Bowen Zhang


2022

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Noise Learning for Text Classification: A Benchmark
Bo Liu | Wandi Xu | Yuejia Xiang | Xiaojun Wu | Lejian He | Bowen Zhang | Li Zhu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Noise Learning is important in the task of text classification which depends on massive labeled data that could be error-prone. However, we find that noise learning in text classification is relatively underdeveloped: 1. many methods that have been proven effective in the image domain are not explored in text classification, 2. it is difficult to conduct a fair comparison between previous studies as they do experiments in different noise settings. In this work, we adapt four state-of-the-art methods of noise learning from the image domain to text classification. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive experiments on our benchmark of noise learning with seven commonly-used methods, four datasets, and five noise modes. Additionally, most previous works are based on an implicit hypothesis that the commonly-used datasets such as TREC, Ag-News and Chnsenticorp contain no errors. However, these datasets indeed contain 0.61% to 15.77% noise labels which we define as intrinsic noise that can cause inaccurate evaluation. Therefore, we build a new dataset Golden-Chnsenticorp( G-Chnsenticorp) without intrinsic noise to more accurately compare the effects of different noise learning methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark of noise learning for text classification.

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Sentiment Interpretable Logic Tensor Network for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis
Bowen Zhang | Xu Huang | Zhichao Huang | Hu Huang | Baoquan Zhang | Xianghua Fu | Liwen Jing
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA) is an important task that aims to infer the sentiment towards the given aspect-terms. It is often required in the industry that ATSA should be performed with interpretability, computational efficiency and high accuracy. However, such an ATSA method has not yet been developed. This study aims to develop an ATSA method that fulfills all these requirements. To achieve the goal, we propose a novel Sentiment Interpretable Logic Tensor Network (SILTN). SILTN is interpretable because it is a neurosymbolic formalism and a computational model that supports learning and reasoning about data with a differentiable first-order logic language (FOL). To realize SILTN with high inferring accuracy, we propose a novel learning strategy called the two-stage syntax knowledge distillation (TSynKD). Using widely used datasets, we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed TSynKD is effective for improving the accuracy of SILTN, and the SILTN has both high interpretability and computational efficiency.

2021

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Visually Grounded Concept Composition
Bowen Zhang | Hexiang Hu | Linlu Qiu | Peter Shaw | Fei Sha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

We investigate ways to compose complex concepts in texts from primitive ones while grounding them in images. We propose Concept and Relation Graph (CRG), which builds on top of constituency analysis and consists of recursively combined concepts with predicate functions. Meanwhile, we propose a concept composition neural network called Composer to leverage the CRG for visually grounded concept learning. Specifically, we learn the grounding of both primitive and all composed concepts by aligning them to images and show that learning to compose leads to more robust grounding results, measured in text-to-image matching accuracy. Notably, our model can model grounded concepts forming at both the finer-grained sentence level and the coarser-grained intermediate level (or word-level). Composer leads to pronounced improvement in matching accuracy when the evaluation data has significant compound divergence from the training data.

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Systematic Generalization on gSCAN: What is Nearly Solved and What is Next?
Linlu Qiu | Hexiang Hu | Bowen Zhang | Peter Shaw | Fei Sha
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We analyze the grounded SCAN (gSCAN) benchmark, which was recently proposed to study systematic generalization for grounded language understanding. First, we study which aspects of the original benchmark can be solved by commonly used methods in multi-modal research. We find that a general-purpose Transformer-based model with cross-modal attention achieves strong performance on a majority of the gSCAN splits, surprisingly outperforming more specialized approaches from prior work. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that many of the remaining errors reveal the same fundamental challenge in systematic generalization of linguistic constructs regardless of visual context. Second, inspired by this finding, we propose challenging new tasks for gSCAN by generating data to incorporate relations between objects in the visual environment. Finally, we find that current models are surprisingly data inefficient given the narrow scope of commands in gSCAN, suggesting another challenge for future work.

2020

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Enhancing Cross-target Stance Detection with Transferable Semantic-Emotion Knowledge
Bowen Zhang | Min Yang | Xutao Li | Yunming Ye | Xiaofei Xu | Kuai Dai
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Stance detection is an important task, which aims to classify the attitude of an opinionated text towards a given target. Remarkable success has been achieved when sufficient labeled training data is available. However, annotating sufficient data is labor-intensive, which establishes significant barriers for generalizing the stance classifier to the data with new targets. In this paper, we proposed a Semantic-Emotion Knowledge Transferring (SEKT) model for cross-target stance detection, which uses the external knowledge (semantic and emotion lexicons) as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer across different targets. Specifically, a semantic-emotion heterogeneous graph is constructed from external semantic and emotion lexicons, which is then fed into a graph convolutional network to learn multi-hop semantic connections between words and emotion tags. Then, the learned semantic-emotion graph representation, which serves as prior knowledge bridging the gap between the source and target domains, is fully integrated into the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) stance classifier by adding a novel knowledge-aware memory unit to the BiLSTM cell. Extensive experiments on a large real-world dataset demonstrate the superiority of SEKT against the state-of-the-art baseline methods.

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Learning to Represent Image and Text with Denotation Graph
Bowen Zhang | Hexiang Hu | Vihan Jain | Eugene Ie | Fei Sha
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Learning to fuse vision and language information and representing them is an important research problem with many applications. Recent progresses have leveraged the ideas of pre-training (from language modeling) and attention layers in Transformers to learn representation from datasets containing images aligned with linguistic expressions that describe the images. In this paper, we propose learning representations from a set of implied, visually grounded expressions between image and text, automatically mined from those datasets. In particular, we use denotation graphs to represent how specific concepts (such as sentences describing images) can be linked to abstract and generic concepts (such as short phrases) that are also visually grounded. This type of generic-to-specific relations can be discovered using linguistic analysis tools. We propose methods to incorporate such relations into learning representation. We show that state-of-the-art multimodal learning models can be further improved by leveraging automatically harvested structural relations. The representations lead to stronger empirical results on downstream tasks of cross-modal image retrieval, referring expression, and compositional attribute-object recognition. Both our codes and the extracted denotation graphs on the Flickr30K and the COCO datasets are publically available on https://sha-lab.github.io/DG.

2018

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A Probabilistic Model for Joint Learning of Word Embeddings from Texts and Images
Melissa Ailem | Bowen Zhang | Aurelien Bellet | Pascal Denis | Fei Sha
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Several recent studies have shown the benefits of combining language and perception to infer word embeddings. These multimodal approaches either simply combine pre-trained textual and visual representations (e.g. features extracted from convolutional neural networks), or use the latter to bias the learning of textual word embeddings. In this work, we propose a novel probabilistic model to formalize how linguistic and perceptual inputs can work in concert to explain the observed word-context pairs in a text corpus. Our approach learns textual and visual representations jointly: latent visual factors couple together a skip-gram model for co-occurrence in linguistic data and a generative latent variable model for visual data. Extensive experimental studies validate the proposed model. Concretely, on the tasks of assessing pairwise word similarity and image/caption retrieval, our approach attains equally competitive or stronger results when compared to other state-of-the-art multimodal models.