Ting Liu


2023

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Towards Stable Natural Language Understanding via Information Entropy Guided Debiasing
Li Du | Xiao Ding | Zhouhao Sun | Ting Liu | Bing Qin | Jingshuo Liu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Although achieving promising performance, current Natural Language Understanding models tend to utilize dataset biases instead of learning the intended task, which always leads to performance degradation on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Toincrease the performance stability, previous debiasing methods empirically capture bias features from data to prevent the model from corresponding biases. However, our analyses show that the empirical debiasing methods may fail to capture part of the potential dataset biases and mistake semantic information of input text as biases, which limits the effectiveness of debiasing. To address these issues, we propose a debiasing framework IEGDB that comprehensively detects the dataset biases to induce a set of biased features, and then purifies the biased features with the guidance of information entropy. Experimental results show that IEGDB can consistently improve the stability of performance on OOD datasets for a set of widely adopted NLU models.

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UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language
Nuwa Xi | Sendong Zhao | Haochun Wang | Chi Liu | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Decoding text stimuli from cognitive signals (e.g. fMRI) enhances our understanding of the human language system, paving the way for building versatile Brain-Computer Interface. However, existing studies largely focus on decoding individual word-level fMRI volumes from a restricted vocabulary, which is far too idealized for real-world application. In this paper, we propose fMRI2text, the first open-vocabulary task aiming to bridge fMRI time series and human language. Furthermore, to explore the potential of this new task, we present a baseline solution, UniCoRN: the Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN for Brain Decoding. By reconstructing both individual time points and time series, UniCoRN establishes a robust encoder for cognitive signals (fMRI & EEG). Leveraging a pre-trained language model as decoder, UniCoRN proves its efficacy in decoding coherent text from fMRI series across various split settings. Our model achieves a 34.77% BLEU score on fMRI2text, and a 37.04% BLEU when generalized to EEG-to-text decoding, thereby surpassing the former baseline. Experimental results indicate the feasibility of decoding consecutive fMRI volumes, and the effectiveness of decoding different cognitive signals using a unified structure.

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SAE-NTM: Sentence-Aware Encoder for Neural Topic Modeling
Hao Liu | Jingsheng Gao | Suncheng Xiang | Ting Liu | Yuzhuo Fu
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023)

Incorporating external knowledge, such as pre-trained language models (PLMs), into neural topic modeling has achieved great success in recent years. However, employing PLMs for topic modeling generally ignores the maximum sequence length of PLMs and the interaction between external knowledge and bag-of-words (BOW). To this end, we propose a sentence-aware encoder for neural topic modeling, which adopts fine-grained sentence embeddings as external knowledge to entirely utilize the semantic information of input documents. We introduce sentence-aware attention for document representation, where BOW enables the model to attend on topical sentences that convey topic-related cues. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our framework outperforms other state-of-the-art neural topic models in topic coherence. Further, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can yield better latent document-topic features through improvement on the document classification.

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NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing
Tingting Wu | Xiao Ding | Minji Tang | Hao Zhang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Large-scale datasets in the real world inevitably involve label noise. Deep models can gradually overfit noisy labels and thus degrade model generalization. To mitigate the effects of label noise, learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods are designed to achieve better generalization performance. Due to the lack of suitable datasets, previous studies have frequently employed synthetic label noise to mimic real-world label noise. However, synthetic noise is not instance-dependent, making this approximation not always effective in practice. Recent research has proposed benchmarks for learning with real-world noisy labels. However, the noise sources within may be single or fuzzy, making benchmarks different from data with heterogeneous label noises in the real world. To tackle these issues, we contribute NoisywikiHow, the largest NLP benchmark built with minimal supervision. Specifically, inspired by human cognition, we explicitly construct multiple sources of label noise to imitate human errors throughout the annotation, replicating real-world noise, whose corruption is affected by both ground-truth labels and instances. Moreover, we provide a variety of noise levels to support controlled experiments on noisy data, enabling us to evaluate LNL methods systematically and comprehensively. After that, we conduct extensive multi-dimensional experiments on a broad range of LNL methods, obtaining new and intriguing findings.

