Ian Harris


2023

pdf
GAP-Gen: Guided Automatic Python Code Generation
Junchen Zhao | Yurun Song | Junlin Wang | Ian Harris
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Automatic code generation from natural language descriptions can be highly beneficial during the process of software development. In this work, we propose GAP-Gen, a Guided Automatic Python Code Generation method based on Python syntactic constraints and semantic constraints. We first introduce Python syntactic constraints in the form of Syntax-Flow, which is a simplified version of Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) reducing the size and high complexity of Abstract Syntax Tree but maintaining crucial syntactic information of Python code. In addition to Syntax-Flow, we introduce Variable-Flow which abstracts variable and function names consistently through out the code. In our work, rather than pretraining, we focus on modifying the finetuning process which reduces computational requirements but retains high generation performance on automatic Python code generation task. GAP-Gen fine-tunes the transformer based language models T5 and CodeT5 using the Code-to-Docstring datasets CodeSearchNet, CodeSearchNet AdvTest and Code-Docstring Corpus from EdinburghNLP. Our experiments show that GAP-Gen achieves better results on automatic Python code generation task than previous works

pdf
PCMID: Multi-Intent Detection through Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning
Yurun Song | Junchen Zhao | Spencer Koehler | Amir Abdullah | Ian Harris
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Intent detection is a major task in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and is the component of dialogue systems for interpreting users’ intentions based on their utterances. Many works have explored detecting intents by assuming that each utterance represents only a single intent. Such systems have achieved very good results; however, intent detection is a far more challenging task in typical real-world scenarios, where each user utterance can be highly complex and express multiple intents. Therefore, in this paper, we propose PCMID, a novel Multi-Intent Detection framework enabled by Prototypical Contrastive Learning under a supervised setting. The PCMID model can learn multiple semantic representations of a given user utterance under the context of different intent labels in an optimized semantic space. Our experiments show that PCMID achieves the current state-of-the-art performance on both multiple public benchmark datasets and a private real-world dataset for the multi-intent detection task.

2022

pdf
Mitra Behzadi at SemEval-2022 Task 5 : Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification method based on CLIP
Mitra Behzadi | Ali Derakhshan | Ian Harris
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Everyday more users are using memes on social media platforms to convey a message with text and image combined. Although there are many fun and harmless memes being created and posted, there are also ones that are hateful and offensive to particular groups of people. In this article present a novel approach based on the CLIP network to detect misogynous memes and find out the types of misogyny in that meme. We participated in Task A and Task B of the Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MaMi) challenge and our best scores are 0.694 and 0.681 respectively.

2021

pdf
Spoken Language Understanding for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Augmented Memory Networks
Jie Wu | Ian Harris | Hongzhi Zhao
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Spoken language understanding, usually including intent detection and slot filling, is a core component to build a spoken dialog system. Recent research shows promising results by jointly learning of those two tasks based on the fact that slot filling and intent detection are sharing semantic knowledge. Furthermore, attention mechanism boosts joint learning to achieve state-of-the-art results. However, current joint learning models ignore the following important facts: 1. Long-term slot context is not traced effectively, which is crucial for future slot filling. 2. Slot tagging and intent detection could be mutually rewarding, but bi-directional interaction between slot filling and intent detection remains seldom explored. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model long-term slot context and to fully utilize the semantic correlation between slots and intents. We adopt a key-value memory network to model slot context dynamically and to track more important slot tags decoded before, which are then fed into our decoder for slot tagging. Furthermore, gated memory information is utilized to perform intent detection, mutually improving both tasks through global optimization. Experiments on benchmark ATIS and Snips datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms other methods, especially for the slot filling task.

2003

pdf
Translation Web Services - A Reality
Ian Harris
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 25