Tat-Seng Chua

Also published as: Tat Seng Chua, Tat-seng Chua


2023

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Cross2StrA: Unpaired Cross-lingual Image Captioning with Cross-lingual Cross-modal Structure-pivoted Alignment
Shengqiong Wu | Hao Fei | Wei Ji | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Unpaired cross-lingual image captioning has long suffered from irrelevancy and disfluency issues, due to the inconsistencies of the semantic scene and syntax attributes during transfer. In this work, we propose to address the above problems by incorporating the scene graph (SG) structures and the syntactic constituency (SC) trees. Our captioner contains the semantic structure-guided image-to-pivot captioning and the syntactic structure-guided pivot-to-target translation, two of which are joined via pivot language. We then take the SG and SC structures as pivoting, performing cross-modal semantic structure alignment and cross-lingual syntactic structure alignment learning. We further introduce cross-lingual&cross-modal back-translation training to fully align the captioning and translation stages. Experiments on English-Chinese transfers show that our model shows great superiority in improving captioning relevancy and fluency.

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Scene Graph as Pivoting: Inference-time Image-free Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Hallucination
Hao Fei | Qian Liu | Meishan Zhang | Min Zhang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In this work, we investigate a more realistic unsupervised multimodal machine translation (UMMT) setup, inference-time image-free UMMT, where the model is trained with source-text image pairs, and tested with only source-text inputs. First, we represent the input images and texts with the visual and language scene graphs (SG), where such fine-grained vision-language features ensure a holistic understanding of the semantics. To enable pure-text input during inference, we devise a visual scene hallucination mechanism that dynamically generates pseudo visual SG from the given textual SG. Several SG-pivoting based learning objectives are introduced for unsupervised translation training. On the benchmark Multi30K data, our SG-based method outperforms the best-performing baseline by significant BLEU scores on the task and setup, helping yield translations with better completeness, relevance and fluency without relying on paired images. Further in-depth analyses reveal how our model advances in the task setting.

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Generating Visual Spatial Description via Holistic 3D Scene Understanding
Yu Zhao | Hao Fei | Wei Ji | Jianguo Wei | Meishan Zhang | Min Zhang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Visual spatial description (VSD) aims to generate texts that describe the spatial relations of the given objects within images. Existing VSD work merely models the 2D geometrical vision features, thus inevitably falling prey to the problem of skewed spatial understanding of target objects. In this work, we investigate the incorporation of 3D scene features for VSD. With an external 3D scene extractor, we obtain the 3D objects and scene features for input images, based on which we construct a target object-centered 3D spatial scene graph (Go3D-S2G), such that we model the spatial semantics of target objects within the holistic 3D scenes. Besides, we propose a scene subgraph selecting mechanism, sampling topologically-diverse subgraphs from Go3D-S2G, where the diverse local structure features are navigated to yield spatially-diversified text generation. Experimental results on two VSD datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines significantly, especially improving on the cases with complex visual spatial relations. Meanwhile, our method can produce more spatially-diversified generation.

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Information Screening whilst Exploiting! Multimodal Relation Extraction with Feature Denoising and Multimodal Topic Modeling
Shengqiong Wu | Hao Fei | Yixin Cao | Lidong Bing | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Existing research on multimodal relation extraction (MRE) faces two co-existing challenges, internal-information over-utilization and external-information under-exploitation. To combat that, we propose a novel framework that simultaneously implements the idea of internal-information screening and external-information exploiting. First, we represent the fine-grained semantic structures of the input image and text with the visual and textual scene graphs, which are further fused into a unified cross-modal graph (CMG). Based on CMG, we perform structure refinement with the guidance of the graph information bottleneck principle, actively denoising the less-informative features. Next, we perform topic modeling over the input image and text, incorporating latent multimodal topic features to enrich the contexts. On the benchmark MRE dataset, our system outperforms the current best model significantly. With further in-depth analyses, we reveal the great potential of our method for the MRE task.

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Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting
Hao Fei | Bobo Li | Qian Liu | Lidong Bing | Fei Li | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

While sentiment analysis systems try to determine the sentiment polarities of given targets based on the key opinion expressions in input texts, in implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. Thus detecting implicit sentiment requires the common-sense and multi-hop reasoning ability to infer the latent intent of opinion. Inspired by the recent chain-of-thought (CoT) idea, in this work we introduce a Three-hop Reasoning (THOR) CoT framework to mimic the human-like reasoning process for ISA. We design a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion, and finally the sentiment polarity. Our THOR+Flan-T5 (11B) pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup. More strikingly, THOR+GPT3 (175B) boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 on zero-shot setting.

