Postdoc Researcher @ University of Groningen

Office: Harmonie Complex, Room 1311.417, 9712 EK Groningen
Email: huiyuanlai dot l AT gmail.com

2025

• Multidimensional Consistency Improves Reasoning in Language Models.
  Huiyuan Lai, Xiao Zhang, Malvina Nissim.
  ArXiv preprint.
  bib pdf

@article{lai-etal-2025-multi,
    title={Multidimensional Consistency Improves Reasoning in Language Models},
    author={Huiyuan Lai and Xiao Zhang and Malvina Nissim},
    year={2025},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02670},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02670}
}

• OntoURL: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Symbolic Ontology Understanding, Reasoning and Learning.
  Xiao Zhang, Huiyuan Lai, Qianru Meng, Johan Bos.
  ArXiv preprint.
  bib pdf

@article{zhang-etal-2025-ontourl,
    title={OntoURL: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on
    Symbolic Ontology Understanding, Reasoning and Learning},
    author={Xiao Zhang and Huiyuan Lai and Qianru Meng and Johan Bos},
    year={2025},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11031},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11031}
}

• Multi-perspective Alignment for Increasing Naturalness in Neural Machine Translation.
  Huiyuan Lai, Esther Ploeger, Rik van Noord and Antonio Toral.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2025.
  bib pdf code

@article{lai-etal-2025-multi,
    title={Multi-perspective Alignment for Increasing Naturalness in
    Neural Machine Translation},
    author={Huiyuan Lai and Esther Ploeger and Rik van Noord and Antonio Toral},
    year={2025},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association
    for Computational Linguistics",
    month = Jul,
    year = "2025",
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08473}
}

• POMP: Pathology-omics Multimodal Pre-training Framework for Cancer Survival Prediction.
  Suixue Wang, Shilin Zhang, Huiyuan Lai, Qingchen Zhang.
  In Proceedings of IJCAI 2025.
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-pomp,
    title={POMP: Pathology-omics Multimodal Pre-training Framework for
    Cancer Survival Predictio},
    author={Suixue Wang and Shilin Zhang and Huiyuan Lai and Qingchen Zhang},
    year={2025},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial
    Intelligence (IJCAI-25)},
    address={Montreal, Canada}
}

2024

• mCoT: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning Consistency in Language Models.
  Huiyuan Lai and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2024.
  bib pdf code

@inproceedings{lai-nissim-2024-mcot,
    title = "m{C}o{T}: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning
    Consistency in Language Models",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association
    for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.649",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.649",
    pages = "12012--12026"
}

• Fine-tuning with HED-IT: The impact of human post-editing for dialogical language models.
  Daniela Occhipinti, Michele Marchi, Irene Mondella, Huiyuan Lai, Felice Dell'Orletta, Malvina Nissim, and Marco Guerini.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2024 Findings.
  bib pdf code

@inproceedings{daniela-etal-2024-fine,
    title = "Fine-tuning with HED-IT: The impact of human post-editing for
    dialogical language models",
    author = "Daniela Occhipinti, Michele Marchi,
    Irene Mondella, Huiyuan Lai, Felice Dell'Orletta,
    Malvina Nissim, and Marco Guerini",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association
    for Computational Linguistics,
    year = {2024},
    address = {Bangkok, Thailand},
}

• ContraMAE: Contrastive alignment masked autoencoder framework for cancer survival prediction.
  Suixue Wang, Huiyuan Lai, Shuling Wang, and Qingchen Zhang.
  In Proceedings of IEEE BIBM 2024.
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-ContraMAE,
    title = "ContraMAE: Contrastive alignment masked autoencoder framework
    for cancer survival prediction",
    author = "Suixue Wang, Huiyuan Lai, Shuling Wang, and Qingchen Zhang",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of 2023 IEEE International Conference on
    Bioinformatics and Biomedicine",
    year = {2024},
    address = {Lisbon, Portugal},
}

• A Survey on Automatic Generation of Figurative Language: From Rule-based Systems to Large Language Models.
  Huiyuan Lai and Malvina Nissim.
  ACM Computing Surveys.
  bib pdf data

@article{lai-etal-2024-agfl,
    title = "A Survey on Automatic Generation of Figurative Language:
    From Rule-based Systems to Large Language Models",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan and Nissim, Malvina",
    journal = {ACM Computing Surveys},
    year = {2024},
    doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3654795},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

• Towards Tailored Recovery of Lexical Diversity in Literary Machine Translation.
  Esther Ploeger, Huiyuan Lai, Rik van Noord, Antonio Toral.
  In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of The European Association for Machine Translation.
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{ploeger-etal-2024-towards,
    title = "Towards Tailored Recovery of Lexical Diversity
    in Literary Machine Translation",
    author = "Ploeger, Esther and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      van Noord, Rik and
      Toral, Antonio",
    booktitle = "the 25th Annual Conference of The European
    Association for Machine Translation",
    year = "2024",
    address = "Sheffield, UK",
}

• ReproHum #0033-3: Comparable Relative Results with Lower Absolute Values in a Reproduction Study.
  Yiru Li, Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems.
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{li-etal-2024-comparable,
    title = "ReproHum #0033-3: Comparable Relative Results with Lower
    Absolute Values in a Reproduction Study",
    author = "Li, Yiru  and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems",
    year = "2024",
    address = "Turin, Italy",
}

• ReproHum #0892-01: The painful route to consistent results: A reproduction study of human evaluation in NLG.
  Irene Mondella, Huiyuan Lai and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems.
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{mondella-etal-2024-the,
    title = "ReproHum #0892-01: The painful route to consistent results:
    A reproduction study of human evaluation in NLG",
    author = "Mondella, Irene  and
      Lai, Huiyuan and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems",
    year = "2024",
    address = "Turin, Italy",
}

• Neural Text Rewriting: Style Transfer, Figurative Language, and Beyond.
  Huiyuan Lai.
  PhD Thesis; University of Groningen.
  bib pdf

@phdthesis{lai-2024-neural,
    title = "Neural Text Rewriting: Style Transfer, Figurative Language, and Beyond",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan",
    school = {University of Groningen},
    year = {2024},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.910519765},
    url={https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/
    neural-text-rewriting-style-transfer-figurative-language-and-beyo}
}

2023

• Multidimensional Evaluation for Text Style Transfer Using ChatGPT.
  Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  Arxiv preprint.
  bib pdf code

@article{lai2023multidimensional,
    title={Multidimensional Evaluation for Text Style Transfer Using ChatGPT},
    author={Huiyuan Lai and Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim},
    year={2023},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.13462},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13462}
}

• Same Trends, Different Answers: Insights from a Replication Study of Human Plausibility Judgments on Narrative Continuations.
  Yiru Li, Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (@ RANLP 2023).
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{li-etal-2023-trends,
    title = "Same Trends, Different Answers: Insights from a Replication Study of Human
    Plausibility Judgments on Narrative Continuations",
    author = "Li, Yiru  and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems",
    month = sep,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Varna, Bulgaria",
    publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.humeval-1.15",
    pages = "190--203",
}

• Multilingual Multi-Figurative Language Detection.
  Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2023 Findings.
  bib pdf code

@inproceedings{lai-etal-2023-multilingual,
    title = "Multilingual Multi-Figurative Language Detection",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.589",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.589",
    pages = "9254--9267",
}

• Pre-Trained Language-Meaning Models for Multilingual Parsing and Generation.
  Chunliu Wang*, Huiyuan Lai*, Malvina Nissim and Johan Bos.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2023 Findings.
  bib pdf code

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2023-pre,
    title = "Pre-Trained Language-Meaning Models for Multilingual
      Parsing and Generation",
    author = "Wang, Chunliu  and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Nissim, Malvina  and
      Bos, Johan",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.345",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.345",
    pages = "5586--5600",
}

• Responsibility Perspective Transfer for Italian Femicide News.
  Gosse Minnema*, Huiyuan Lai*, Benedetta Muscato and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2023 Findings.
  bib pdf code

@inproceedings{minnema-etal-2023-responsibility,
    title = "Responsibility Perspective Transfer for {I}talian Femicide News",
    author = "Minnema, Gosse  and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Muscato, Benedetta  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.501",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.501",
    pages = "7907--7918",
}

• Missing Information, Unresponsive Authors, Experimental Flaws: The Impossibility of Assessing the Reproducibility of Previous Human Evaluations in NLP.
  Anya Belz, et al.
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP (@ EACL 2023).
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{belz-etal-2023-missing,
    title = "Missing Information, Unresponsive Authors,
    Experimental Flaws: The Impossibility of Assessing the Reproducibility
    of Previous Human Evaluations in {NLP}",
    author = "Belz, Anya  and
      Thomson, Craig  and
      Reiter, Ehud",
    booktitle = "The Fourth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.insights-1.1",
    pages = "1--10",
}

• A Text Style Transfer System for Reducing the Physician-Patient Expertise Gap: an Analysis with Automatic and Human Evaluations.
  Luca Bacco, Felice Dell'Orletta, Huiyuan Lai, Mario Merone, Malvina Nissim
  Expert Systems with Applications.
  bib pdf

@article{bacco-etal-2023-atext,
    title = {A text style transfer system for reducing the physician–patient
    expertise gap: An analysis with automatic and human evaluations},
    author = {Luca Bacco and Felice Dell’Orletta and Huiyuan Lai and Mario
    Merone and Malvina Nissim},
    journal = {Expert Systems with Applications},
    volume = {233},
    pages = {120874},
    year = {2023},
    issn = {0957-4174},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120874},
    url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417423013763},
}

2022

• Multi-Figurative Language Generation.
  Huiyuan Lai and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of COLING 2022.
  bib pdf code slides

@inproceedings{lai-nissim-2022-multi,
    title = "Multi-Figurative Language Generation",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International
        Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = oct,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
    publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.519",
    pages = "5939--5954",
}

• Human Judgement as a Compass to Navigate Automatic Metrics for Formality Transfer.
  Huiyuan Lai, Jiali Mao, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (@ ACL 2022).
  bib pdf code slides

@inproceedings{lai-etal-2022-human,
    title = "Human Judgement as a Compass to Navigate Automatic
    Metrics for Formality Transfer",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Mao, Jiali  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation
    of NLP Systems (HumEval)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.humeval-1.9",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.humeval-1.9",
    pages = "102--115",
}

• Multilingual Pre-training with Language and Task Adaptation for Multilingual Text Style Transfer.
  Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2022.
  bib pdf code slides

@inproceedings{lai-etal-2022-multilingual,
    title = "Multilingual Pre-training with Language and Task Adaptation
    for Multilingual Text Style Transfer",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association
    for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.29",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.29",
    pages = "262--271",
}

2021

• Generic resources are what you need: Style transfer tasks without task-specific parallel training data.
  Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of EMNLP 2021.
  bib pdf code slides

@inproceedings{lai-etal-2021-generic,
    title = "Generic resources are what you need: Style transfer tasks without
    task-specific parallel training data",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in
    Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.349",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.349",
    pages = "4241--4254",
}

• Human Perception in Natural Language Generation.
  Lorenzo De Mattei*, Huiyuan Lai*, Felice Dell’Orletta, Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Generation Evaluation and Metrics (@ ACL 2021).
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{de-mattei-etal-2021-human,
    title = "Human Perception in Natural Language Generation",
    author = "De Mattei, Lorenzo  and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Dell{'}Orletta, Felice  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation,
    Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.gem-1.2",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.gem-1.2",
    pages = "15--23",
}

• Thank you BART! Rewarding Pre-Trained Models Improves Formality Style Transfer.
  Huiyuan Lai, Antonio Toral and Malvina Nissim.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2021.
  bib pdf code slides

@inproceedings{lai-etal-2021-thank,
    title = "Thank you {BART}! Rewarding Pre-Trained Models
    Improves Formality Style Transfer",
    author = "Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Toral, Antonio  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association
    for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference
    on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.62",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.62",
    pages = "484--494",
}

2020

• On the interaction of automatic evaluation and task framing in headline style transfer.
  Lorenzo De Mattei, Michele Cafagna, Huiyuan Lai, Felice Dell’Orletta, Malvina Nissim and Albert Gatt.
  In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluating NLG Evaluation (@ INLG 2020).
  bib pdf

@inproceedings{mattei-etal-2020-interaction,
    title = "On the interaction of automatic evaluation
    and task framing in headline style transfer",
    author = "Mattei, Lorenzo De  and
      Cafagna, Michele  and
      Lai, Huiyuan  and
      Dell{'}Orletta, Felice  and
      Nissim, Malvina  and
      Gatt, Albert",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluating NLG Evaluation",
    month = dec,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online (Dublin, Ireland)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.evalnlgeval-1.5",
    pages = "38--43",
}

• Bi-Directional Attention Comparison for Semantic Sentence Matching.
  Huiyuan Lai, Yizheng Tao, Chunliu Wang, Lunfan Xu, Dingyong Tang, Gongliang Li.
  Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2019.
  bib pdf

@article{Lai2019BidirectionalAC,
    title   = {Bi-directional attention comparison for semantic sentence matching},
    author  = {Huiyuan Lai and Yizheng Tao and Chunliu Wang and
      Lunfan Xu and Dingyong Tang and Gongliang Li},
    journal = {Multimedia Tools and Applications},
    year    = {2020},
    volume  = {79},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-7063-5},
    url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-018-7063-5},
    pages   = {14609-14624}
}

2019

• 文本相似度计算方法研究综述 (A Review of Text Similarity Approaches).
  王春柳, 杨永辉, 邓霏, 赖辉源.
  情报科学, 2019.
  bib pdf

@article{wang2019review,
    title={文本相似度计算方法研究综述},
    author={王春柳 and 杨永辉 and 邓霏 and 赖辉源},
    journal={情报科学},
    volume={37},
    number={3},
    pages={158--168},
    year={2019}
}