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I run as fast as a rabbit, can you? A Multilingual Simile Dialogues Datasets
Longxuan Ma | Wei-Nan Zhang | Shuhan Zhou | Churui Sun | Changxin Ke | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

A simile is a figure of speech that compares two different things (called the tenor and the vehicle) via shared properties. The tenor and the vehicle are usually connected with comparator words such as “like” or “as”. The simile phenomena are unique and complex in a real-life dialogue scene where the tenor and the vehicle can be verbal phrases or sentences, mentioned by different speakers, exist in different sentences, or occur in reversed order. However, the current simile research usually focuses on similes in a triplet tuple (tenor, property, vehicle) or a single sentence where the tenor and vehicle are usually entities or noun phrases, which could not reflect complex simile phenomena in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel and high-quality multilingual simile dialogue (MSD) dataset to facilitate the study of complex simile phenomena. The MSD is the largest manually annotated simile data (~21K) and it contains both English and Chinese data. Meanwhile, the MSD data can also be used on dialogue tasks to test the ability of dialogue systems when using similes. We design 3 simile tasks (recognition, interpretation, and generation) and 2 dialogue tasks (retrieval and generation) with MSD. For each task, we provide experimental results from strong pre-trained or state-of-the-art models. The experiments demonstrate the challenge of MSD and we will release the data/code on GitHub.

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Sentence Ordering with a Coherence Verifier
Sainan Jia | Wei Song | Jiefu Gong | Shijin Wang | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

This paper presents a novel sentence ordering method by plugging a coherence verifier (CoVer) into pair-wise ranking-based and sequence generation-based methods. It does not change the model parameters of the baseline, and only verifies the coherence of candidate (partial) orders produced by the baseline and reranks them in beam search. We also propose a coherence model as CoVer with a novel graph formulation and a novel data construction strategy for contrastive pre-training independently of the sentence ordering task. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with topological sorting-based and pointer network-based methods as the baselines. Detailed analyses illustrate how CoVer improves the baselines and confirm the importance of its graph formulation and training strategy. Our code is available at https://github.com/SN-Jia/SO_with_CoVer.

2022

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SelF-Eval: Self-supervised Fine-grained Dialogue Evaluation
Longxuan Ma | Ziyu Zhuang | Weinan Zhang | Mingda Li | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces a novel Self-supervised Fine-grained Dialogue Evaluation framework (SelF-Eval). The core idea is to model the correlation between turn quality and the entire dialogue quality. We first propose a novel automatic data construction method that can automatically assign fine-grained scores for arbitrarily dialogue data. Then we train SelF-Eval with a multi-level contrastive learning schema which helps to distinguish different score levels. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks show that SelF-Eval is highly consistent with human evaluations and better than the state-of-the-art models. We give a detailed analysis of the experiments in this paper. Our code is available on GitHub.

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Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words
Haochun Wang | Chi Liu | Nuwa Xi | Sendong Zhao | Meizhi Ju | Shiwei Zhang | Ziheng Zhang | Yefeng Zheng | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Prompt-based fine-tuning for pre-trained models has proven effective for many natural language processing tasks under few-shot settings in general domain. However, tuning with prompt in biomedical domain has not been investigated thoroughly. Biomedical words are often rare in general domain, but quite ubiquitous in biomedical contexts, which dramatically deteriorates the performance of pre-trained models on downstream biomedical applications even after fine-tuning, especially in low-resource scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective approach to helping models learn rare biomedical words during tuning with prompt. Experimental results show that our method can achieve up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings.

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CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models
Xiao Ding | Bowen Chen | Li Du | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We study the problem of integrating cognitive language processing signals (e.g., eye-tracking or EEG data) into pre-trained language models like BERT. Existing methods typically fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between the texts and cognitive signals. To fill the gap, we propose CogBERT, a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate cognitive features into BERT by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. Extensive experiments show that: (1) Cognition-guided pre-trained models can consistently perform better than basic pre-trained models on ten NLP tasks. (2) Different cognitive features contribute differently to different NLP tasks. Based on this observation, we give a fine-grained explanation of why cognitive data is helpful for NLP. (3) Different transformer layers of pre-trained models should encode different cognitive features, with word-level cognitive features at the bottom and semantic-level cognitive features at the top. (4) Attention visualization demonstrates that CogBERT aligns with human gaze patterns and improves its natural language comprehension ability.

