Yachao Zhao
Author directory2026
LocalSUG: City-Preference-Enhanced LLM for Query Suggestion in Local-Life Services
Jinwen Chen | Shiwen Zhang | Shuai Gong | Zheng Zhang | Yachao Zhao | Lingxiang Wang | Haibo Zhou | Wei Lin | Hainan Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Jinwen Chen | Shiwen Zhang | Shuai Gong | Zheng Zhang | Yachao Zhao | Lingxiang Wang | Haibo Zhou | Wei Lin | Hainan Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
In local-life service platforms, query suggestion reduces user effort by generating candidate queries from input prefixes. Traditional multi-stage systems rely heavily on historical popular queries, limiting their ability to capture long-tail and emerging demand. Although LLMs provide strong semantic generalization, their deployment in local-life services faces three challenges: insufficient city-preference awareness, exposure bias in preference optimization, and strict online latency constraints. We propose LocalSUG, an LLM-based query suggestion framework for local-life services. LocalSUG mines city-preference-enhanced candidates from term co-occurrence and injects them into prompts as dynamic references rather than fusing them into model parameters. This allows the model to adapt to changing city preferences, such as merchant openings or closures, while reducing stale or locally invalid suggestions. We further introduce a beam-search-driven GRPO algorithm to align training with inference-time decoding and optimize relevance together with business-oriented rewards. Finally, quality-aware beam acceleration and vocabulary pruning reduce online latency while preserving generation quality. Offline evaluations and large-scale online A/B testing show that LocalSUG improves CTR by +0.35% and reduces the low/no-result rate by 3.98%, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world deployment.
2025
Explicit vs. Implicit: Investigating Social Bias in Large Language Models through Self-Reflection
Yachao Zhao | Bo Wang | Yan Wang | Dongming Zhao | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yachao Zhao | Bo Wang | Yan Wang | Dongming Zhao | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit various biases and stereotypes in their generated content. While extensive research has investigated biases in LLMs, prior work has predominantly focused on explicit bias, with minimal attention to implicit bias and the relation between these two forms of bias. This paper presents a systematic framework grounded in social psychology theories to investigate and compare explicit and implicit biases in LLMs.We propose a novel self-reflection-based evaluation framework that operates in two phases: first measuring implicit bias through simulated psychological assessment methods, then evaluating explicit bias by prompting LLMs to analyze their own generated content. Through extensive experiments on advanced LLMs across multiple social dimensions, we demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a substantial inconsistency between explicit and implicit biases: while explicit bias manifests as mild stereotypes, implicit bias exhibits strong stereotypes.We further investigate the underlying factors contributing to this explicit-implicit bias inconsistency, examining the effects of training data scale, model size, and alignment techniques. Experimental results indicate that while explicit bias declines with increased training data and model size, implicit bias exhibits a contrasting upward trend. Moreover, contemporary alignment methods effectively suppress explicit bias but show limited efficacy in mitigating implicit bias.
2024
Emotion Recognition in Conversation via Dynamic Personality
Yan Wang | Bo Wang | Yachao Zhao | Dongming Zhao | Xiaojia Jin | Jijun Zhang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Yan Wang | Bo Wang | Yachao Zhao | Dongming Zhao | Xiaojia Jin | Jijun Zhang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a field that aims to classify the emotion of each utterance within conversational contexts. This presents significant challenges, particularly in handling emotional ambiguity across various speakers and contextual factors. Existing ERC approaches have primarily focused on modeling conversational contexts while incorporating only superficial speaker attributes such as names, memories, and interactions. Recent works introduce personality as an essential deep speaker factor for emotion recognition, but relies on static personality, overlooking dynamic variability during conversations. Advances in personality psychology conceptualize personality as dynamic, proposing that personality states can change across situations. In this paper, we introduce ERC-DP, a novel model considering the dynamic personality of speakers during conversations. ERC-DP accounts for past utterances from the same speaker as situation impacting dynamic personality. It combines personality modeling with prompt design and fine-grained classification modules. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, ERC-DP demonstrates superior performance on three benchmark conversational datasets.
A Comparative Study of Explicit and Implicit Gender Biases in Large Language Models via Self-evaluation
Yachao Zhao | Bo Wang | Yan Wang | Dongming Zhao | Xiaojia Jin | Jijun Zhang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Yachao Zhao | Bo Wang | Yan Wang | Dongming Zhao | Xiaojia Jin | Jijun Zhang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
While extensive work has examined the explicit and implicit biases in large language models (LLMs), little research explores the relation between these two types of biases. This paper presents a comparative study of the explicit and implicit biases in LLMs grounded in social psychology. Social psychology distinguishes between explicit and implicit biases by whether the bias can be self-recognized by individuals. Aligning with this conceptualization, we propose a self-evaluation-based two-stage measurement of explicit and implicit biases within LLMs. First, the LLM is prompted to automatically fill templates with social targets to measure implicit bias toward these targets, where the bias is less likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. Then, the LLM is prompted to self-evaluate the templates filled by itself to measure explicit bias toward the same targets, where the bias is more likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. Experiments conducted on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal human-like inconsistency between explicit and implicit occupational gender biases. This work bridges a critical gap where prior studies concentrate solely on either explicit or implicit bias. We advocate that future work highlight the relation between explicit and implicit biases in LLMs.