Liyan Xu

About Me

I am currently a Senior Research Scientist at WeChat AI, Tencent, focusing on Natural Language Processing (NLP). I graduated with PhD of Computer Science from Emory, advised by Dr. Jinho Choi. I was also co-advised by Dr. Fei Liu in 2023.

Before Emory, I completed my bachelor’s degrees at ECNU and CSU. Following this, I worked as a Software Engineer for two years before returning to graduate school.

Research Interests

My current research interests focus around Context Comprehension Modeling / LLM Analysis.

Actively looking for motivated students to collaborate on NLP research.

News

• [06/2023]: started Research Scientist @ WeChat AI.
• [05/2023]: completed my PhD journey @ Emory!
• [05/2022]: started Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon Product Graph.
• [05/2021]: started Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon Alexa ASR.
• [10/2020]: started research collaboration @ NEC Labs America.
• [08/2020]: winning team of the 2020 Amazon Alexa Prize Chatbot Competition.

Selected Publications

(*: Equal Contribution; †: Project Lead)

Context Comprehension Modeling

• PRELUDE: A Benchmark Designed to Require Global Comprehension and Reasoning over Long Contexts
  Mo Yu^*, Tsz Ting Chung^*, Chulun Zhou^*, Tong Li^*, Rui Lu^*, Jiangnan Li^*, Liyan Xu^*, Haoshu Lu, Ning Zhang, Jing Li, Jie Zhou
  arXiv preprint 2508.09848

• SitEmb-v1.5: Improved Context-Aware Dense Retrieval for Semantic Association and Long Story Comprehension
  Junjie Wu, Jiangnan Li, Yuqing Li, Lemao Liu, Liyan Xu, Jiwei Li, Dit-Yan Yeung, Jie Zhou, Mo Yu
  arXiv preprint 2508.01959

• ComoRAG: A Cognitive-Inspired Memory-Organized RAG for Stateful Long Narrative Reasoning
  Juyuan Wang^*, Rongchen Zhao^*, Wei Wei, Yufeng Wang, Mo Yu, Jie Zhou, Jin Xu, Liyan Xu^†
  [AAAI’26] The 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions
  Liyan Xu, Jiangnan Li, Mo Yu, Jie Zhou
  [ACL’24] The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

• Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension via Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph
  Liyan Xu, Xuchao Zhang, Bo Zong, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Jingchao Ni, Haifeng Chen, Liang Zhao, Jinho Choi
  [AAAI’22] The 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Language Modeling & Analysis

• Towards Threshold-Free KV Cache Pruning
  Xuanfan Ni^*, Liyan Xu^*†, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Mo Yu, Lemao Liu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Piji Li^†
  arXiv preprint 2502.16886

• Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings
  Liyan Xu, Zhenlin Su, Mo Yu, Jiangnan Li, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou
  [EMNLP’25 Findings] The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

• RescoreBERT: Discriminative Speech Recognition Rescoring with BERT
  Liyan Xu, Yile Gu, Jari Kolehmainen, Haidar Khan, Ankur Gandhe, Ariya Rastrow, Andreas Stolcke, Ivan Bulyko
  [ICASSP’22] 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

• Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer via Self-Learning with Uncertainty Estimation
  Liyan Xu, Xuchao Zhang, Xujiang Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Feng Chen, Jinho Choi
  [EMNLP’21] The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Semantics & Information Extraction

• Identifying Factual Inconsistencies in Summaries: Grounding Model Inference via Task Taxonomy
  Liyan Xu^*, Zhenlin Su^*, Mo Yu, Jin Xu, Jinho Choi, Jie Zhou, Fei Liu
  [EMNLP’24 Findings] The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

• SIG: Speaker Identification in Literature via Prompt-Based Generation
  Zhenlin Su, Liyan Xu^†, Jin Xu^†, Jiangnan Li, Mingdu Huangfu
  [AAAI’24] The 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• Towards Open-World Product Attribute Mining: A Lightly-Supervised Approach
  Liyan Xu, Chenwei Zhang, Xian Li, Jingbo Shang, Jinho Choi
  [ACL’23] The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

• Modeling Task Interactions in Document-Level Joint Entity and Relation Extraction
  Liyan Xu, Jinho Choi
  [NAACL’22] The 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

• Online Coreference Resolution for Dialogue Processing: Improving Mention-Linking on Real-Time Conversations
  Liyan Xu, Jinho Choi
  [*SEM’22] The 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics.

• Adapted End-to-End Coreference Resolution System for Anaphoric Identities in Dialogues
  Liyan Xu, Jinho Choi
  The CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared Task on Anaphora, Bridging, and Discourse Deixis in Dialogue.

• Revealing the Myth of Higher-Order Inference in Coreference Resolution
  Liyan Xu, Jinho Choi
  [EMNLP’20] The 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Applications

• COVID-19 Pandemic-Associated Changes in the Acuity of Brain MRI Findings: A Secondary Analysis of Reports Using Natural Language Processing
  Taejin Min, Liyan Xu, Jinho Choi, Ranliang Hu, Jason Allen, Christopher Reeves, Derek Hsu, Richard Duszak, Jeffrey Switchenko, Gelareh Sadigh
  Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology, July–August 2022.

• Noise Pollution in Hospital Readmission Prediction: Long Document Classification with Reinforcement Learning
  Liyan Xu, Julien Hogan, Rachel Patzer, Jinho Choi
  [BioNLP’20] The 19th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing.

Professional Services

• Program Committee Member: ARR Rolling (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL), AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR

Other Activities

I enjoy wandering in nature with my camera in hand (my gallery).