Yunah Jang
Author directory2026
CompCQR: Compositional Query Generation for Training-Free Conversational Search
Yunah Jang | Kang-il Lee | Joongbo Shin | Kyomin Jung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yunah Jang | Kang-il Lee | Joongbo Shin | Kyomin Jung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multi-turn interactions with LLMs are becoming increasingly common in information-seeking scenarios. However, user queries are often ambiguous and context-dependent, making them ill-suited for direct use as retriever queries. Conversational query reformulation (CQR) addresses this issue by rewriting the current utterance into a stand-alone query grounded in the dialogue history. Recent LLM-based CQR approaches achieve strong performance; however, their repeated LLM invocations and misalignment with downstream retrievers remain challenges. In this work, we begin from the observation that retrievers are highly sensitive to content ordering: simply reordering the same content can lead to changes in retrieval coverage and performance. Based on this, we propose a novel training-free method that generates a very large number of queries with minimal LLM usage by compositionally combining a small set of atomic components. We further apply LLM reasoning to construct a high-quality document set that balances precision and recall while capturing the user’s core intent. Our framework generalizes across both open- and closed-source LLMs as well as dense and sparse retrievers. It achieves strong performance on four widely used conversational benchmarks, with up to 22.5% relative MRR improvement over the previous state-of-the-art baseline with far fewer LLM calls.
PRAGMA: Evaluating Personalized Guidance with Memory Alignment in Lifelong Conversations
Hyojeong Yu | Hyukhun Koh | Minsung Kim | Yunah Jang | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hyojeong Yu | Hyukhun Koh | Minsung Kim | Yunah Jang | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as personalized assistants that interact with users over extended periods of time. As conversations grow longer, relying on full interaction histories becomes increasingly inefficient and unreliable, motivating memory systems that selectively store and retrieve user-specific information. In realistic interactions, users often seek practical guidance such as recommendations, planning, and decision support. Unlike factual recall tasks, personalized guidance requires models to integrate information across multiple past conversations and reason about changing user preferences and experiences. However, existing conversational memory evaluations mainly focus on retrieval and factual recall. To study this challenge, we introduce PRAGMA, a benchmark for evaluating personalized guidance in long-term conversations. PRAGMA contains curated longitudinal conversation histories, evidence annotations, and guidance scenarios grounded in evolving user contexts and incorrect user assumptions. Experiments across retrieval systems, memory systems, and long-context models reveal that current systems struggle both to recover the appropriate conversational evidence and to effectively use it for personalized guidance. Our results highlight the need for memory architectures that support robust conversational retrieval and memory-grounded reasoning beyond evidence recall.
How You Ask Matters! Adaptive RAG Robustness to Query Variations
Yunah Jang | Megha Sundriyal | Kyomin Jung | Meeyoung Cha
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yunah Jang | Megha Sundriyal | Kyomin Jung | Meeyoung Cha
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) promises accuracy and efficiency by dynamically triggering retrieval only when needed and is widely used in practice. However, real-world queries vary in surface form even with the same intent, and their impact on Adaptive RAG remains under-explored. We introduce the first large-scale benchmark of diverse yet semantically identical query variations, combining human-written and model-generated rewrites. Our benchmark facilitates a systematic evaluation of Adaptive RAG robustness by examining its key components across three dimensions: answer quality, computational cost, and retrieval decisions. We discover a critical robustness gap, where small surface-level changes in queries dramatically alter retrieval behavior and accuracy. Although larger models show better performance, robustness does not improve accordingly. These findings reveal that Adaptive RAG methods are highly vulnerable to query variations that preserve identical semantics, exposing a critical robustness challenge.
