🏛️ About me

I’m currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education of The Central China Normal University (CCNU). Previously, I obtained my Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), supervised by Prof. Bang Wang. After that, I have spent times as a Postdoctoral Researcher at HUST, supervised by Prof. Xiang Bai. My research interests cover the broad area of large-scale language model, natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and recommendation systems, with a current focus on information extraction, public opinion events and intelligence analysis. I have published nearly 30 papers in the top international AI conferences and journals such as ACL, COLING, EMNLP, CSUR, Neur.Netw., ESWA, etc.

Prospective students: I am looking for master’s students interested in scientific research to work together, as well as self-motivated undergraduate students to study in the research group. If you are interested in working with me, please drop me an email with your resume.

💼 Work Experiences

• 2024.08 - Now, Associate Professor, Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.
• 2024.02 - 2024.07, Postdoc Researcher, School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
• 2015.07 - 2020.08, Student Counselor, School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.

🎓 Educations

• 2020.09 - 2023.12, Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
• 2013.09 - 2015.06, M.Mgt. in Administrative Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
• 2007.09 - 2011.06, B.Eng. in Electronic Information Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.

📝 Selected Publications

Journal Papers

• TASLP 2025 Unified Semantic and Structural Modeling via Focal Attention for Causality Graph Event Prediction, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, C. Zhan, W. Xiang, C. Liang and B. Wang.
• Neur.Netw. 2025 Modeling Document Causal Structure with a Hypergraph for Event Causality Identification, Neural Networks (Elsevier), W. Xiang, C. Liu and B. Wang.
• TASLP 2025 Adaptive Prompt Learning with Distilled Connective Knowledge for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, B. Wang, Z. Wang, W. Xiang and Y. Mo.
• CSL 2025 Modeling correlated causal-effect structure with a hypergraph for document-level event causality identification, Computer Speech and Language (Elsevier), W. Xiang, C. Liu and B. Wang.

• NCAA 2025 DAPrompt: Deterministic Assumption Prompt Learning for Event Causality Identification., Neural Computing and Applications (Springer), W. Xiang, C. Zhan, Q. Zhang and B. Wang.

• NCAA 2024 Parsing and Encoding Interactive Phrase Structure for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition, Neural Computing and Applications (Springer), W. Xiang, S. Liu and B. Wang.
• CSUR 2023 A Survey of Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition, ACM Computing Surveys, W. Xiang and B. Wang.
• ESWA 2023 A graph-enhanced attention model for community detection in multiplex networks, Expert Systems With Applications (Elsevier), B. Wang, X. Cai, M. Xu and W. Xiang.
• NPL 2023 Modeling Character-Word Interaction via a Novel Mesh Transformer for Chinese Event Detection, Neural Processing Letters (Springer), L. Dai, B. Wang, W. Xiang and Y. Mo.
• Appl.Intel. 2022 A Syntactic Distance Sensitive Neural Network for Event Argument Extraction, Applied Intelligence (Springer), L. Dai, B. Wang, W. Xiang and Y. Mo.
• ACCESS 2020 A Survey of Event Extraction from Text, IEEE ACCESS, W. Xiang and B. Wang.

Conference Papers

• ACL 2025 Evaluating Instructively Generated Statement by Large Language Models for directional Event Causality Identification (Findings), W. Xiang, C. Zhan, Q. Zhang and B. Wang.
• ACL 2024 Identifying while Learning for Document Event Causality Identification, C. Liu, W. Xiang and B. Wang.
• ACL 2024 Encoding Hierarchical Schema via Concept Flow for Multifaceted Ideology Detection (Findings), S. Liu, B. Wang, W. Xiang, H. Xu and M. Xu.
• EMNLP 2024 In-context Contrastive Learning for Event Causality Identification, C. Liang, W. Xiang and B. Wang.
• EMNLP 2024 What Would Happen Next? Predicting Consequences from An Event Causality Graph (Findings), C. Zhan, W. Xiang, C. Liang and B. Wang.
• NLPCC 2024 Retrieval-Enhanced Template Generation for Template Extraction, R. Wang, W. Xiang, Z. Wang and B. Wang.
• NLPCC 2024 Bias-Rectified Multi-way Learning with Data Augmentation for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition, Z. Zheng, C. Liang, W. Xiang and B. Wang.
• ACL 2023 TEPrompt: Task Enlightenment Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (Findings), W. Xiang, C. Liang and B. Wang.
• EMNLP 2023 Ideology Takes Multiple Looks: A High-Quality Dataset for Multifaceted Ideology Detection, S. Liu, Z. Luo, M. Xu, L. Wei, Z. Wei, H. Yu, W. Xiang and B. Wang.
• COLING 2022 ConnPrompt: Connective-Cloze Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition, W. Xiang, Z. Wang, L. Dai and B. Wang.
• ACL 2022 Encoding and Fusing Semantic Connection and Linguistic Evidence for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (Findings), W. Xiang, B. Wang, L. Dai and Y. Mo.
• EMNLP 2022 Bi-Directional Iterative Prompt-Tuning for Event Argument Extraction, L. Dai, B. Wang, W. Xiang and Y. Mo.
• PAKDD 2022 A Hybrid Semantic-Topic Co-encoding Network for Social Emotion Classification, L. Dai, B. Wang, W. Xiang, M. Xu and H. Xu.
• NLPCC 2021 Event Argument Extraction via a Distance-Sensitive Graph Convolutional Network, L. Dai, B. Wang, W. Xiang and Y. Mo.
• SIGIR 2019 Encoding Syntactic Dependency and Topical Information for Social Emotion Classification, C. Wang, B. Wang, W. Xiang and M. Xu.

🎖️ Awards and Service

Awards

• Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award, Second Prize, Department of Science and Technology of Hubei Province, 2025.
• National Scholarship for Doctoral Students, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2023.
• Huawei Scholarship, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., 2022.

Academic Service

• Program Committee @ ICPADS, 2025, AIAHPC, 2025, TrustCom 2025
• Session Chair @ IEEE HPCC, 2024, 2022

Reviewer

• IEEE TNNLS, IEEE ACCESS
• Elsevier ESWA, Neural Networks, Neurocomputing, EAAI
• Springer Multimedia Systems
• ACL (‘25, ‘24, ‘23, ‘22), NAACL (‘25, ‘24, ‘23), EMNLP (‘24, ‘23), ECAI (‘23)， NLPCC （‘25, ‘24).