Hongning Wang


2023

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COFFEE: Counterfactual Fairness for Personalized Text Generation in Explainable Recommendation
Nan Wang | Qifan Wang | Yi-Chia Wang | Maziar Sanjabi | Jingzhou Liu | Hamed Firooz | Hongning Wang | Shaoliang Nie
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

As language models become increasingly integrated into our digital lives, Personalized Text Generation (PTG) has emerged as a pivotal component with a wide range of applications. However, the bias inherent in user written text, often used for PTG model training, can inadvertently associate different levels of linguistic quality with users’ protected attributes. The model can inherit the bias and perpetuate inequality in generating text w.r.t. users’ protected attributes, leading to unfair treatment when serving users. In this work, we investigate fairness of PTG in the context of personalized explanation generation for recommendations. We first discuss the biases in generated explanations and their fairness implications. To promote fairness, we introduce a general framework to achieve measure-specific counterfactual fairness in explanation generation. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

2019

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Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension
Huazheng Wang | Zhe Gan | Xiaodong Liu | Jingjing Liu | Jianfeng Gao | Hongning Wang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

In this paper, we focus on unsupervised domain adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), where the source domain has a large amount of labeled data, while only unlabeled passages are available in the target domain. To this end, we propose an Adversarial Domain Adaptation framework (AdaMRC), where (i) pseudo questions are first generated for unlabeled passages in the target domain, and then (ii) a domain classifier is incorporated into an MRC model to predict which domain a given passage-question pair comes from. The classifier and the passage-question encoder are jointly trained using adversarial learning to enforce domain-invariant representation learning. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach (i) is generalizable to different MRC models and datasets, (ii) can be combined with pre-trained large-scale language models (such as ELMo and BERT), and (iii) can be extended to semi-supervised learning.

2016

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Modeling Social Norms Evolution for Personalized Sentiment Classification
Lin Gong | Mohammad Al Boni | Hongning Wang
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2015

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Model Adaptation for Personalized Opinion Analysis
Mohammad Al Boni | Keira Zhou | Hongning Wang | Matthew S. Gerber
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2011

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Structural Topic Model for Latent Topical Structure Analysis
Hongning Wang | Duo Zhang | ChengXiang Zhai
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2010

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Exploiting Structured Ontology to Organize Scattered Online Opinions
Yue Lu | Huizhong Duan | Hongning Wang | ChengXiang Zhai
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)