Xinyu Zhang


2022

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A Hmong Corpus with Elaborate Expression Annotations
David R. Mortensen | Xinyu Zhang | Chenxuan Cui | Katherine J. Zhang
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes the first publicly available corpus of Hmong, a minority language of China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and various countries in Europe and the Americas. The corpus has been scraped from a long-running Usenet newsgroup called soc.culture.hmong and consists of approximately 12 million tokens. This corpus (called SCH) is also the first substantial corpus to be annotated for elaborate expressions, a kind of four-part coordinate construction that is common and important in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. We show that word embeddings trained on SCH can benefit tasks in Hmong (solving analogies) and that a model trained on it can label previously unseen elaborate expressions, in context, with an F1 of 90.79 (precision: 87.36, recall: 94.52). [ISO 639-3: mww, hmj]

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Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering
Jiawei Zhou | Xiaoguang Li | Lifeng Shang | Lan Luo | Ke Zhan | Enrui Hu | Xinyu Zhang | Hao Jiang | Zhao Cao | Fan Yu | Xin Jiang | Qun Liu | Lei Chen
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

To alleviate the data scarcity problem in training question answering systems, recent works propose additional intermediate pre-training for dense passage retrieval (DPR). However, there still remains a large discrepancy between the provided upstream signals and the downstream question-passage relevance, which leads to less improvement. To bridge this gap, we propose the HyperLink-induced Pre-training (HLP), a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlink-based topology within Web documents. We demonstrate that the hyperlink-based structures of dual-link and co-mention can provide effective relevance signals for large-scale pre-training that better facilitate downstream passage retrieval. We investigate the effectiveness of our approach across a wide range of open-domain QA datasets under zero-shot, few-shot, multi-hop, and out-of-domain scenarios. The experiments show our HLP outperforms the BM25 by up to 7 points as well as other pre-training methods by more than 10 points in terms of top-20 retrieval accuracy under the zero-shot scenario. Furthermore, HLP significantly outperforms other pre-training methods under the other scenarios.

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Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding
Zhaoye Fei | Yu Tian | Yongkang Wu | Xinyu Zhang | Yutao Zhu | Zheng Liu | Jiawen Wu | Dejiang Kong | Ruofei Lai | Zhao Cao | Zhicheng Dou | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Generalized text representations are the foundation of many natural language understanding tasks. To fully utilize the different corpus, it is inevitable that models need to understand the relevance among them. However, many methods ignore the relevance and adopt a single-channel model (a coarse paradigm) directly for all tasks, which lacks enough rationality and interpretation. In addition, some existing works learn downstream tasks by stitches skill block (a fine paradigm), which might cause irrational results due to its redundancy and noise. In this work, we first analyze the task correlation through three different perspectives, , data property, manual design, and model-based relevance, based on which the similar tasks are grouped together. Then, we propose a hierarchical framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm, with the bottom level shared to all the tasks, the mid-level divided to different groups, and the top-level assigned to each of the tasks. This allows our model to learn basic language properties from all tasks, boost performance on relevant tasks, and reduce the negative impact from irrelevant tasks. Our experiments on 13 benchmark datasets across five natural language understanding tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method.

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Towards Efficient NLP: A Standard Evaluation and A Strong Baseline
Xiangyang Liu | Tianxiang Sun | Junliang He | Jiawen Wu | Lingling Wu | Xinyu Zhang | Hao Jiang | Zhao Cao | Xuanjing Huang | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Supersized pre-trained language models have pushed the accuracy of various natural language processing (NLP) tasks to a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, more and more researchers start paying attention to model efficiency and usability. Different from accuracy, the metric for efficiency varies across different studies, making them hard to be fairly compared. To that end, this work presents ELUE (Efficient Language Understanding Evaluation), a standard evaluation, and a public leaderboard for efficient NLP models. ELUE is dedicated to depicting the Pareto Frontier for various language understanding tasks, such that it can tell whether and how much a method achieves Pareto improvement. Along with the benchmark, we also release a strong baseline, ElasticBERT, which allows BERT to exit at any layer in both static and dynamic ways. We demonstrate the ElasticBERT, despite its simplicity, outperforms or performs on par with SOTA compressed and early exiting models. With ElasticBERT, the proposed ELUE has a strong Pareto Frontier and makes a better evaluation for efficient NLP models.

2021

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Generalized Supervised Attention for Text Generation
Yixian Liu | Liwen Zhang | Xinyu Zhang | Yong Jiang | Yue Zhang | Kewei Tu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Bag-of-Words Baselines for Semantic Code Search
Xinyu Zhang | Ji Xin | Andrew Yates | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Programming (NLP4Prog 2021)

The task of semantic code search is to retrieve code snippets from a source code corpus based on an information need expressed in natural language. The semantic gap between natural language and programming languages has for long been regarded as one of the most significant obstacles to the effectiveness of keyword-based information retrieval (IR) methods. It is a common assumption that “traditional” bag-of-words IR methods are poorly suited for semantic code search: our work empirically investigates this assumption. Specifically, we examine the effectiveness of two traditional IR methods, namely BM25 and RM3, on the CodeSearchNet Corpus, which consists of natural language queries paired with relevant code snippets. We find that the two keyword-based methods outperform several pre-BERT neural models. We also compare several code-specific data pre-processing strategies and find that specialized tokenization improves effectiveness.

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Mr. TyDi: A Multi-lingual Benchmark for Dense Retrieval
Xinyu Zhang | Xueguang Ma | Peng Shi | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning

We present Mr. TyDi, a multi-lingual benchmark dataset for mono-lingual retrieval in eleven typologically diverse languages, designed to evaluate ranking with learned dense representations. The goal of this resource is to spur research in dense retrieval techniques in non-English languages, motivated by recent observations that existing techniques for representation learning perform poorly when applied to out-of-distribution data. As a starting point, we provide zero-shot baselines for this new dataset based on a multi-lingual adaptation of DPR that we call “mDPR”. Experiments show that although the effectiveness of mDPR is much lower than BM25, dense representations nevertheless appear to provide valuable relevance signals, improving BM25 results in sparse–dense hybrids. In addition to analyses of our results, we also discuss future challenges and present a research agenda in multi-lingual dense retrieval. Mr. TyDi can be downloaded at https://github.com/castorini/mr.tydi.

2020

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A Little Bit Is Worse Than None: Ranking with Limited Training Data
Xinyu Zhang | Andrew Yates | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of SustaiNLP: Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing

Researchers have proposed simple yet effective techniques for the retrieval problem based on using BERT as a relevance classifier to rerank initial candidates from keyword search. In this work, we tackle the challenge of fine-tuning these models for specific domains in a data and computationally efficient manner. Typically, researchers fine-tune models using corpus-specific labeled data from sources such as TREC. We first answer the question: How much data of this type do we need? Recognizing that the most computationally efficient training is no training, we explore zero-shot ranking using BERT models that have already been fine-tuned with the large MS MARCO passage retrieval dataset. We arrive at the surprising and novel finding that “some” labeled in-domain data can be worse than none at all.