Xiaowang Zhang

Prof. Xiaowang Zhang

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

17Years (2010-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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3 July 2025 in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
SZSai Zhang
Sai Zhang
ZXZhenchang Xing
Zhenchang Xing
RGRonghui Guo
Ronghui Guo
FXFangzhou Xu
Fangzhou Xu
LCLei Chen
Lei Chen
ZZZhiqiang Zhuang
Zhiqiang Zhuang
In software development, the raw requirements proposed by users are frequently incomplete, which impedes the complete implementation of software functionalities. With the emergence of large language models, the exploration of generating software through user requirements has attracted attention. Recent methods with the top-down waterfall model employ a questioning approach for requirement completion, attempting to explore further user requirements. However, users, constrained by their domain knowledge, result in a lack of effective acceptance criteria during the requirement completion, failing to fully capture the implicit needs of the user. Moreover, the cumulative errors of the waterfall model can lead to discrepancies between the generated code and user requirements. The Agile methodologies reduce cumulative errors of the waterfall model through lightweight iteration and collaboration with users, but the challenge lies in ensuring semantic consistency between user requirements and the code generated by the agent. To address these challenges, we propose AgileGen, an agile-based generative software development through human-AI teamwork. Unlike existing questioning agents, AgileGen adopts a novel collaborative approach that breaks free from the constraints of domain knowledge by initiating the end-user perspective to complete the acceptance criteria. By introducing the Gherkin language, AgileGen attempts for the first time to use testable requirement descriptions as a bridge for semantic consistency between requirements and code, aiming to ensure that software products meet actual user requirements by defining user scenarios that include acceptance criteria. Additionally, we innovate in the human-AI teamwork model, allowing users to participate in decision-making processes they do well and significantly enhancing the completeness of software functionality. To ensure semantic consistency between requirements and generated code, we derive consistency factors from Gherkin to drive the subsequent software code generation. Finally, to improve the reliability of user scenarios, we also introduce a memory pool mechanism, collecting user decision-making scenarios and recommending them to new users with similar requirements. AgileGen, as a user-friendly interactive system, significantly outperformed existing best methods by 16.4% and garnered higher user satisfaction.

3 July 2020 in Frontiers in Energy Research
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ZLZiyi Luo
Ziyi Luo
XYXinyi Yang
Xinyi Yang
YWYingxue Wang
Yingxue Wang
WLWeidi Liu
Weidi Liu
SLSiliang Liu
Siliang Liu
YDYida Deng
Yida Deng
Energy shortage is a severe challenge nowadays. It has affected the development of new energy sources. Artificial intelligence (AI), such as learning and analyzing, has been widely used for various advantages. It has been successfully applied to predict materials, especially energy storage materials. In this paper, we present a survey of the present status of AI in energy storage materials via capacitors and Li-ion batteries. We picture the comprehensive progress of AI in energy storage materials, including the advantages and disadvantages of material data to support AI. Finally, we provide some ideas to solve those challenges.

1 January 2019
Verified
Book Chapter
Closed access
PDF file
PWPeiyun Wu
Peiyun Wu
XZXiaowang Zhang
Xiaowang Zhang
ZFZhiyong Feng
Zhiyong Feng

23 April 2022 in The Computer Journal
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
PDF file
RHRafiul Haq
Rafiul Haq
XZXiaowang Zhang
Xiaowang Zhang
WKWahab Khan
Wahab Khan
ZFZhiyong Feng
Zhiyong Feng
Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental part of other natural language processing tasks such as information retrieval, question answering systems and machine translation. Progress and success have already been achieved in research on the English NER systems. However, the Urdu NER system is still in its infancy due to the complexity and morphological richness of the Urdu language. Existing Urdu NER systems are highly dependent on manual feature engineering and word embedding to capture similarity. Their performance lags if the words are previously unknown or infrequent. The feature-based models suffer from complicated feature engineering and are often highly reliant on external resources. To overcome these limitations in this study, we present several deep neural approaches that automatically learn features from the data and eliminate manual feature engineering. Our extension involved convolutional neural network to extract character-level features and combine them with word embedding to handle out-of-vocabulary words. The study also presents a tweets dataset in Urdu, annotated manually for five named entity classes. The effectiveness of the deep learning approaches is demonstrated on four benchmarks datasets. The proposed method demonstrates notable progress upon current state-of-the-art NER approaches in Urdu. The results show an improvement of 6.26% in the F1 score.

30 April 2023
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
JZJiarui Zhang
Jiarui Zhang
SWShaojuan Wu
Shaojuan Wu
XZXiaowang Zhang
Xiaowang Zhang
ZFZhiyong Feng
Zhiyong Feng
Various targets keep coming up on social media, and most of them lack labeled data. In this paper, we focus on zero-shot and few-shot stance detection, which aims to identify stances with few or even no training instances. In order to solve the lack of labeled data and implicit stance expression, we propose a self-supervised data augment approach based on coreference resolution. The method is specific for stance detection to generate more stable data and reduce the variance within and between classes to achieve a balance between validity and robustness. Considering the diversity of comments, we propose a novel multi-task stance detection framework of target-related fragment extraction and stance detection, which can enhance attention on target-related fragments and reduce the noise of other fragments. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot and few-shot stance detection.

22 July 2023 in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
SYSofonias Yitagesu
Sofonias Yitagesu
ZXZhenchang Xing
Zhenchang Xing
XZXiaowang Zhang
Xiaowang Zhang
ZFZhiyong Feng
Zhiyong Feng
XLXiaohong Li
Xiaohong Li
LHLinyi Han
Linyi Han
Software vulnerabilities, once disclosed, can be documented in vulnerability databases, which have great potential to advance vulnerability analysis and security research. People describe the key characteristics of software vulnerabilities in natural language mixed with domain-specific names and concepts. This textual nature poses a significant challenge for the automatic analysis of vulnerability knowledge embedded in text. Automatic extraction of key vulnerability aspects is highly desirable but demands significant effort to manually label data for model training. In this article, we propose unsupervised methods to label and extract important vulnerability concepts in textual vulnerability descriptions (TVDs). We focus on six types of phrase-based vulnerability concepts (vulnerability type, vulnerable component, root cause, attacker type, impact, and attack vector) as they are much more difficult to label and extract than name- or number-based entities (i.e., vendor, product, and version). Our approach is based on a key observation that the same-type of phrases, no matter how they differ in sentence structures and phrase expressions, usually share syntactically similar paths in the sentence parsing trees. Specifically, we present a source-target neural architecture that learns the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging to identify a token’s functional role within TVDs, where the source neural model is trained to capture common features found in the TVD corpus, and the target model is trained to identify linguistically malformed words specific to the security domain. Our evaluation confirms that the proposed tagger outperforms (4.45%–5.98%) the taggers designed on natural language notions and identifies a broad set of TVDs and natural language contents. Then, based on the key observations, we propose two path representations (absolute paths and relative paths) and use an auto-encoder to encode such syntactic similarities. To address the discrete nature of our paths, we enhance the traditional Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) with Gumble-Max trick for categorical data distribution and thus create a Categorical VAE (CaVAE). In the latent space of absolute and relative paths, we further apply unsupervised clustering techniques to generate clusters of the same-type of concepts. Our evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our CaVAE, which achieves a small (85.85) log-likelihood for encoding path representations and the accuracy (83%–89%) of vulnerability concepts in the resulting clusters. The resulting clusters accurately label six types of vulnerability concepts from a TVD corpus in an unsupervised way. Furthermore, these labeled vulnerability concepts can be mapped back to the corresponding phrases in the original TVDs, which produce labels of six types of vulnerability concepts. The resulting labeled TVDs can be used to train concept extraction models for other TVD corpora. In this work, we present two concept extraction methods (concept classification and sequence labeling model) to demonstrate the utility of the unsupervisedly labeled concepts. Our study shows that models trained with our unsupervisedly labeled vulnerability concepts outperform (3.9%–5.14%) those trained with the two manually labeled TVD datasets from previous work due to the consistent boundary and typing by our unsupervised labeling method.