Liang Yang 0003

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13ranked-venue papers in the field
1as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Information Retrieval & Web Search · 8Database Systems & Data Management · 2Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 1Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1Other / Interdisciplinary · 1 (1 first)
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Decoding Multimodal Cues: Unveiling the Implicit Meaning Behind Hateful Videos
abstract
Hateful videos have become prevalent on online platforms, highlighting an urgent need for effective detection. However, existing studies primarily focus on binary classification and fail to provide contextual rationales that reveal the implicit meanings behind these judgments, significantly undermining model explainability. To fill this gap, we aim to achieve explainable hateful video detection, enabling models to provide contextual rationales that integrate relevant evidence and logical reasoning alongside decisions. This approach can comprehensively enhance the understanding of video content and the explainability of the decision-making process. We first introduce two datasets, Ex-HateMM and Ex-ImpliHateVid, for explainable hateful video detection. Each dataset provides fine-grained annotations of multimodal harmful elements, along with contextual rationales. We then propose an Information Augmentation and Reasoning Enhancement (IARE) framework designed for explainable detection. The framework employs an information augmentation phase that leverages the multimodal chain-of-thought to integrate harmful elements, thereby enriching rationale evidence. Additionally, IARE incorporates a reasoning enhancement phase, in which Direct Preference Optimization guides the model toward correct reasoning paths and away from incorrect ones, thereby improving the logical coherence of its justifications. We conduct extensive experiments on the two datasets, comparing multiple baselines with our proposed IARE framework. The results demonstrate that IARE achieves state-of-the-art performance while also generating accurate rationales.
Junyu Lu 0001, Deyi Ji, Liqun Liu 0006, Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Youlin Wu, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Peng Shu, Huan Yu 0012, Jie Jiang 0015, Bo Xu 0009, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin
SIGIR11
2026 SEGA: Selective cross-lingual representation via sparse guided attention for low-resource multilingual named entity recognition
Paerhati Tulajiang, Jinzhong Ning, Yuanyuan Sun 0002, Liang Yang 0003, Yuanyu Zhang 0005, Kelaiti Xiao, Zhixing Lu, Yi-Jia Zhang 0001, Hongfei Lin
Inf. Process. Manag.4
2025 A Benchmark Dataset and Instruction Fine-Tuning Methods for Metaphorical Comprehension and Explanation
Senqi Yang, Dongyu Zhang 0001, Mingshuo Pan, Haojia Li, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin
DASFAA (4)6
2025 IP2: Entity-Guided Interest Probing for Personalized News Recommendation
abstract
News recommender systems aim to provide personalized news reading experiences for users based on their reading history. Behavioral science studies suggest that screen-based news reading contains three successive steps: scanning, title reading, and then clicking. Adhering to these steps, we find that intra-news entity interest dominates the scanning stage, while the inter-news entity interest guides title reading and influences click decisions. Unfortunately, current methods overlook the unique utility of entities in news recommendation. To this end, we propose a novel method called IP2 to probe entity-guided reading interest at both intra- and inter-news levels. At the intra-news level, a Transformer-based entity encoder is devised to aggregate mentioned entities in the news title into one signature entity. Then, a signature entity-title contrastive pre-training is adopted to initialize entities with proper meanings using the news story context, which in the meantime facilitates us to probe for intra-news entity interest. As for the inter-news level, a dual tower user encoder is presented to capture inter-news reading interest from both the title meaning and entity sides. In addition to highlighting the contribution of inter-news entity guidance, a cross-tower attention link is adopted to calibrate title reading interest using inter-news entity interest, thus further aligning with real-world behavior. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our IP2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in news recommendation.