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DuReadervis: A Chinese Dataset for Open-domain Document Visual Question Answering
Le Qi | Shangwen Lv | Hongyu Li | Jing Liu | Yu Zhang | Qiaoqiao She | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Open-domain question answering has been used in a wide range of applications, such as web search and enterprise search, which usually takes clean texts extracted from various formats of documents (e.g., web pages, PDFs, or Word documents) as the information source. However, designing different text extraction approaches is time-consuming and not scalable. In order to reduce human cost and improve the scalability of QA systems, we propose and study an Open-domain Document Visual Question Answering (Open-domain DocVQA) task, which requires answering questions based on a collection of document images directly instead of only document texts, utilizing layouts and visual features additionally. Towards this end, we introduce the first Chinese Open-domain DocVQA dataset called DuReadervis, containing about 15K question-answering pairs and 158K document images from the Baidu search engine. There are three main challenges in DuReadervis: (1) long document understanding, (2) noisy texts, and (3) multi-span answer extraction. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the dataset is challenging. Additionally, we propose a simple approach that incorporates the layout and visual features, and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The dataset and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader/tree/master/DuReader-vis.

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A Graph Enhanced BERT Model for Event Prediction
Li Du | Xiao Ding | Yue Zhang | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Predicting the subsequent event for an existing event context is an important but challenging task, as it requires understanding the underlying relationship between events. Previous methods propose to retrieve relational features from event graph to enhance the modeling of event correlation. However, the sparsity of event graph may restrict the acquisition of relevant graph information, and hence influence the model performance. To address this issue, we consider automatically building of event graph using a BERT model. To this end, we incorporate an additional structured variable into BERT to learn to predict the event connections in the training process.Hence, in the test process, the connection relationship for unseen events can be predicted by the structured variable.Results on two event prediction tasks: script event prediction and story ending prediction, show that our approach can outperform state-of-the-art baseline methods.

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All Information is Valuable: Question Matching over Full Information Transmission Network
Le Qi | Yu Zhang | Qingyu Yin | Guidong Zheng | Wen Junjie | Jinlong Li | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Question matching is the task of identifying whether two questions have the same intent. For better reasoning the relationship between questions, existing studies adopt multiple interaction modules and perform multi-round reasoning via deep neural networks. In this process, there are two kinds of critical information that are commonly employed: the representation information of original questions and the interactive information between pairs of questions. However, previous studies tend to transmit only one kind of information, while failing to utilize both kinds of information simultaneously. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Full Information Transmission Network (FITN) that can transmit both representation and interactive information together in a simultaneous fashion. More specifically, we employ a novel memory-based attention for keeping and transmitting the interactive information through a global interaction matrix. Besides, we apply an original-average mixed connection method to effectively transmit the representation information between different reasoning rounds, which helps to preserve the original representation features of questions along with the historical hidden features. Experiments on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baseline models.

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LEMON: Language-Based Environment Manipulation via Execution-Guided Pre-training
Qi Shi | Qian Liu | Bei Chen | Yu Zhang | Ting Liu | Jian-Guang Lou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Language-based environment manipulation requires agents to manipulate the environment following natural language instructions, which is challenging due to the huge space of the environments.To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed in recent work. Although these approaches work well for their intended environments, they are difficult to generalize across environments. In this work, we propose LEMON, a general framework for language-based environment manipulation tasks. Specifically, we first specify a general approach for language-based environment manipulation tasks, which can deal with various environments using the same generative language model. Then we propose an execution-guided pre-training strategy to inject prior knowledge of environments to the language model with a pure synthetic pre-training corpus. Experimental results on tasks including Alchemy, Scene, Tangrams, ProPara and Recipes demonstrate the effectiveness of LEMON: it achieves new state-of-the-art results on four of the tasks, and the execution-guided pre-training strategy brings remarkable improvements on all experimental tasks.

