Zhiyong Wang


2024

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Generating Harder Cross-document Event Coreference Resolution Datasets using Metaphoric Paraphrasing
Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Zhiyong Wang | George Baker | Kevin Stowe | James Martin
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

The most popular Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution (CDEC) datasets fail to convey the true difficulty of the task, due to the lack of lexical diversity between coreferring event triggers (words or phrases that refer to an event). Furthermore, there is a dearth of event datasets for figurative language, limiting a crucial avenue of research in event comprehension. We address these two issues by introducing ECB+META, a lexically rich variant of Event Coref Bank Plus (ECB+) for CDEC on symbolic and metaphoric language. We use ChatGPT as a tool for the metaphoric transformation of sentences in the documents of ECB+, then tag the original event triggers in the transformed sentences in a semi-automated manner. In this way, we avoid the re-annotation of expensive coreference links. We present results that show existing methods that work well on ECB+ struggle with ECB+META, thereby paving the way for CDEC research on a much more challenging dataset. Code/data: https://github.com/ahmeshaf/llms_coref

2023

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Efficient and Interpretable Compressive Text Summarisation with Unsupervised Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Peggy Tang | Junbin Gao | Lei Zhang | Zhiyong Wang
Proceedings of The Fourth Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP)

2022

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OTExtSum: Extractive Text Summarisation with Optimal Transport
Peggy Tang | Kun Hu | Rui Yan | Lei Zhang | Junbin Gao | Zhiyong Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Extractive text summarisation aims to select salient sentences from a document to form a short yet informative summary. While learning-based methods have achieved promising results, they have several limitations, such as dependence on expensive training and lack of interpretability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel non-learning-based method by for the first time formulating text summarisation as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem, namely Optimal Transport Extractive Summariser (OTExtSum). Optimal sentence extraction is conceptualised as obtaining an optimal summary that minimises the transportation cost to a given document regarding their semantic distributions. Such a cost is defined by the Wasserstein distance and used to measure the summary’s semantic coverage of the original document. Comprehensive experiments on four challenging and widely used datasets - MultiNews, PubMed, BillSum, and CNN/DM demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art non-learning-based methods and several recent learning-based methods in terms of the ROUGE metric.

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1Cademy at Semeval-2022 Task 1: Investigating the Effectiveness of Multilingual, Multitask, and Language-Agnostic Tricks for the Reverse Dictionary Task
Zhiyong Wang | Ge Zhang | Nineli Lashkarashvili
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper describes our system for the Se- mEval2022 task of matching dictionary glosses to word embeddings. We focus on the Reverse Dictionary Track of the competition, which maps multilingual glosses to reconstructed vector representations. More specifically, models convert the input of sentences to three types of embeddings: SGNS, Char, and Electra. We pro- pose several experiments for applying neural network cells, general multilingual and multi-task structures, and language-agnostic tricks to the task. We also provide comparisons over different types of word embeddings and ablation studies to suggest helpful strategies. Our initial transformer-based model achieves relatively low performance. However, trials on different retokenization methodologies indicate improved performance. Our proposed Elmo- based monolingual model achieves the highest outcome, and its multitask, and multilingual varieties show competitive results as well.