2024
IterCQR: Iterative Conversational Query Reformulation with Retrieval Guidance
Yunah Jang | Kang-il Lee | Hyunkyung Bae | Hwanhee Lee | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yunah Jang | Kang-il Lee | Hyunkyung Bae | Hwanhee Lee | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Conversational search aims to retrieve passages containing essential information to answer queries in a multi-turn conversation. In conversational search, reformulating context-dependent conversational queries into stand-alone forms is imperative to effectively utilize off-the-shelf retrievers. Previous methodologies for conversational query reformulation frequently depend on human-annotated rewrites.However, these manually crafted queries often result in sub-optimal retrieval performance and require high collection costs.To address these challenges, we propose Iterative Conversational Query Reformulation (IterCQR), a methodology that conducts query reformulation without relying on human rewrites. IterCQR iteratively trains the conversational query reformulation (CQR) model by directly leveraging information retrieval (IR) signals as a reward.Our IterCQR training guides the CQR model such that generated queries contain necessary information from the previous dialogue context.Our proposed method shows state-of-the-art performance on two widely-used datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness on both sparse and dense retrievers. Moreover, IterCQR exhibits superior performance in challenging settings such as generalization on unseen datasets and low-resource scenarios.
MP2D: An Automated Topic Shift Dialogue Generation Framework Leveraging Knowledge Graphs
Yerin Hwang | Yongil Kim | Yunah Jang | Jeesoo Bang | Hyunkyung Bae | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yerin Hwang | Yongil Kim | Yunah Jang | Jeesoo Bang | Hyunkyung Bae | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Despite advancements in on-topic dialogue systems, effectively managing topic shifts within dialogues remains a persistent challenge, largely attributed to the limited availability of training datasets. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Passage to Dialogue (MP2D), a data generation framework that automatically creates conversational question-answering datasets with natural topic transitions. By leveraging the relationships between entities in a knowledge graph, MP2D maps the flow of topics within a dialogue, effectively mirroring the dynamics of human conversation. It retrieves relevant passages corresponding to the topics and transforms them into dialogues through the passage-to-dialogue method. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate MP2D’s efficacy in generating dialogue with natural topic shifts. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel benchmark for topic shift dialogues, TS-WikiDialog. Utilizing the dataset, we demonstrate that even Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to handle topic shifts in dialogue effectively, and we showcase the performance improvements of models trained on datasets generated by MP2D across diverse topic shift dialogue tasks.
2023
Task-specific Compression for Multi-task Language Models using Attribution-based Pruning
Nakyeong Yang | Yunah Jang | Hwanhee Lee | Seohyeong Jeong | Kyomin Jung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Nakyeong Yang | Yunah Jang | Hwanhee Lee | Seohyeong Jeong | Kyomin Jung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Multi-task language models show outstanding performance for various natural language understanding tasks with only a single model. However, these language models inevitably utilize an unnecessarily large number of model parameters, even when used only for a specific task. In this paper, we propose a novel training-free compression method for multi-task language models using pruning method. Specifically, we use an attribution method to determine which neurons are essential for performing a specific task. We task-specifically prune unimportant neurons and leave only task-specific parameters. Furthermore, we extend our method to be applicable in both low-resource and unsupervised settings. Since our compression method is training-free, it uses little computing resources and does not update the pre-trained parameters of language models, reducing storage space usage. Experimental results on the six widely-used datasets show that our proposed pruning method significantly outperforms baseline pruning methods. In addition, we demonstrate that our method preserves performance even in an unseen domain setting.
2022
Improving Multiple Documents Grounded Goal-Oriented Dialog Systems via Diverse Knowledge Enhanced Pretrained Language Model
Yunah Jang | Dongryeol Lee | Hyung Joo Park | Taegwan Kang | Hwanhee Lee | Hyunkyung Bae | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering
Yunah Jang | Dongryeol Lee | Hyung Joo Park | Taegwan Kang | Hwanhee Lee | Hyunkyung Bae | Kyomin Jung
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering
In this paper, we mainly discuss about our submission to MultiDoc2Dial task, which aims to model the goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. The proposed task is split into grounding span prediction and agent response generation. The baseline for the task is the retrieval augmented generation model, which consists of a dense passage retrieval model for the retrieval part and the BART model for the generation part. The main challenge of this task is that the system requires a great amount of pre-trained knowledge to generate answers grounded in multiple documents. To overcome this challenge, we adopt model pretraining, fine-tuning, and multi-task learning to enhance our model’s coverage of pretrained knowledge. We experimented with various settings of our method to show the effectiveness of our approaches.