Tianyu Jiang

Tianyu Jiang, Sonia Vinogradova, Nathan Stringham et al.

Our research explores the use of natural language processing (NLP) methods to automatically classify entities for the purpose of knowledge graph population and integration with food system ontologies. We have created NLP models that can automatically classify organizations with respect to categories associated with environmental issues as well as Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, which are used by the U.S. government to characterize business activities. As input, the NLP models are provided with text snippets retrieved by the Google search engine for each organization, which serves as a textual description of the organization that is used for learning. Our experimental results show that NLP models can achieve reasonably good performance for these two classification tasks, and they rely on a general framework that could be applied to many other classification problems as well. We believe that NLP models represent a promising approach for automatically harvesting information to populate knowledge graphs and aligning the information with existing ontologies through shared categories and concepts.

Saptarshi Ghosh, Tianyu Jiang

Metonymy plays an important role in our daily communication. People naturally think about things using their most salient properties or commonly related concepts. For example, by saying "The bus decided to skip our stop today," we actually mean that the bus driver made the decision, not the bus. Prior work on metonymy resolution has mainly focused on named entities. However, metonymy involving common nouns (such as desk, baby, and school) is also a frequent and challenging phenomenon. We argue that NLP systems should be capable of identifying the metonymic use of common nouns in context. We create a new metonymy dataset ConMeC, which consists of 6,000 sentences, where each sentence is paired with a target common noun and annotated by humans to indicate whether that common noun is used metonymically or not in that context. We also introduce a chain-of-thought based prompting method for detecting metonymy using large language models (LLMs). We evaluate our LLM-based pipeline, as well as a supervised BERT model on our dataset and three other metonymy datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMs could achieve performance comparable to the supervised BERT model on well-defined metonymy categories, while still struggling with instances requiring nuanced semantic understanding. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/SaptGhosh/ConMeC.

Phan Anh Duong, Cat Luong, Divyesh Bommana et al.

Emotions manifest through physical experiences and bodily reactions, yet identifying such embodied emotions in text remains understudied. We present an embodied emotion classification dataset, CHEER-Ekman, extending the existing binary embodied emotion dataset with Ekman's six basic emotion categories. Using automatic best-worst scaling with large language models, we achieve performance superior to supervised approaches on our new dataset. Our investigation reveals that simplified prompting instructions and chain-of-thought reasoning significantly improve emotion recognition accuracy, enabling smaller models to achieve competitive performance with larger ones. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/menamerai/cheer-ekman.

Daniel Vennemeyer, Phan Anh Duong, Tiffany Zhan et al.

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We decompose sycophancy into sycophantic agreement and sycophantic praise, contrasting both with genuine agreement. Using difference-in-means directions, activation additions, and subspace geometry across multiple models and datasets, we show that: (1) the three behaviors are encoded along distinct linear directions in latent space; (2) each behavior can be independently amplified or suppressed without affecting the others; and (3) their representational structure is consistent across model families and scales. These results suggest that sycophantic behaviors correspond to distinct, independently steerable representations.

Rizul Sharma, Tianyu Jiang, Seokki Lee et al.

In this short paper, we present work evaluating an AI agent's understanding of spoken conversations about data visualizations in an online meeting scenario. There is growing interest in the development of AI-assistants that support meetings, such as by providing assistance with tasks or summarizing a discussion. The quality of this support depends on a model that understands the conversational dialogue. To evaluate this understanding, we introduce a dual-axis testing framework for diagnosing the AI agent's comprehension of spoken conversations about data. Using this framework, we designed a series of tests to evaluate understanding of a novel corpus of 72 spoken conversational dialogues about data visualizations. We examine diverse pipelines and model architectures, LLM vs VLM, and diverse input formats for visualizations (the chart image, its underlying source code, or a hybrid of both) to see how this affects model performance on our tests. Using our evaluation methods, we found that text-only input modalities achieved the best performance (96%) in understanding discussions of visualizations in online meetings.

Louie Hong Yao, Nicholas Jarvis, Tiffany Zhan et al.

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

Tianyu Jiang, Quanxue Gao, Xinbo Gao

Graph-based multi-view clustering has become an active topic due to the efficiency in characterizing both the complex structure and relationship between multimedia data. However, existing methods have the following shortcomings: (1) They are inefficient or even fail for graph learning in large scale due to the graph construction and eigen-decomposition. (2) They cannot well exploit both the complementary information and spatial structure embedded in graphs of different views. To well exploit complementary information and tackle the scalability issue plaguing graph-based multi-view clustering, we propose an efficient multiple graph learning model via a small number of anchor points and tensor Schatten p-norm minimization. Specifically, we construct a hidden and tractable large graph by anchor graph for each view and well exploit complementary information embedded in anchor graphs of different views by tensor Schatten p-norm regularizer. Finally, we develop an efficient algorithm, which scales linearly with the data size, to solve our proposed model. Extensive experimental results on several datasets indicate that our proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art multi-view clustering algorithms.