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Goal Awareness for Conversational AI: Proactivity, Non-collaborativity, and Beyond
Yang Deng | Wenqiang Lei | Minlie Huang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Tutorial Abstracts)

Conversational systems are envisioned to provide social support or functional service to human users via natural language interactions. Conventional conversation researches mainly focus on the responseability of the system, such as dialogue context understanding and response generation, but overlooks the design of an essential property in intelligent conversations, i.e., goal awareness. The awareness of goals means the state of not only being responsive to the users but also aware of the target conversational goal and capable of leading the conversation towards the goal, which is a significant step towards higher-level intelligence and artificial consciousness. It can not only largely improve user engagement and service efficiency in the conversation, but also empower the system to handle more complicated conversation tasks that involve strategical and motivational interactions. In this tutorial, we will introduce the recent advances on the design of agent’s awareness of goals in a wide range of conversational systems.

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Hypothetical Training for Robust Machine Reading Comprehension of Tabular Context
Moxin Li | Wenjie Wang | Fuli Feng | Hanwang Zhang | Qifan Wang | Tat-Seng Chua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models easily learn spurious correlations from complex contexts such as tabular data. Counterfactual training—using the factual and counterfactual data by augmentation—has become a promising solution. However, it is costly to construct faithful counterfactual examples because it is tricky to maintain the consistency and dependency of the tabular data. In this paper, we take a more efficient fashion to ask hypothetical questions like “in which year would the net profit be larger if the revenue in 2019 were $38,298?”, whose effects on the answers are equivalent to those expensive counterfactual tables. We propose a hypothetical training framework that uses paired examples with different hypothetical questions to supervise the direction of model gradient towards the counterfactual answer change. The superior generalization results on tabular MRC datasets, including a newly constructed stress test and MultiHiertt, validate our effectiveness.

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Improving Named Entity Recognition via Bridge-based Domain Adaptation
Jingyun Xu | Changmeng Zheng | Yi Cai | Tat-Seng Chua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in cross-domain named entity recognition (cross-domain NER). Despite the promising results, existing methods mainly utilize pre-training language models like BERT to represent words. As such, the original chaotic representations may challenge them to distinguish entity types of entities, leading to entity type misclassification. To this end, we attempt to utilize contrastive learning to refine the original representations and propose a model-agnostic framework named MoCL for cross-domain NER. Additionally, we respectively combine MoCL with two distinctive cross-domain NER methods and two pre-training language models to explore its generalization ability. Empirical results on seven domains show the effectiveness and good generalization ability of MoCL.

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Constructing Code-mixed Universal Dependency Forest for Unbiased Cross-lingual Relation Extraction
Hao Fei | Meishan Zhang | Min Zhang | Tat-Seng Chua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Latest efforts on cross-lingual relation extraction (XRE) aggressively leverage the language-consistent structural features from the universal dependency (UD) resource, while they may largely suffer from biased transfer (e.g., either target-biased or source-biased) due to the inevitable linguistic disparity between languages. In this work, we investigate an unbiased UD- based XRE transfer by constructing a type of code-mixed UD forest. We first translate the sentence of the source language to the parallel target-side language, for both of which we parse the UD tree respectively. Then, we merge the source-/target-side UD structures as a unified code-mixed UD forest. With such forest features, the gaps of UD-based XRE between the training and predicting phases can be effectively closed. We conduct experiments on the ACE XRE benchmark datasets, where the results demonstrate that the proposed code-mixed UD forests help unbiased UD-based XRE transfer, with which we achieve significant XRE performance gains.