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e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning
Li Du | Xiao Ding | Kai Xiong | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Understanding causality has vital importance for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Beyond the labeled instances, conceptual explanations of the causality can provide deep understanding of the causal fact to facilitate the causal reasoning process. However, such explanation information still remains absent in existing causal reasoning resources. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting a human-annotated explainable CAusal REasoning dataset (e-CARE), which contains over 20K causal reasoning questions, together with natural language formed explanations of the causal questions. Experimental results show that generating valid explanations for causal facts still remains especially challenging for the state-of-the-art models, and the explanation information can be helpful for promoting the accuracy and stability of causal reasoning models.

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CLIP Models are Few-Shot Learners: Empirical Studies on VQA and Visual Entailment
Haoyu Song | Li Dong | Weinan Zhang | Ting Liu | Furu Wei
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

CLIP has shown a remarkable zero-shot capability on a wide range of vision tasks. Previously, CLIP is only regarded as a powerful visual encoder. However, after being pre-trained by language supervision from a large amount of image-caption pairs, CLIP itself should also have acquired some few-shot abilities for vision-language tasks. In this work, we empirically show that CLIP can be a strong vision-language few-shot learner by leveraging the power of language. We first evaluate CLIP’s zero-shot performance on a typical visual question answering task and demonstrate a zero-shot cross-modality transfer capability of CLIP on the visual entailment task. Then we propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to boost the few-shot performance on the vqa task. We achieve competitive zero/few-shot results on the visual question answering and visual entailment tasks without introducing any additional pre-training procedure.

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ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks
Kai Xiong | Xiao Ding | Zhongyang Li | Li Du | Ting Liu | Bing Qin | Yi Zheng | Baoxing Huai
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Causal chain reasoning (CCR) is an essential ability for many decision-making AI systems, which requires the model to build reliable causal chains by connecting causal pairs. However, CCR suffers from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. In other words, the causal pairs to be spliced may have a conflicting threshold boundary or scenario.To address these issues, we propose a novel Reliable Causal chain reasoning framework (ReCo), which introduces exogenous variables to represent the threshold and scene factors of each causal pair within the causal chain, and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions across exogenous variables via structural causal recurrent neural networks (SRNN). Experiments show that ReCo outperforms a series of strong baselines on both Chinese and English CCR datasets. Moreover, by injecting reliable causal chain knowledge distilled by ReCo, BERT can achieve better performances on four downstream causal-related tasks than BERT models enhanced by other kinds of knowledge.

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STGN: an Implicit Regularization Method for Learning with Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing
Tingting Wu | Xiao Ding | Minji Tang | Hao Zhang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Noisy labels are ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Existing work, namely learning with noisy labels in NLP, is often limited to dedicated tasks or specific training procedures, making it hard to be widely used. To address this issue, SGD noise has been explored to provide a more general way to alleviate the effect of noisy labels by involving benign noise in the process of stochastic gradient descent. However, previous studies exert identical perturbation for all samples, which may cause overfitting on incorrect ones or optimizing correct ones inadequately. To facilitate this, we propose a novel stochastic tailor-made gradient noise (STGN), mitigating the effect of inherent label noise by introducing tailor-made benign noise for each sample. Specifically, we investigate multiple principles to precisely and stably discriminate correct samples from incorrect ones and thus apply different intensities of perturbation to them. A detailed theoretical analysis shows that STGN has good properties, beneficial for model generalization. Experiments on three different NLP tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of STGN. Also, STGN can boost existing robust training methods.

2021

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Benchmarking Robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension Models
Chenglei Si | Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Wentao Ma | Ting Liu | Shijin Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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A Closer Look into the Robustness of Neural Dependency Parsers Using Better Adversarial Examples
Yuxuan Wang | Wanxiang Che | Ivan Titov | Shay B. Cohen | Zhilin Lei | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Dynamic Connected Networks for Chinese Spelling Check
Baoxin Wang | Wanxiang Che | Dayong Wu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Learning to Bridge Metric Spaces: Few-shot Joint Learning of Intent Detection and Slot Filling
Yutai Hou | Yongkui Lai | Cheng Chen | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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What Did You Refer to? Evaluating Co-References in Dialogue
Wei-Nan Zhang | Yue Zhang | Hanlin Tang | