Hantian Ding


2022

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Towards Open-Domain Topic Classification
Hantian Ding | Jinrui Yang | Yuqian Deng | Hongming Zhang | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: System Demonstrations

We introduce an open-domain topic classification system that accepts user-defined taxonomy in real time. Users will be able to classify a text snippet with respect to any candidate labels they want, and get instant response from our web interface. To obtain such flexibility, we build the backend model in a zero-shot way. By training on a new dataset constructed from Wikipedia, our label-aware text classifier can effectively utilize implicit knowledge in the pretrained language model to handle labels it has never seen before. We evaluate our model across four datasets from various domains with different label sets. Experiments show that the model significantly improves over existing zero-shot baselines in open-domain scenarios, and performs competitively with weakly-supervised models trained on in-domain data.

2019

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SP-10K: A Large-scale Evaluation Set for Selectional Preference Acquisition
Hongming Zhang | Hantian Ding | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Selectional Preference (SP) is a commonly observed language phenomenon and proved to be useful in many natural language processing tasks. To provide a better evaluation method for SP models, we introduce SP-10K, a large-scale evaluation set that provides human ratings for the plausibility of 10,000 SP pairs over five SP relations, covering 2,500 most frequent verbs, nouns, and adjectives in American English. Three representative SP acquisition methods based on pseudo-disambiguation are evaluated with SP-10K. To demonstrate the importance of our dataset, we investigate the relationship between SP-10K and the commonsense knowledge in ConceptNet5 and show the potential of using SP to represent the commonsense knowledge. We also use the Winograd Schema Challenge to prove that the proposed new SP relations are essential for the hard pronoun coreference resolution problem.