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Two Heads Are Better Than One: Improving Fake News Video Detection by Correlating with Neighbors
Peng Qi | Yuyang Zhao | Yufeng Shen | Wei Ji | Juan Cao | Tat-Seng Chua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

The prevalence of short video platforms has spawned a lot of fake news videos, which have stronger propagation ability than textual fake news. Thus, automatically detecting fake news videos has been an important countermeasure in practice. Previous works commonly verify each news video individually with multimodal information. Nevertheless, news videos from different perspectives regarding the same event are commonly posted together, which contain complementary or contradictory information and thus can be used to evaluate each other mutually. To this end, we introduce a new and practical paradigm, i.e., cross-sample fake news video detection, and propose a novel framework, Neighbor-Enhanced fakE news video Detection (NEED), which integrates the neighborhood relationship of new videos belonging to the same event. NEED can be readily combined with existing single-sample detectors and further enhance their performances with the proposed graph aggregation (GA) and debunking rectification (DR) modules. Specifically, given the feature representations obtained from single-sample detectors, GA aggregates the neighborhood information with the dynamic graph to enrich the features of independent samples. After that, DR explicitly leverages the relationship between debunking videos and fake news videos to refute the candidate videos via textual and visual consistency. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark demonstrate that NEED greatly improves the performance of both single-modal (up to 8.34% in accuracy) and multimodal (up to 4.97% in accuracy) base detectors.

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DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis
Bobo Li | Hao Fei | Fei Li | Yuhan Wu | Jinsong Zhang | Shengqiong Wu | Jingye Li | Yijiang Liu | Lizi Liao | Tat-Seng Chua | Donghong Ji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

The rapid development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) within recent decades shows great potential for real-world society. The current ABSA works, however, are mostly limited to the scenario of a single text piece, leaving the study in dialogue contexts unexplored. To bridge the gap between fine-grained sentiment analysis and conversational opinion mining, in this work, we introduce a novel task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis, namely DiaASQ, aiming to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. We manually construct a large-scale high-quality DiaASQ dataset in both Chinese and English languages. We deliberately develop a neural model to benchmark the task, which advances in effectively performing end-to-end quadruple prediction, and manages to incorporate rich dialogue-specific and discourse feature representations for better cross-utterance quadruple extraction. We hope the new benchmark will spur more advancements in the sentiment analysis community.

2022

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Semi-supervised New Slot Discovery with Incremental Clustering
Yuxia Wu | Lizi Liao | Xueming Qian | Tat-Seng Chua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Discovering new slots is critical to the success of dialogue systems. Most existing methods rely on automatic slot induction in unsupervised fashion or perform domain adaptation across zero or few-shot scenarios. They have difficulties in providing high-quality supervised signals to learn clustering-friendly features, and are limited in effectively transferring the prior knowledge from known slots to new slots. In this work, we propose a Semi-supervised Incremental Clustering method (SIC), to discover new slots with the aid of existing linguistic annotation models and limited known slot data. Specifically, we harvest slot value candidates with NLP model cues and innovatively formulate the slot discovery task under an incremental clustering framework. The model gradually calibrate slot representations under the supervision of generated pseudo-labels, and automatically learns to terminate when no more salient slot remains. Our thorough evaluation on five public datasets demonstrates that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

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Learning to Imagine: Integrating Counterfactual Thinking in Neural Discrete Reasoning
Moxin Li | Fuli Feng | Hanwang Zhang | Xiangnan He | Fengbin Zhu | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Neural discrete reasoning (NDR) has shown remarkable progress in combining deep models with discrete reasoning. However, we find that existing NDR solution suffers from large performance drop on hypothetical questions, e.g. “what the annualized rate of return would be if the revenue in 2020 was doubled”. The key to hypothetical question answering (HQA) is counterfactual thinking, which is a natural ability of human reasoning but difficult for deep models. In this work, we devise a Learning to Imagine (L2I) module, which can be seamlessly incorporated into NDR models to perform the imagination of unseen counterfactual. In particular, we formulate counterfactual thinking into two steps: 1) identifying the fact to intervene, and 2) deriving the counterfactual from the fact and assumption, which are designed as neural networks. Based on TAT-QA, we construct a very challenging HQA dataset with 8,283 hypothetical questions. We apply the proposed L2I to TAGOP, the state-of-the-art solution on TAT-QA, validating the rationality and effectiveness of our approach.

