Tao Li


2023

pdf
An Extensible Plug-and-Play Method for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation
Xuancheng Huang | Zijun Liu | Peng Li | Tao Li | Maosong Sun | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, multi-aspect controllable text generation that controls the generated text in multiple aspects (e.g., sentiment, topic, and keywords) has attracted increasing attention. Although methods based on parameter efficient tuning like prefix-tuning could achieve multi-aspect controlling in a plug-and-play way, the mutual interference of multiple prefixes leads to significant degeneration of constraints and limits their extensibility to training-time unseen aspect combinations. In this work, we provide a theoretical lower bound for the interference and empirically found that the interference grows with the number of layers where prefixes are inserted. Based on these analyses, we propose using trainable gates to normalize the intervention of prefixes to restrain the growing interference. As a result, controlling training-time unseen combinations of aspects can be realized by simply concatenating corresponding plugins such that new constraints can be extended at a lower cost. In addition, we propose a unified way to process both categorical and free-form constraints. Experiments on text generation and machine translation demonstrate the superiority of our approach over baselines on constraint accuracy, text quality, and extensibility.

2021

pdf
OSCaR: Orthogonal Subspace Correction and Rectification of Biases in Word Embeddings
Sunipa Dev | Tao Li | Jeff M Phillips | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Language representations are known to carry stereotypical biases and, as a result, lead to biased predictions in downstream tasks. While existing methods are effective at mitigating biases by linear projection, such methods are too aggressive: they not only remove bias, but also erase valuable information from word embeddings. We develop new measures for evaluating specific information retention that demonstrate the tradeoff between bias removal and information retention. To address this challenge, we propose OSCaR (Orthogonal Subspace Correction and Rectification), a bias-mitigating method that focuses on disentangling biased associations between concepts instead of removing concepts wholesale. Our experiments on gender biases show that OSCaR is a well-balanced approach that ensures that semantic information is retained in the embeddings and bias is also effectively mitigated.

pdf
Automatic Entity State Annotation using the VerbNet Semantic Parser
Ghazaleh Kazeminejad | Martha Palmer | Tao Li | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop

Tracking entity states is a natural language processing task assumed to require human annotation. In order to reduce the time and expenses associated with annotation, we introduce a new method to automatically extract entity states, including location and existence state of entities, following Dalvi et al. (2018) and Tandon et al. (2020). For this purpose, we rely primarily on the semantic representations generated by the state of the art VerbNet parser (Gung, 2020), and extract the entities (event participants) and their states, based on the semantic predicates of the generated VerbNet semantic representation, which is in propositional logic format. For evaluation, we used ProPara (Dalvi et al., 2018), a reading comprehension dataset which is annotated with entity states in each sentence, and tracks those states in paragraphs of natural human-authored procedural texts. Given the presented limitations of the method, the peculiarities of the ProPara dataset annotations, and that our system, Lexis, makes no use of task-specific training data and relies solely on VerbNet, the results are promising, showcasing the value of lexical resources.

2020

pdf
Structured Tuning for Semantic Role Labeling
Tao Li | Parth Anand Jawale | Martha Palmer | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent neural network-driven semantic role labeling (SRL) systems have shown impressive improvements in F1 scores. These improvements are due to expressive input representations, which, at least at the surface, are orthogonal to knowledge-rich constrained decoding mechanisms that helped linear SRL models. Introducing the benefits of structure to inform neural models presents a methodological challenge. In this paper, we present a structured tuning framework to improve models using softened constraints only at training time. Our framework leverages the expressiveness of neural networks and provides supervision with structured loss components. We start with a strong baseline (RoBERTa) to validate the impact of our approach, and show that our framework outperforms the baseline by learning to comply with declarative constraints. Additionally, our experiments with smaller training sizes show that we can achieve consistent improvements under low-resource scenarios.

pdf
UNQOVERing Stereotyping Biases via Underspecified Questions
Tao Li | Daniel Khashabi | Tushar Khot | Ashish Sabharwal | Vivek Srikumar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

While language embeddings have been shown to have stereotyping biases, how these biases affect downstream question answering (QA) models remains unexplored. We present UNQOVER, a general framework to probe and quantify biases through underspecified questions. We show that a naive use of model scores can lead to incorrect bias estimates due to two forms of reasoning errors: positional dependence and question independence. We design a formalism that isolates the aforementioned errors. As case studies, we use this metric to analyze four important classes of stereotypes: gender, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. We probe five transformer-based QA models trained on two QA datasets, along with their underlying language models. Our broad study reveals that (1) all these models, with and without fine-tuning, have notable stereotyping biases in these classes; (2) larger models often have higher bias; and (3) the effect of fine-tuning on bias varies strongly with the dataset and the model size.

