Kai Zhang


2023

pdf
Aligning Instruction Tasks Unlocks Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Relation Extractors
Kai Zhang | Bernal Jimenez Gutierrez | Yu Su
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on large-scale instruction-following datasets substantially improves their performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, especially in the zero-shot setting. However, even advanced instruction-tuned LLMs still fail to outperform small LMs on relation extraction (RE), a fundamental information extraction task. We hypothesize that instruction-tuning has been unable to elicit strong RE capabilities in LLMs due to RE’s low incidence in instruction-tuning datasets, making up less than 1% of all tasks (Wang et al. 2022). To address this limitation, we propose QA4RE, a framework that aligns RE with question answering (QA), a predominant task in instruction-tuning datasets. Comprehensive zero-shot RE experiments over four datasets with two series of instruction-tuned LLMs (six LLMs in total) demonstrate that our QA4RE framework consistently improves LLM performance, strongly verifying our hypothesis and enabling LLMs to outperform strong zero-shot baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we provide thorough experiments and discussions to show the robustness, few-shot effectiveness, and strong transferability of our QA4RE framework. This work illustrates a promising way of adapting LLMs to challenging and underrepresented tasks by aligning these tasks with more common instruction-tuning tasks like QA.

pdf
Enhancing Hierarchical Text Classification through Knowledge Graph Integration
Ye Liu | Kai Zhang | Zhenya Huang | Kehang Wang | Yanghai Zhang | Qi Liu | Enhong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is an essential and challenging subtask of multi-label text classification with a taxonomic hierarchy. Recent advances in deep learning and pre-trained language models have led to significant breakthroughs in the HTC problem. However, despite their effectiveness, these methods are often restricted by a lack of domain knowledge, which leads them to make mistakes in a variety of situations. Generally, when manually classifying a specific document to the taxonomic hierarchy, experts make inference based on their prior knowledge and experience. For machines to achieve this capability, we propose a novel Knowledge-enabled Hierarchical Text Classification model (K-HTC), which incorporates knowledge graphs into HTC. Specifically, K-HTC innovatively integrates knowledge into both the text representation and hierarchical label learning process, addressing the knowledge limitations of traditional methods. Additionally, a novel knowledge-aware contrastive learning strategy is proposed to further exploit the information inherent in the data. Extensive experiments on two publicly available HTC datasets show the efficacy of our proposed method, and indicate the necessity of incorporating knowledge graphs in HTC tasks.

pdf
RHGN: Relation-gated Heterogeneous Graph Network for Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs
Xukai Liu | Kai Zhang | Ye Liu | Enhong Chen | Zhenya Huang | Linan Yue | Jiaxian Yan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Entity Alignment, which aims to identify equivalent entities from various Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is a fundamental and crucial task in knowledge graph fusion. Existing methods typically use triple or neighbor information to represent entities, and then align those entities using similarity matching. Most of them, however, fail to account for the heterogeneity among KGs and the distinction between KG entities and relations. To better solve these problems, we propose a Relation-gated Heterogeneous Graph Network (RHGN) for entity alignment. Specifically, RHGN contains a relation-gated convolutional layer to distinguish relations and entities in the KG. In addition, RHGN adopts a cross-graph embedding exchange module and a soft relation alignment module to address the neighbor heterogeneity and relation heterogeneity between different KGs, respectively. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that RHGN is superior to existing state-of-the-art entity alignment methods.

2022

pdf
CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character Representations
Borun Chen | Hongyin Tang | Jiahao Bu | Kai Zhang | Jingang Wang | Qifan Wang | Hai-Tao Zheng | Wei Wu | Liqian Yu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance gains across numerous downstream tasks in natural language understanding. Various Chinese PLMs have been successively proposed for learning better Chinese language representation. However, most current models use Chinese characters as inputs and are not able to encode semantic information contained in Chinese words. While recent pre-trained models incorporate both words and characters simultaneously, they usually suffer from deficient semantic interactions and fail to capture the semantic relation between words and characters. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective PLM CLOWER, which adopts the Contrastive Learning Over Word and charactER representations. In particular, CLOWER implicitly encodes the coarse-grained information (i.e., words) into the fine-grained representations (i.e., characters) through contrastive learning on multi-grained information. CLOWER is of great value in realistic scenarios since it can be easily incorporated into any existing fine-grained based PLMs without modifying the production pipelines. Extensive experiments conducted on a range of downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of CLOWER over several state-of-the-art baselines.

pdf
基于异构用户知识融合的隐式情感分析研究(Research on Implicit Sentiment Analysis based on Heterogeneous User Knowledge Fusion)
Jian Liao (廖健) | Kai Zhang (张楷) | Suge Wang (王素格) | Jia Lei (雷佳) | Yiyang Zhang (张益阳)
Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