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ConReader: Exploring Implicit Relations in Contracts for Contract Clause Extraction
Weiwen Xu | Yang Deng | Wenqiang Lei | Wenlong Zhao | Tat-Seng Chua | Wai Lam
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We study automatic Contract Clause Extraction (CCE) by modeling implicit relations in legal contracts. Existing CCE methods mostly treat contracts as plain text, creating a substantial barrier to understanding contracts of high complexity. In this work, we first comprehensively analyze the complexity issues of contracts and distill out three implicit relations commonly found in contracts, namely, 1) Long-range Context Relation that captures the correlations of distant clauses; 2) Term-Definition Relation that captures the relation between important terms with their corresponding definitions, and 3) Similar Clause Relation that captures the similarities between clauses of the same type. Then we propose a novel framework ConReader to exploit the above three relations for better contract understanding and improving CCE. Experimental results show that ConReader makes the prediction more interpretable and achieves new state-of-the-art on two CCE tasks in both conventional and zero-shot settings.

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Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges
Yaoyao Zhong | Wei Ji | Junbin Xiao | Yicong Li | Weihong Deng | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This survey aims to sort out the recent advances in video question answering (VideoQA) and point towards future directions. We firstly categorize the datasets into 1) normal VideoQA, multi-modal VideoQA and knowledge-based VideoQA, according to the modalities invoked in the question-answer pairs, or 2) factoid VideoQA and inference VideoQA, according to the technical challenges in comprehending the questions and deriving the correct answers. We then summarize the VideoQA techniques, including those mainly designed for Factoid QA (e.g., the early spatio-temporal attention-based methods and the recently Transformer-based ones) and those targeted at explicit relation and logic inference (e.g., neural modular networks, neural symbolic methods, and graph-structured methods). Aside from the backbone techniques, we delve into the specific models and find out some common and useful insights either for video modeling, question answering, or for cross-modal correspondence learning. Finally, we point out the research trend of studying beyond factoid VideoQA to inference VideoQA, as well as towards the robustness and interpretability. Additionally, we maintain a repository, https://github.com/VRU-NExT/VideoQA, to keep trace of the latest VideoQA papers, datasets, and their open-source implementations if available. With these efforts, we strongly hope this survey could shed light on the follow-up VideoQA research.

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PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance
Yang Deng | Wenqiang Lei | Wenxuan Zhang | Wai Lam | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

To facilitate conversational question answering (CQA) over hybrid contexts in finance, we present a new dataset, named PACIFIC. Compared with existing CQA datasets, PACIFIC exhibits three key features: (i) proactivity, (ii) numerical reasoning, and (iii) hybrid context of tables and text. A new task is defined accordingly to study Proactive Conversational Question Answering (PCQA), which combines clarification question generation and CQA. In addition, we propose a novel method, namely UniPCQA, to adapt a hybrid format of input and output content in PCQA into the Seq2Seq problem, including the reformulation of the numerical reasoning process as code generation. UniPCQA performs multi-task learning over all sub-tasks in PCQA and incorporates a simple ensemble strategy to alleviate the error propagation issue in the multi-task learning by cross-validating top-k sampled Seq2Seq outputs. We benchmark the PACIFIC dataset with extensive baselines and provide comprehensive evaluations on each sub-task of PCQA.

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PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models
Yuan Yao | Qianyu Chen | Ao Zhang | Wei Ji | Zhiyuan Liu | Tat-Seng Chua | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) has shown impressive performance on a wide range of cross-modal tasks, where VLP models without reliance on object detectors are becoming the mainstream due to their superior computation efficiency and competitive performance. However, the removal of object detectors also deprives the capability of VLP models in explicit object modeling, which is essential to various position-sensitive vision-language (VL) tasks, such as referring expression comprehension and visual commonsense reasoning. To address the challenge, we introduce PEVL that enhances the pre-training and prompt tuning of VLP models with explicit object position modeling. Specifically, PEVL reformulates discretized object positions and language in a unified language modeling framework, which facilitates explicit VL alignment during pre-training, and also enables flexible prompt tuning for various downstream tasks. We show that PEVL enables state-of-the-art performance of detector-free VLP models on position-sensitive tasks such as referring expression comprehension and phrase grounding, and also improves the performance on position-insensitive tasks with grounded inputs. We make the data and code for this paper publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/PEVL.

2021

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Empowering Language Understanding with Counterfactual Reasoning
Fuli Feng | Jizhi Zhang | Xiangnan He | Hanwang Zhang | Tat-Seng Chua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance
Fengbin Zhu | Wenqiang Lei | Youcheng Huang | Chao Wang | Shuo Zhang | Jiancheng Lv | Fuli Feng | Tat-Seng Chua
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)

Hybrid data combining both tabular and textual content (e.g., financial reports) are quite pervasive in the real world. However, Question Answering (QA) over such hybrid data is largely neglected in existing research. In this work, we extract samples from real financial reports to build a new large-scale QA dataset containing both Tabular And Textual data, named TAT-QA, where numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, counting, comparison/sorting, and the compositions. We further propose a novel QA model termed TAGOP, which is capable of reasoning over both tables and text. It adopts sequence tagging to extract relevant cells from the table along with relevant spans from the text to infer their semantics, and then applies symbolic reasoning over them with a set of aggregation operators to arrive at the final answer. TAGOP achieves 58.0% inF1, which is an 11.1% absolute increase over the previous best baseline model, according to our experiments on TAT-QA. But this result still lags far behind performance of expert human, i.e.90.8% in F1. It is demonstrated that our TAT-QA is very challenging and can serve as a benchmark for training and testing powerful QA models that address hybrid form data.

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How Knowledge Graph and Attention Help? A Qualitative Analysis into Bag-level Relation Extraction
Zikun Hu | Yixin Cao | Lifu Huang | Tat-Seng Chua
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)

Knowledge Graph (KG) and attention mechanism have been demonstrated effective in introducing and selecting useful information for weakly supervised methods. However, only qualitative analysis and ablation study are provided as evidence. In this paper, we contribute a dataset and propose a paradigm to quantitatively evaluate the effect of attention and KG on bag-level relation extraction (RE). We find that (1) higher attention accuracy may lead to worse performance as it may harm the model’s ability to extract entity mention features; (2) the performance of attention is largely influenced by various noise distribution patterns, which is closely related to real-world datasets; (3) KG-enhanced attention indeed improves RE performance, while not through enhanced attention but by incorporating entity prior; and (4) attention mechanism may exacerbate the issue of insufficient training data. Based on these findings, we show that a straightforward variant of RE model can achieve significant improvements (6% AUC on average) on two real-world datasets as compared with three state-of-the-art baselines. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/zig-kwin-hu/how-KG-ATT-help.

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Dialogue State Tracking with Incremental Reasoning
Lizi Liao | Le Hong Long | Yunshan Ma | Wenqiang Lei | Tat-Seng Chua
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

Tracking dialogue states to better interpret user goals and feed downstream policy learning is a bottleneck in dialogue management. Common practice has been to treat it as a problem of classifying dialogue content into a set of pre-defined slot-value pairs, or generating values for different slots given the dialogue history. Both have limitations on considering dependencies that occur on dialogues, and are lacking of reasoning capabilities. This paper proposes to track dialogue states gradually with reasoning over dialogue turns with the help of the back-end data. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of joint belief accuracy for MultiWOZ 2.1, a large-scale human–human dialogue dataset across multiple domains.

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Neural Quality Estimation with Multiple Hypotheses for Grammatical Error Correction
Zhenghao Liu | Xiaoyuan Yi | Maosong Sun | Liner Yang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to correct writing errors and help language learners improve their writing skills. However, existing GEC models tend to produce spurious corrections or fail to detect lots of errors. The quality estimation model is necessary to ensure learners get accurate GEC results and avoid misleading from poorly corrected sentences. Well-trained GEC models can generate several high-quality hypotheses through decoding, such as beam search, which provide valuable GEC evidence and can be used to evaluate GEC quality. However, existing models neglect the possible GEC evidence from different hypotheses. This paper presents the Neural Verification Network (VERNet) for GEC quality estimation with multiple hypotheses. VERNet establishes interactions among hypotheses with a reasoning graph and conducts two kinds of attention mechanisms to propagate GEC evidence to verify the quality of generated hypotheses. Our experiments on four GEC datasets show that VERNet achieves state-of-the-art grammatical error detection performance, achieves the best quality estimation results, and significantly improves GEC performance by reranking hypotheses. All data and source codes are available at https://github.com/thunlp/VERNet.

2020

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Learning Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy with opposite Agent Awareness
Zheng Zhang | Lizi Liao | Xiaoyan Zhu | Tat-Seng Chua | Zitao Liu | Yan Huang | Minlie Huang
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Most existing approaches for goal-oriented dialogue policy learning used reinforcement learning, which focuses on the target agent policy and simply treats the opposite agent policy as part of the environment. While in real-world scenarios, the behavior of an opposite agent often exhibits certain patterns or underlies hidden policies, which can be inferred and utilized by the target agent to facilitate its own decision making. This strategy is common in human mental simulation by first imaging a specific action and the probable results before really acting it. We therefore propose an opposite behavior aware framework for policy learning in goal-oriented dialogues. We estimate the opposite agent’s policy from its behavior and use this estimation to improve the target agent by regarding it as part of the target policy. We evaluate our model on both cooperative and competitive dialogue tasks, showing superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines.