Youlin Wu, Yuanyuan Sun 0002, Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Haoxi Zhan, Bo Xu 0009, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin
RecSys6
2025 Is Having Rationales Enough? Rethinking Knowledge Enhancement for Multimodal Hateful Meme Detection
abstract
Hateful memes are prevalent on the Internet, raising the urgent need for effective detection.Given their implicit nature, incorporating rationales with background knowledge is crucial for enhancing model understanding.However, existing methods often suffer from limited quality of external rationales and misalignment with original meme information.These challenges hinder model comprehension, leading to reduced accuracy and explainability.To address these challenges, we propose a Multimodal Multi-agent Knowledge Enhanced (M2KE) framework for hateful meme detection.M2KE introduces a multi-agent rationale discovery mechanism to extract high-quality rationales relevant to meme content and an adaptive knowledge interaction mechanism to ensure alignment between original meme information and external rationales.Specifically, multi-agent rationale discovery mechanism improves the reliability of rationales by collaboratively verifying and refining them with multiple agents, supported by large language models (LLMs) due to their extensive knowledge.And adaptive knowledge interaction mechanism uses information entropy to dynamically balance the model's attention between original meme information and external rationales, preventing over-reliance on rationales and enabling a more comprehensive understanding.Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that M2KE significantly outperforms existing models.Further analysis underscores the importance of effectively integrating accurate rationales to enhance model performance.Disclaimer: Samples in this paper may be considered offensive.
Junyu Lu 0001, Bo Xu 0009, Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Haohao Zhu, Kaichun Wang, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin
SIGIR6
2024 Beyond Co-Occurrence: Multi-Modal Session-Based Recommendation
abstract
Session-based recommendation is devoted to characterizing preferences of anonymous users based on short sessions. Existing methods mostly focus on mining limited item co-occurrence patterns exposed by item ID within sessions, while ignoring what attracts users to engage with certain items is rich multi-modal information displayed on pages. Generally, the multi-modal information can be classified into two categories: descriptive information (e.g., item images and description text) and numerical information (e.g., price). In this paper, we aim to improve session-based recommendation by modeling the above multi-modal information holistically. There are mainly three issues to reveal user intent from multi-modal information: (1) How to extract relevant semantics from heterogeneous descriptive information with different noise? (2) How to fuse these heterogeneous descriptive information to comprehensively infer user interests? (3) How to handle probabilistic influence of numerical information on user behaviors? To solve above issues, we propose a novel multi-modal session-based recommendation (MMSBR) that models both descriptive and numerical information under a unified framework. Specifically, a pseudo-modality contrastive learning is devised to enhance the representation learning of descriptive information. Afterwards, a hierarchical pivot transformer is presented to fuse heterogeneous descriptive information. Moreover, we represent numerical information with Gaussian distribution and design a Wasserstein self-attention to handle the probabilistic influence mode. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MMSBR. Further analysis also proves that our MMSBR can alleviate the cold-start problem in SBR effectively.
Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Bo Xu 0009, Fenglong Ma, Chenliang Li 0005, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.5
2023 Humor Level Recognition Based on Prompt Learning and Contrastive Learning
abstract
Humor recognition is one of the hot topics in the field of natural language processing in recent years. Most existing methods focus on whether something is humorous, while there is less research on humor level recognition. This article proposes a method based on prompt learning and contrastive learning for humor level recognition. Firstly, the context with prompt learning templates and the context without prompt learning templates are input into a pre-trained language model separately. Then, during the fine-tuning stage, a prompt learning strategy based on P-tuning is used to learn semantic information related to humor levels in the text. Subsequently, a contrastive learning loss function is introduced to increase the distance between the vector representations of different classes and reduce the classification difficulty of strong humor and weak humor samples. Finally, a multi-task learning strategy is used to simultaneously perform prompt learning, contrastive learning, and sentence binary classification tasks. Experiments on the Reddit public humor dataset show that the model’s accuracy on the corpus improves by 1.1% compared to the previous best results. Experimental results indicate that the model proposed in this article can effectively recognize humor levels.
Shaowu Zhang 0002, Xijun Cui, Tongyue Zhang, Hongfei Lin, Liang Yang 0003
IEEE Big Data5
2023 More Than Simply Masking: Exploring Pre-training Strategies for Symbolic Music Understanding
abstract
Pre-trained language models have become the prevailing approach for handling natural language processing tasks in recent years. Given the similarities in sequential features between symbolic music and natural language text, it is fairly logical to adopt pre-training methods to symbolic music data. However, the disparity between music and natural language text makes it difficult to comprehensively model the unique features of music through traditional text-based pre-training strategies alone. To address this challenge, in this paper, we design the quad-attribute masking (QM) strategy and propose the key prediction (KP) task to improve the extraction of generic knowledge from symbolic music. We evaluate the impact of various pre-training strategies on several public symbolic music datasets, and the results of our experiments reveal that the proposed multi-task pre-training model can effectively capture music domain knowledge from symbolic music data and significantly improve performance on downstream tasks.
