Shuning Zhang

Author directory

2026

Social media fact-checking is increasingly challenged by evidence-level and aggregation-level conflicts, where erroneous evidence often mimics authoritative news sources. To support conflict verification task, we construct ContraNote, a real-world dataset derived from X Community Notes. ContraNote is curated to mirror the two aforementioned challenges, providing 33,686 posts for evaluating evidence-level conflict resolution, and 54,474 instances for evaluating aggregation-level evidence prioritization. This paper further proposes CoVer, a framework designed to resolve these contradictions through factual adjudication. Cover uses a three-stage pipeline consisting of evidence schema normalization, factual consensus and support verification, prioritizing definitive evidence over noise to prevent it from compromising the final verdict. Technical evaluations across multiple benchmarks show that CoVer outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an accuracy of 88.4% on CONFACT-HumC and 89.4% on CONFACT-ModC.
Evidence grounding makes generated content verifiable by linking statements to their sources. However, effective verifiability requires two properties that existing methods fail to jointly provide: *verification granularity*, the ability to localize fine-grained evidence for each statement, and *verification completeness*, the ability to capture both support and contradiction. Existing methods either operate at granularities too coarse for rapid inspection or are support-only. We formalize *polarity-aware evidence grounding*: linking each response sentence to its contextual evidence with a supporting, contradicting, or irrelevant label. We construct **eTracer-Bench**, a human-annotated benchmark with 7,905 supporting and contradicting sentence pairs across seven domains, covering both explicit and implicit contradictions. We further propose **eTracer**, a post-hoc framework whose context-aware signed scorer recovers the full evidence map in a single forward pass per response, with localization and polarity emerging jointly from one mechanism. **eTracer** achieves the best overall Citation F1 of **82.39**, driven by a Contradict F1 of **89.20**. A pre-registered within-subjects user study (n = 30) shows that polarity-aware grounding nearly doubles contradiction detection over the document-level baseline (**27.9% → 51.9%**, Cohen’s d = 0.82, p = 0.0003), and suggests a false-completeness bias under which support-only grounding fails to improve over this baseline (**23.4% vs. 27.9%**). Dataset and code: https://github.com/chubohao/eTracer.
Cultural reasoning lies at the core of many emerging AI applications, yet existing benchmarks provide limited insight into how well models understand and contextualize cultural artifacts. We introduce ExhibitionBench, the first benchmark that frames exhibition curation as a high-level evaluation testbed, comprising 300 institution-derived exhibition and thematic collection records, 23,658 artifacts, and three interconnected tasks that evaluate complementary aspects of cultural understanding and reasoning, translating them into user-perceivable utilities. Extensive experiments across 29 systems reveal a significant gap between frontier LLMs and expert-level competence, particularly on tasks that require collection-level coherence and thematic understanding. Performance gains from scaling, prompting, and multimodal inputs are limited and highly model-dependent, whereas tailored model optimizations can equip open-weight models with better capabilities that support on-premise deployment. These findings highlight the difficulty of reasoning over cultural collections and provide a practical benchmark for developing more culturally grounded and reliable AI systems. The full project is released at https://github.com/mengze-hong/ExhibitionBench.

2023

Many tasks in natural language processing require the extraction of relationship information for a given condition, such as event argument extraction, relation extraction, and task-oriented semantic parsing. Recent works usually propose sophisticated models for each task independently and pay less attention to the commonality of these tasks and to have a unified framework for all the tasks. In this work, we propose to take a unified view of all these tasks and introduce TAGPRIME to address relational structure extraction problems. TAGPRIME is a sequence tagging model that appends priming words about the information of the given condition (such as an event trigger) to the input text. With the self-attention mechanism in pre-trained language models, the priming words make the output contextualized representations contain more information about the given condition, and hence become more suitable for extracting specific relationships for the condition. Extensive experiments and analyses on three different tasks that cover ten datasets across five different languages demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of TAGPRIME.