Weipeng Yan


2022

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LEGO-ABSA: A Prompt-based Task Assemblable Unified Generative Framework for Multi-task Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Tianhao Gao | Jun Fang | Hanyu Liu | Zhiyuan Liu | Chao Liu | Pengzhang Liu | Yongjun Bao | Weipeng Yan
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. ABSA can be divided into multiple tasks according to the different extracted elements. Existing generative methods usually treat the output as a whole string rather than the combination of different elements and only focus on a single task at once. This paper proposes a unified generative multi-task framework that can solve multiple ABSA tasks by controlling the type of task prompts consisting of multiple element prompts. Further, the proposed approach can train on simple tasks and transfer to difficult tasks by assembling task prompts, like assembling Lego bricks. We conduct experiments on six ABSA tasks across multiple benchmarks. Our proposed multi-task approach achieves new state-of-the-art results in almost all tasks and competitive results in task transfer scenarios.

2020

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Group-wise Contrastive Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation
Hengyi Cai | Hongshen Chen | Yonghao Song | Zhuoye Ding | Yongjun Bao | Weipeng Yan | Xiaofang Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Neural dialogue response generation has gained much popularity in recent years. Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) objective is widely adopted in existing dialogue model learning. However, models trained with MLE objective function are plagued by the low-diversity issue when it comes to the open-domain conversational setting. Inspired by the observation that humans not only learn from the positive signals but also benefit from correcting behaviors of undesirable actions, in this work, we introduce contrastive learning into dialogue generation, where the model explicitly perceives the difference between the well-chosen positive and negative utterances. Specifically, we employ a pretrained baseline model as a reference. During contrastive learning, the target dialogue model is trained to give higher conditional probabilities for the positive samples, and lower conditional probabilities for those negative samples, compared to the reference model. To manage the multi-mapping relations prevalent in human conversation, we augment contrastive dialogue learning with group-wise dual sampling. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed group-wise contrastive learning framework is suited for training a wide range of neural dialogue generation models with very favorable performance over the baseline training approaches.