributed representations of context, which bridges all components with mutual enhancement in an iterative fashion.Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of REHESSION over the state-of-the-art.