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Expertise Style Transfer: A New Task Towards Better Communication between Experts and Laymen
Yixin Cao | Ruihao Shui | Liangming Pan | Min-Yen Kan | Zhiyuan Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The curse of knowledge can impede communication between experts and laymen. We propose a new task of expertise style transfer and contribute a manually annotated dataset with the goal of alleviating such cognitive biases. Solving this task not only simplifies the professional language, but also improves the accuracy and expertise level of laymen descriptions using simple words. This is a challenging task, unaddressed in previous work, as it requires the models to have expert intelligence in order to modify text with a deep understanding of domain knowledge and structures. We establish the benchmark performance of five state-of-the-art models for style transfer and text simplification. The results demonstrate a significant gap between machine and human performance. We also discuss the challenges of automatic evaluation, to provide insights into future research directions. The dataset is publicly available at https://srhthu.github.io/expertise-style-transfer/.

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Semantic Graphs for Generating Deep Questions
Liangming Pan | Yuxi Xie | Yansong Feng | Tat-Seng Chua | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper proposes the problem of Deep Question Generation (DQG), which aims to generate complex questions that require reasoning over multiple pieces of information about the input passage. In order to capture the global structure of the document and facilitate reasoning, we propose a novel framework that first constructs a semantic-level graph for the input document and then encodes the semantic graph by introducing an attention-based GGNN (Att-GGNN). Afterward, we fuse the document-level and graph-level representations to perform joint training of content selection and question decoding. On the HotpotQA deep-question centric dataset, our model greatly improves performance over questions requiring reasoning over multiple facts, leading to state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/WING-NUS/SG-Deep-Question-Generation.

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Exploring and Evaluating Attributes, Values, and Structures for Entity Alignment
Zhiyuan Liu | Yixin Cao | Liangming Pan | Juanzi Li | Zhiyuan Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Entity alignment (EA) aims at building a unified Knowledge Graph (KG) of rich content by linking the equivalent entities from various KGs. GNN-based EA methods present promising performance by modeling the KG structure defined by relation triples. However, attribute triples can also provide crucial alignment signal but have not been well explored yet. In this paper, we propose to utilize an attributed value encoder and partition the KG into subgraphs to model the various types of attribute triples efficiently. Besides, the performances of current EA methods are overestimated because of the name-bias of existing EA datasets. To make an objective evaluation, we propose a hard experimental setting where we select equivalent entity pairs with very different names as the test set. Under both the regular and hard settings, our method achieves significant improvements (5.10% on average Hits@1 in DBP15k) over 12 baselines in cross-lingual and monolingual datasets. Ablation studies on different subgraphs and a case study about attribute types further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Source code and data can be found at https://github.com/thunlp/explore-and-evaluate.

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Re-examining the Role of Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL
Wenqiang Lei | Weixin Wang | Zhixin Ma | Tian Gan | Wei Lu | Min-Yen Kan | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In existing sophisticated text-to-SQL models, schema linking is often considered as a simple, minor component, belying its importance. By providing a schema linking corpus based on the Spider text-to-SQL dataset, we systematically study the role of schema linking. We also build a simple BERT-based baseline, called Schema-Linking SQL (SLSQL) to perform a data-driven study. We find when schema linking is done well, SLSQL demonstrates good performance on Spider despite its structural simplicity. Many remaining errors are attributable to corpus noise. This suggests schema linking is the crux for the current text-to-SQL task. Our analytic studies provide insights on the characteristics of schema linking for future developments of text-to-SQL tasks.