“隐式情感分析因其缺乏显式情感线索的特性是情感分析领域的重要研究难点之一。传统的隐式情感分析方法通常针对隐式情感文本本身的信息进行建模,没有考虑隐式情感的主观差异性特征。本文提出了一种基于异构用户知识融合的隐式情感分析模型HELENE,首先从用户数据中挖掘用户异构的内容知识、社会化属性知识以及社会化关系知识,异构用户知识融合学习框架基于图神经网络模型结合动态预训练模型分别从用户的内部信息和外部信息两个维度对其进行画像建模;在此基础上与隐式情感文本语义信息进行融合学习,使得模型可以对隐式情感进行主观差异化建模表示。此外,本文构建了一个用户个性化通用情感分析语料库,涵盖了较为完整的文本内容信息、用户社会化属性信息和关系信息,可同时满足面向用户个性化建模的隐式或显式情感分析相关研究任务的需要。在所构建数据集上的实验结果显示,本文的方法相比基线模型在用户个性化隐式情感分析任务上具有显著的提升效果。”

pdf
Incorporating Dynamic Semantics into Pre-Trained Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Kai Zhang | Kun Zhang | Mengdi Zhang | Hongke Zhao | Qi Liu | Wei Wu | Enhong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in the given sentence. While pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved great success, incorporating dynamic semantic changes into ABSA remains challenging. To this end, in this paper, we propose to address this problem by Dynamic Re-weighting BERT (DR-BERT), a novel method designed to learn dynamic aspect-oriented semantics for ABSA. Specifically, we first take the Stack-BERT layers as a primary encoder to grasp the overall semantic of the sentence and then fine-tune it by incorporating a lightweight Dynamic Re-weighting Adapter (DRA). Note that the DRA can pay close attention to a small region of the sentences at each step and re-weigh the vitally important words for better aspect-aware sentiment understanding. Finally, experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the rationality of our proposed model and provide good interpretable insights for future semantic modeling.

pdf
Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation
Kai Zhang | Yu Wang | Hongyi Wang | Lifu Huang | Carl Yang | Xun Chen | Lichao Sun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Federated learning (FL) can be essential in knowledge representation, reasoning, and data mining applications over multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs). A recent study FedE first proposes an FL framework that shares entity embeddings of KGs across all clients. However, entity embedding sharing from FedE would incur a severe privacy leakage. Specifically, the known entity embedding can be used to infer whether a specific relation between two entities exists in a private client. In this paper, we introduce a novel attack method that aims to recover the original data based on the embedding information, which is further used to evaluate the vulnerabilities of FedE. Furthermore, we propose a Federated learning paradigm with privacy-preserving Relation embedding aggregation (FedR) to tackle the privacy issue in FedE. Besides, relation embedding sharing can significantly reduce the communication cost due to its smaller size of queries. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate FedR with five different KG embedding models and three datasets. Compared to FedE, FedR achieves similar utility and significant improvements regarding privacy-preserving effect and communication efficiency on the link prediction task.

2021

pdf
GradTS: A Gradient-Based Automatic Auxiliary Task Selection Method Based on Transformer Networks
Weicheng Ma | Renze Lou | Kai Zhang | Lili Wang | Soroush Vosoughi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

A key problem in multi-task learning (MTL) research is how to select high-quality auxiliary tasks automatically. This paper presents GradTS, an automatic auxiliary task selection method based on gradient calculation in Transformer-based models. Compared to AUTOSEM, a strong baseline method, GradTS improves the performance of MT-DNN with a bert-base-cased backend model, from 0.33% to 17.93% on 8 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in the GLUE benchmarks. GradTS is also time-saving since (1) its gradient calculations are based on single-task experiments and (2) the gradients are re-used without additional experiments when the candidate task set changes. On the 8 GLUE classification tasks, for example, GradTS costs on average 21.32% less time than AUTOSEM with comparable GPU consumption. Further, we show the robustness of GradTS across various task settings and model selections, e.g. mixed objectives among candidate tasks. The efficiency and efficacy of GradTS in these case studies illustrate its general applicability in MTL research without requiring manual task filtering or costly parameter tuning.

pdf
Contributions of Transformer Attention Heads in Multi- and Cross-lingual Tasks
Weicheng Ma | Kai Zhang | Renze Lou | Lili Wang | Soroush Vosoughi
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)

This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each mono-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) task and pruning the remaining heads leads to comparable or improved performance of the model. However, the impact of pruning attention heads is not yet clear in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that (1) pruning a number of attention heads in a multi-lingual Transformer-based model has, in general, positive effects on its performance in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks and (2) the attention heads to be pruned can be ranked using gradients and identified with a few trial experiments. Our experiments focus on sequence labeling tasks, with potential applicability on other cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. For comprehensiveness, we examine two pre-trained multi-lingual models, namely multi-lingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM-R, on three tasks across 9 languages each. We also discuss the validity of our findings and their extensibility to truly resource-scarce languages and other task settings.

pdf
Open Hierarchical Relation Extraction
Kai Zhang | Yuan Yao | Ruobing Xie | Xu Han | Zhiyuan Liu | Fen Lin | Leyu Lin | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Open relation extraction (OpenRE) aims to extract novel relation types from open-domain corpora, which plays an important role in completing the relation schemes of knowledge bases (KBs). Most OpenRE methods cast different relation types in isolation without considering their hierarchical dependency. We argue that OpenRE is inherently in close connection with relation hierarchies. To establish the bidirectional connections between OpenRE and relation hierarchy, we propose the task of open hierarchical relation extraction and present a novel OHRE framework for the task. We propose a dynamic hierarchical triplet objective and hierarchical curriculum training paradigm, to effectively integrate hierarchy information into relation representations for better novel relation extraction. We also present a top-down hierarchy expansion algorithm to add the extracted relations into existing hierarchies with reasonable interpretability. Comprehensive experiments show that OHRE outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin on both relation clustering and hierarchy expansion.

2020

pdf
Multi-Stage Pre-training for Automated Chinese Essay Scoring
Wei Song | Kai Zhang | Ruiji Fu | Lizhen Liu | Ting Liu | Miaomiao Cheng
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

This paper proposes a pre-training based automated Chinese essay scoring method. The method involves three components: weakly supervised pre-training, supervised cross- prompt fine-tuning and supervised target- prompt fine-tuning. An essay scorer is first pre- trained on a large essay dataset covering diverse topics and with coarse ratings, i.e., good and poor, which are used as a kind of weak supervision. The pre-trained essay scorer would be further fine-tuned on previously rated es- says from existing prompts, which have the same score range with the target prompt and provide extra supervision. At last, the scorer is fine-tuned on the target-prompt training data. The evaluation on four prompts shows that this method can improve a state-of-the-art neural essay scorer in terms of effectiveness and domain adaptation ability, while in-depth analysis also reveals its limitations..

pdf
Cascaded Semantic and Positional Self-Attention Network for Document Classification
Juyong Jiang | Jie Zhang | Kai Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Transformers have shown great success in learning representations for language modelling. However, an open challenge still remains on how to systematically aggregate semantic information (word embedding) with positional (or temporal) information (word orders). In this work, we propose a new architecture to aggregate the two sources of information using cascaded semantic and positional self-attention network (CSPAN) in the context of document classification. The CSPAN uses a semantic self-attention layer cascaded with Bi-LSTM to process the semantic and positional information in a sequential manner, and then adaptively combine them together through a residue connection. Compared with commonly used positional encoding schemes, CSPAN can exploit the interaction between semantics and word positions in a more interpretable and adaptive manner, and the classification performance can be notably improved while simultaneously preserving a compact model size and high convergence rate. We evaluate the CSPAN model on several benchmark data sets for document classification with careful ablation studies, and demonstrate the encouraging results compared with state of the art.

2019

pdf
Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain Conversation
Kun Zhou | Kai Zhang | Yu Wu | Shujie Liu | Jingsong Yu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Context modeling has a pivotal role in open domain conversation. Existing works either use heuristic methods or jointly learn context modeling and response generation with an encoder-decoder framework. This paper proposes an explicit context rewriting method, which rewrites the last utterance by considering context history. We leverage pseudo-parallel data and elaborate a context rewriting network, which is built upon the CopyNet with the reinforcement learning method. The rewritten utterance is beneficial to candidate retrieval, explainable context modeling, as well as enabling to employ a single-turn framework to the multi-turn scenario. The empirical results show that our model outperforms baselines in terms of the rewriting quality, the multi-turn response generation, and the end-to-end retrieval-based chatbots.

pdf
TOI-CNN: a Solution of Information Extraction on Chinese Insurance Policy
Lin Sun | Kai Zhang | Fule Ji | Zhenhua Yang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)

Contract analysis can significantly ease the work for humans using AI techniques. This paper shows a problem of Element Tagging on Insurance Policy (ETIP). A novel Text-Of-Interest Convolutional Neural Network (TOI-CNN) is proposed for the ETIP solution. We introduce a TOI pooling layer to replace traditional pooling layer for processing the nested phrasal or clausal elements in insurance policies. The advantage of TOI pooling layer is that the nested elements from one sentence could share computation and context in the forward and backward passes. The computation of backpropagation through TOI pooling is also demonstrated in the paper. We have collected a large Chinese insurance contract dataset and labeled the critical elements of seven categories to test the performance of the proposed method. The results show the promising performance of our method in the ETIP problem.