William Gantt Walden
PhD Alumnus
Will is a Research Scientist at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University. Will's dissertation, which he defended in 2024 under the supervision of Aaron Steven White, focused on ways of decomposing and describing the structure of events. He contributed to a number of projects during his PhD, including Decomp and MegaAttitude.
Website
Projects
Papers
- Walden, William, Pavlo Kuchmiichuk, Alexander Martin, Chihsheng Jin, Angela Cao, Claire Sun, Curisia Allen & Aaron White. 2025. Cross-Document Event-Keyed Summarization. In Hao Fei, Kewei Tu, Yuhui Zhang, Xiang Hu, Wenjuan Han, Zixia Jia, Zilong Zheng, et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM 2025), 218–241. Vienna, Austria: Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{walden_cross-document_2025,
title = "Cross-Document Event-Keyed Summarization",
author = "Walden, William and
Kuchmiichuk, Pavlo and
Martin, Alexander and
Jin, Chihsheng and
Cao, Angela and
Sun, Claire and
Allen, Curisia and
White, Aaron",
editor = "Fei, Hao and
Tu, Kewei and
Zhang, Yuhui and
Hu, Xiang and
Han, Wenjuan and
Jia, Zixia and
Zheng, Zilong and
Cao, Yixin and
Zhang, Meishan and
Lu, Wei and
Siddharth, N. and
{\O}vrelid, Lilja and
Xue, Nianwen and
Zhang, Yue",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM 2025)",
month = aug,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.xllm-1.19/",
pages = "218--241",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-286-2",
abstract = "Event-keyed summarization (EKS) requires summarizing a specific event described in a document given the document text and an event representation extracted from it. In this work, we extend EKS to the cross-document setting (CDEKS), in which summaries must synthesize information from accounts of the same event as given by multiple sources. We introduce **SEAMuS** (**S**ummaries of **E**vents **A**cross **Mu**ltiple **S**ources), a high-quality dataset for CDEKS based on an expert reannotation of the FAMuS dataset for cross-document argument extraction. We present a suite of baselines on SEAMuS{---}covering both smaller, fine-tuned models, as well as zero- and few-shot prompted LLMs{---}along with detailed ablations and a human evaluation study, showing SEAMuS to be a valuable benchmark for this new task."
}- Gantt, William, Alexander Martin, Pavlo Kuchmiichuk & Aaron White. 2024. Event-Keyed Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, 7333–7345. Miami, Florida, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{gantt_event_2024,
title = "Event-Keyed Summarization",
author = "Gantt, William and
Martin, Alexander and
Kuchmiichuk, Pavlo and
White, Aaron",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.431",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.431",
pages = "7333--7345",
}- Gantt, William & Aaron Steven White. 2024. Small Models Are (Still) Effective Cross-Domain Argument Extractors.
- Gantt, William, Shabnam Behzad, Hannah An, Yunmo Chen, Aaron White, Benjamin Van Durme & Mahsa Yarmohammadi. 2024. MultiMUC: Multilingual Template Filling on MUC-4. In Yvette Graham & Matthew Purver (eds.), Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 349–368. St. Julian’s, Malta: Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{gantt_multimuc_2024,
title = "{M}ulti{MUC}: Multilingual Template Filling on {MUC}-4",
author = "Gantt, William and
Behzad, Shabnam and
An, Hannah and
Chen, Yunmo and
White, Aaron and
Van Durme, Benjamin and
Yarmohammadi, Mahsa",
editor = "Graham, Yvette and
Purver, Matthew",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = mar,
year = "2024",
address = "St. Julian{'}s, Malta",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.21",
pages = "349--368",
abstract = "We introduce MultiMUC, the first multilingual parallel corpus for template filling, comprising translations of the classic MUC-4 template filling benchmark into five languages: Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, and Russian. We obtain automatic translations from a strong multilingual machine translation system and manually project the original English annotations into each target language. For all languages, we also provide human translations for key portions of the dev and test splits. Finally, we present baselines on MultiMUC both with state-of-the-art template filling models for MUC-4 and with ChatGPT. We release MUC-4 and the supervised baselines to facilitate further work on document-level information extraction in multilingual settings.",
}- Chen, Yunmo, William Gantt, Tongfei Chen, Aaron White & Benjamin Van Durme. 2023. A Unified View of Evaluation Metrics for Structured Prediction. In Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino & Kalika Bali (eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 12868–12882. Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{chen_unified_2023,
title = "A Unified View of Evaluation Metrics for Structured Prediction",
author = "Chen, Yunmo and
Gantt, William and
Chen, Tongfei and
White, Aaron and
Van Durme, Benjamin",
editor = "Bouamor, Houda and
Pino, Juan and
Bali, Kalika",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Singapore",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.795",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.795",
pages = "12868--12882",
}- Chen, Yunmo, William Gantt, Weiwei Gu, Tongfei Chen, Aaron White & Benjamin Van Durme. 2023. Iterative Document-level Information Extraction via Imitation Learning. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1858–1874. Dubrovnik, Croatia: Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{chen_iterative_2023,
title = "Iterative Document-level Information Extraction via Imitation Learning",
author = "Chen, Yunmo and
Gantt, William and
Gu, Weiwei and
Chen, Tongfei and
White, Aaron and
Van Durme, Benjamin",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
month = may,
year = "2023",
address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.136.bib",
pages = "1858--1874",
}- Gantt, William, Lelia Glass & Aaron Steven White. 2022. Decomposing and Recomposing Event Structure. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 10. 17–34.
@article{gantt_decomposing_2022,
title = {Decomposing and {Recomposing} {Event} {Structure}},
volume = {10},
issn = {2307-387X},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00445},
doi = {10.1162/tacl_a_00445},
urldate = {2022-01-30},
journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
author = {Gantt, William and Glass, Lelia and White, Aaron Steven},
month = jan,
year = {2022},
pages = {17--34},
}- Gantt, William, Benjamin Kane & Aaron Steven White. 2020. Natural Language Inference with Mixed Effects. In Proceedings of the Ninth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, 81–87. Barcelona, Spain (Online): Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{gantt_natural_2020,
title = {Natural Language Inference with Mixed Effects},
author = {Gantt, William and
Kane, Benjamin and
White, Aaron Steven},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics},
month = dec,
year = {2020},
address = {Barcelona, Spain (Online)},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.starsem-1.9},
pages = {81--87}
}