Zhexu Shen, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin
ICMR2
2023 Multi-perspective respondent representations for answer ranking in community question answering
Lingfei Qian, Jian Wang 0021, Hongfei Lin, Liang Yang 0003
Inf. Sci.4
2022 Price DOES Matter!: Modeling Price and Interest Preferences in Session-based Recommendation
abstract
Session-based recommendation aims to predict items that an anonymous user would like to purchase based on her short behavior sequence. The current approaches towards session-based recommendation only focus on modeling users' interest preferences, while they all ignore a key attribute of an item, i.e., the price. Many marketing studies have shown that the price factor significantly influences users' behaviors and the purchase decisions of users are determined by both price and interest preferences simultaneously. However, it is nontrivial to incorporate price preferences for session-based recommendation. Firstly, it is hard to handle heterogeneous information from various features of items to capture users' price preferences. Secondly, it is difficult to model the complex relations between price and interest preferences in determining user choices.
Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Bo Xu 0009, Liang Yang 0003, Chenliang Li 0005, Fenglong Ma, Haifeng Liu 0002, Hongfei Lin
SIGIR3
2019 Heterographic Pun Recognition via Pronunciation and Spelling Understanding Gated Attention Network
abstract
Heterographic pun plays a critical role in human writing and literature, which usually has a similar sounding or spelling structure. It is important and difficult research to recognize the heterographic pun because of the ambiguity. However, most existing methods for this task only focus on designing features with rule-based or machine learning methods. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end computational approach - Pronunciation Spelling Understanding Gated Attention (PSUGA) network. For pronunciation, we exploit the hierarchical attention model with phoneme embedding. While for spelling, we consider the character-level, word-level, tag-level, position-level and contextual-level embedding with attention model. To deal with the two parts, we present a gated attention mechanism to control the information integration. We have conducted extensive experiments on SemEval2017 task7 and Pun of the Day datasets. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Yufeng Diao, Hongfei Lin, Liang Yang 0003, Xiaochao Fan, Di Wu 0007, Dongyu Zhang 0001, Kan Xu
WWW3
2019 Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Effect of Facial Perception on Centrality in Social Networks
abstract
Facial appearance matters in social networks. Individuals frequently make trait judgments from facial clues. Although these face-based impressions lack the evidence to determine validity, they are of vital importance, because they may relate to human network-based social behavior, such as seeking certain individuals for help, advice, dating, and cooperation, and thus they may relate to centrality in social networks. However, little to no work has investigated the apparent facial traits that influence network centrality, despite the large amount of research on attributions of the central position including personality and behavior. In this paper, we examine whether perceived traits based on facial appearance affect network centrality by exploring the initial stage of social network formation in a first-year college residential area. We took face photos of participants who are freshmen living in the same residential area, and we asked them to nominate community members linking to different networks. We then collected facial perception data by requiring other participants to rate facial images for three main attributions: dominance, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Meanwhile, we proposed a framework to discover how facial appearance affects social networks. Our results revealed that perceived facial traits were correlated with the network centrality and that they were indicative to predict the centrality of people in different networks. Our findings provide psychological evidence regarding the interaction between faces and network centrality. Our findings also offer insights in to a combination of psychological and social network techniques, and they highlight the function of facial bias in cuing and signaling social traits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the influence of facial perception on centrality in social networks.
Dongyu Zhang 0001, Teng Guo 0002, Hanxiao Pan, Zhitao Feng, Liang Yang 0003, Hongfei Lin, Feng Xia 0001
WWW6
2016 Combining local and global information for product feature extraction in opinion documents
Liang Yang 0003, Bing Liu 0001, Hongfei Lin, Yuan Lin 0001
Inf. Process. Lett.1