Tong Zhou


2024

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Open Event Causality Extraction by the Assistance of LLM in Task Annotation, Dataset, and Method
Kun Luo | Tong Zhou | Yubo Chen | Jun Zhao | Kang Liu
Proceedings of the Workshop: Bridging Neurons and Symbols for Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs Reasoning (NeusymBridge) @ LREC-COLING-2024

Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims to extract explicit causal relations between event pairs from the text. However, the event boundary deviation and the causal event pair mismatching are two crucial challenges that remain unaddressed. To address the above issues, we propose a paradigm to utilize LLM to optimize the task definition, evolve the datasets, and strengthen our proposed customized Contextual Highlighting Event Causality Extraction framework (CHECE). Specifically in CHECE, we propose an Event Highlighter and an Event Concretization Module, guiding the model to represent the event by a higher-level cluster and consider its causal counterpart in event boundary prediction to deal with event boundary deviation. And we propose a Contextual Event Causality Matching mechanism, meanwhile, applying LLM to diversify the content templates to force the model to learn causality from context to targeting on causal event pair mismatching. Experimental results on two ECE datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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Landmark Embedding: A Chunking-Free Embedding Method For Retrieval Augmented Long-Context Large Language Models
Kun Luo | Zheng Liu | Shitao Xiao | Tong Zhou | Yubo Chen | Jun Zhao | Kang Liu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Retrieval augmentation is a promising approach to handle long-context language modeling. However, the existing retrieval methods usually work with the chunked context, which is prone to inferior quality of semantic representation and incomplete retrieval of useful information. In this work, we propose a new method for the retrieval augmentation of long-context language modeling, called Landmark Embedding. Our method is characterized by threefold technical contributions. Firstly, we introduce a chunking-free architecture, which keeps the long context coherent such that high-quality embeddings can be generated for the fine-grained units within the context. Secondly, we present a position-aware objective function, which prioritizes the ultimate boundary for a consecutive span of information. By learning to discriminate such a special position, the useful information can be comprehensively retrieved for the query. Thirdly, we design a novel multi-stage learning algorithm, which makes the best use of readily available data and synthetic data for cost-effective training of the landmark embedding. In our experimental study, landmark embedding is able to substantially improve the performance for both LLaMA-2 and ChatGPT in a variety of long-context tasks; meanwhile, it also outperforms the existing retrieval methods with a notable advantage. Our model and source code will be made publicly available.

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CogMG: Collaborative Augmentation Between Large Language Model and Knowledge Graph
Tong Zhou | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Large language models have become integral to question-answering applications despite their propensity for generating hallucinations and factually inaccurate content. Querying knowledge graphs to reduce hallucinations in LLM meets the challenge of incomplete knowledge coverage in knowledge graphs. On the other hand, updating knowledge graphs by information extraction and knowledge graph completion faces the knowledge update misalignment issue. In this work, we introduce a collaborative augmentation framework, CogMG, leveraging knowledge graphs to address the limitations of LLMs in QA scenarios, explicitly targeting the problems of incomplete knowledge coverage and knowledge update misalignment. The LLMs identify and decompose required knowledge triples that are not present in the KG, enriching them and aligning updates with real-world demands. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through a supervised fine-tuned LLM within an agent framework, showing significant improvements in reducing hallucinations and enhancing factual accuracy in QA responses. Our code and video are publicly available.

2023

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Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation
Bo Wang | Heyan Huang | Xiaochi Wei | Ge Shi | Xiao Liu | Chong Feng | Tong Zhou | Shuaiqiang Wang | Dawei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Event extraction aims to recognize pre-defined event triggers and arguments from texts, which suffer from the lack of high-quality annotations. In most NLP applications, involving a large scale of synthetic training data is a practical and effective approach to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. However, when applying to the task of event extraction, recent data augmentation methods often neglect the problem of grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting, leading to unsatisfactory performances. In order to solve these problems, we propose a denoised structure-to-text augmentation framework for event extraction (DAEE), which generates additional training data through the knowledge-based structure-to-text generation model and selects the effective subset from the generated data iteratively with a deep reinforcement learning agent. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extraction and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art.

2021

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Classification, Extraction, and Normalization : CASIA_Unisound Team at the Social Media Mining for Health 2021 Shared Tasks
Tong Zhou | Zhucong Li | Zhen Gan | Baoli Zhang | Yubo Chen | Kun Niu | Jing Wan | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Yafei Shi | Weifeng Chong | Shengping Liu
Proceedings of the Sixth Social Media Mining for Health (#SMM4H) Workshop and Shared Task

This is the system description of the CASIA_Unisound team for Task 1, Task 7b, and Task 8 of the sixth Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task in 2021. Targeting on deal with two shared challenges, the colloquial text and the imbalance annotation, among those tasks, we apply a customized pre-trained language model and propose various training strategies. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our system. Moreover, we got an F1-score of 0.87 in task 8, which is the highest among all participates.

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Automatic ICD Coding via Interactive Shared Representation Networks with Self-distillation Mechanism
Tong Zhou | Pengfei Cao | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Kun Niu | Weifeng Chong | Shengping Liu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The ICD coding task aims at assigning codes of the International Classification of Diseases in clinical notes. Since manual coding is very laborious and prone to errors, many methods have been proposed for the automatic ICD coding task. However, existing works either ignore the long-tail of code frequency or the noisy clinical notes. To address the above issues, we propose an Interactive Shared Representation Network with Self-Distillation Mechanism. Specifically, an interactive shared representation network targets building connections among codes while modeling the co-occurrence, consequently alleviating the long-tail problem. Moreover, to cope with the noisy text issue, we encourage the model to focus on the clinical note’s noteworthy part and extract valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism. Experimental results on two MIMIC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.