2019

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Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned with Weakly Labeled Data
Yixin Cao | Zikun Hu | Tat-seng Chua | Zhiyuan Liu | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Name tagging in low-resource languages or domains suffers from inadequate training data. Existing work heavily relies on additional information, while leaving those noisy annotations unexplored that extensively exist on the web. In this paper, we propose a novel neural model for name tagging solely based on weakly labeled (WL) data, so that it can be applied in any low-resource settings. To take the best advantage of all WL sentences, we split them into high-quality and noisy portions for two modules, respectively: (1) a classification module focusing on the large portion of noisy data can efficiently and robustly pretrain the tag classifier by capturing textual context semantics; and (2) a costly sequence labeling module focusing on high-quality data utilizes Partial-CRFs with non-entity sampling to achieve global optimum. Two modules are combined via shared parameters. Extensive experiments involving five low-resource languages and fine-grained food domain demonstrate our superior performance (6% and 7.8% F1 gains on average) as well as efficiency.

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Revisit Automatic Error Detection for Wrong and Missing Translation – A Supervised Approach
Wenqiang Lei | Weiwen Xu | Ai Ti Aw | Yuanxin Xiang | Tat Seng Chua
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 achieving great fluency, current machine translation (MT) techniques are bottle-necked by adequacy issues. To have a closer study of these issues and accelerate model development, we propose automatic detecting adequacy errors in MT hypothesis for MT model evaluation. To do that, we annotate missing and wrong translations, the two most prevalent issues for current neural machine translation model, in 15000 Chinese-English translation pairs. We build a supervised alignment model for translation error detection (AlignDet) based on a simple Alignment Triangle strategy to set the benchmark for automatic error detection task. We also discuss the difficulties of this task and the benefits of this task for existing evaluation metrics.

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Semi-supervised Entity Alignment via Joint Knowledge Embedding Model and Cross-graph Model
Chengjiang Li | Yixin Cao | Lei Hou | Jiaxin Shi | Juanzi Li | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Entity alignment aims at integrating complementary knowledge graphs (KGs) from different sources or languages, which may benefit many knowledge-driven applications. It is challenging due to the heterogeneity of KGs and limited seed alignments. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised entity alignment method by joint Knowledge Embedding model and Cross-Graph model (KECG). It can make better use of seed alignments to propagate over the entire graphs with KG-based constraints. Specifically, as for the knowledge embedding model, we utilize TransE to implicitly complete two KGs towards consistency and learn relational constraints between entities. As for the cross-graph model, we extend Graph Attention Network (GAT) with projection constraint to robustly encode graphs, and two KGs share the same GAT to transfer structural knowledge as well as to ignore unimportant neighbors for alignment via attention mechanism. Results on publicly available datasets as well as further analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of KECG. Our codes can be found in https: //github.com/THU-KEG/KECG.

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Graph Neural Networks with Generated Parameters for Relation Extraction
Hao Zhu | Yankai Lin | Zhiyuan Liu | Jie Fu | Tat-Seng Chua | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we propose a novel graph neural network with generated parameters (GP-GNNs). The parameters in the propagation module, i.e. the transition matrices used in message passing procedure, are produced by a generator taking natural language sentences as inputs. We verify GP-GNNs in relation extraction from text, both on bag- and instance-settings. Experimental results on a human-annotated dataset and two distantly supervised datasets show that multi-hop reasoning mechanism yields significant improvements. We also perform a qualitative analysis to demonstrate that our model could discover more accurate relations by multi-hop relational reasoning.

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Multi-Channel Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment
Yixin Cao | Zhiyuan Liu | Chengjiang Li | Zhiyuan Liu | Juanzi Li | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Entity alignment typically suffers from the issues of structural heterogeneity and limited seed alignments. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-channel Graph Neural Network model (MuGNN) to learn alignment-oriented knowledge graph (KG) embeddings by robustly encoding two KGs via multiple channels. Each channel encodes KGs via different relation weighting schemes with respect to self-attention towards KG completion and cross-KG attention for pruning exclusive entities respectively, which are further combined via pooling techniques. Moreover, we also infer and transfer rule knowledge for completing two KGs consistently. MuGNN is expected to reconcile the structural differences of two KGs, and thus make better use of seed alignments. Extensive experiments on five publicly available datasets demonstrate our superior performance (5% Hits@1 up on average). Source code and data used in the experiments can be accessed at https://github.com/thunlp/MuGNN .

2018

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Temporally Grounding Natural Sentence in Video
Jingyuan Chen | Xinpeng Chen | Lin Ma | Zequn Jie | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We introduce an effective and efficient method that grounds (i.e., localizes) natural sentences in long, untrimmed video sequences. Specifically, a novel Temporal GroundNet (TGN) is proposed to temporally capture the evolving fine-grained frame-by-word interactions between video and sentence. TGN sequentially scores a set of temporal candidates ended at each frame based on the exploited frame-by-word interactions, and finally grounds the segment corresponding to the sentence. Unlike traditional methods treating the overlapping segments separately in a sliding window fashion, TGN aggregates the historical information and generates the final grounding result in one single pass. We extensively evaluate our proposed TGN on three public datasets with significant improvements over the state-of-the-arts. We further show the consistent effectiveness and efficiency of TGN through an ablation study and a runtime test.

2016

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Generative Topic Embedding: a Continuous Representation of Documents
Shaohua Li | Tat-Seng Chua | Jun Zhu | Chunyan Miao
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

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Answering Opinion Questions on Products by Exploiting Hierarchical Organization of Consumer Reviews
Jianxing Yu | Zheng-Jun Zha | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

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SSHLDA: A Semi-Supervised Hierarchical Topic Model
Xian-Ling Mao | Zhao-Yan Ming | Tat-Seng Chua | Si Li | Hongfei Yan | Xiaoming Li
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

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Community Answer Summarization for Multi-Sentence Question with Group L1 Regularization
Wen Chan | Xiangdong Zhou | Wei Wang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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A Semi-Supervised Bayesian Network Model for Microblog Topic Classification
Yan Chen | Zhoujun Li | Liqiang Nie | Xia Hu | Xiangyu Wang | Tat-Seng Chua | Xiaoming Zhang
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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The Use of Dependency Relation Graph to Enhance the Term Weighting in Question Retrieval
Weinan Zhang | Zhaoyan Ming | Yu Zhang | Liqiang Nie | Ting Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of COLING 2012

2011

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Domain-Assisted Product Aspect Hierarchy Generation: Towards Hierarchical Organization of Unstructured Consumer Reviews
Jianxing Yu | Zheng-Jun Zha | Meng Wang | Kai Wang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Aspect Ranking: Identifying Important Product Aspects from Online Consumer Reviews
Jianxing Yu | Zheng-Jun Zha | Meng Wang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2010

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Exploiting Salient Patterns for Question Detection and Question Retrieval in Community-based Question Answering
Kai Wang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

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Automatic Generation of Semantic Fields for Annotating Web Images
Gang Wang | Tat Seng Chua | Chong-Wah Ngo | Yong Cheng Wang
Coling 2010: Posters

2009

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Summarizing Definition from Wikipedia
Shiren Ye | Tat-Seng Chua | Jie Lu
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

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Query Segmentation Based on Eigenspace Similarity
Chao Zhang | Nan Sun | Xia Hu | Tingzhu Huang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers

2008

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Modeling Context in Scenario Template Creation
Long Qiu | Min-Yen Kan | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Volume-I

2007

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A Multi-resolution Framework for Information Extraction from Free Text
Mstislav Maslennikov | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics

2006

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ARE: Instance Splitting Strategies for Dependency Relation-Based Information Extraction
Mstislav Maslennikov | Hai-Kiat Goh | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering
Tat-Seng Chua | Jade Goldstein | Simone Teufel | Lucy Vanderwende
Proceedings of the Workshop on Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering

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Paraphrase Recognition via Dissimilarity Significance Classification
Long Qiu | Min-Yen Kan | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2004

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Cascading Use of Soft and Hard Matching Pattern Rules for Weakly Supervised Information Extraction
Jing Xiao | Tat-Seng Chua | Hang Cui
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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Web-based List Question Answering
Hui Yang | Tat-Seng Chua
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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A Public Reference Implementation of the RAP Anaphora Resolution Algorithm
Long Qiu | Min-Yen Kan | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

2003

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Extracting Key Semantic Terms from Chinese Speech Query for Web Searches
Gang Wang | Tat-Seng Chua | Yong-Cheng Wang
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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QUALIFIER: Question Answering by Lexical Fabric and External Resources
Hui Yang | Tat-Seng Chua
10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2002

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Extracting Pronunciation-translated Names from Chinese Texts using Bootstrapping Approach
Jing Xiao | Jimin Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
COLING-02: The First SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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An Agent-based Approach to Chinese Named Entity Recognition
Shiren Ye | Tat-Seng Chua | Jimin Liu
COLING 2002: The 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

2001

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Building Semantic Perceptron Net for Topic Spotting
Jimin Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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