2019

pdf
A Logic-Driven Framework for Consistency of Neural Models
Tao Li | Vivek Gupta | Maitrey Mehta | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

While neural models show remarkable accuracy on individual predictions, their internal beliefs can be inconsistent across examples. In this paper, we formalize such inconsistency as a generalization of prediction error. We propose a learning framework for constraining models using logic rules to regularize them away from inconsistency. Our framework can leverage both labeled and unlabeled examples and is directly compatible with off-the-shelf learning schemes without model redesign. We instantiate our framework on natural language inference, where experiments show that enforcing invariants stated in logic can help make the predictions of neural models both accurate and consistent.

pdf
Augmenting Neural Networks with First-order Logic
Tao Li | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Today, the dominant paradigm for training neural networks involves minimizing task loss on a large dataset. Using world knowledge to inform a model, and yet retain the ability to perform end-to-end training remains an open question. In this paper, we present a novel framework for introducing declarative knowledge to neural network architectures in order to guide training and prediction. Our framework systematically compiles logical statements into computation graphs that augment a neural network without extra learnable parameters or manual redesign. We evaluate our modeling strategy on three tasks: machine comprehension, natural language inference, and text chunking. Our experiments show that knowledge-augmented networks can strongly improve over baselines, especially in low-data regimes.

2018

pdf
Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis with Gated Convolutional Networks
Wei Xue | Tao Li
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) can provide more detailed information than general sentiment analysis, because it aims to predict the sentiment polarities of the given aspects or entities in text. We summarize previous approaches into two subtasks: aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA). Most previous approaches employ long short-term memory and attention mechanisms to predict the sentiment polarity of the concerned targets, which are often complicated and need more training time. We propose a model based on convolutional neural networks and gating mechanisms, which is more accurate and efficient. First, the novel Gated Tanh-ReLU Units can selectively output the sentiment features according to the given aspect or entity. The architecture is much simpler than attention layer used in the existing models. Second, the computations of our model could be easily parallelized during training, because convolutional layers do not have time dependency as in LSTM layers, and gating units also work independently. The experiments on SemEval datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our models.

pdf
Visual Interrogation of Attention-Based Models for Natural Language Inference and Machine Comprehension
Shusen Liu | Tao Li | Zhimin Li | Vivek Srikumar | Valerio Pascucci | Peer-Timo Bremer
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Neural networks models have gained unprecedented popularity in natural language processing due to their state-of-the-art performance and the flexible end-to-end training scheme. Despite their advantages, the lack of interpretability hinders the deployment and refinement of the models. In this work, we present a flexible visualization library for creating customized visual analytic environments, in which the user can investigate and interrogate the relationships among the input, the model internals (i.e., attention), and the output predictions, which in turn shed light on the model decision-making process.

2017

pdf
MTNA: A Neural Multi-task Model for Aspect Category Classification and Aspect Term Extraction On Restaurant Reviews
Wei Xue | Wubai Zhou | Tao Li | Qing Wang
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Online reviews are valuable resources not only for consumers to make decisions before purchase, but also for providers to get feedbacks for their services or commodities. In Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), it is critical to identify aspect categories and extract aspect terms from the sentences of user-generated reviews. However, the two tasks are often treated independently, even though they are closely related. Intuitively, the learned knowledge of one task should inform the other learning task. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model based on neural networks to solve them together. We demonstrate the improved performance of our multi-task learning model over the models trained separately on three public dataset released by SemEval workshops.

2016

pdf
Exploiting Sentence Similarities for Better Alignments
Tao Li | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

pdf
Co-training for Semi-supervised Sentiment Classification Based on Dual-view Bags-of-words Representation
Rui Xia | Cheng Wang | Xin-Yu Dai | Tao Li
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2013

pdf
A Participant-based Approach for Event Summarization Using Twitter Streams
Chao Shen | Fei Liu | Fuliang Weng | Tao Li
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2011

pdf
A Non-negative Matrix Factorization Based Approach for Active Dual Supervision from Document and Word Labels
Chao Shen | Tao Li
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2010

pdf
Multi-Document Summarization via the Minimum Dominating Set
Chao Shen | Tao Li
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

2009

pdf
A Non-negative Matrix Tri-factorization Approach to Sentiment Classification with Lexical Prior Knowledge
Tao Li | Yi Zhang | Vikas Sindhwani
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP

pdf
Multi-Document Summarization using Sentence-based Topic Models
Dingding Wang | Shenghuo Zhu | Tao Li | Yihong Gong
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers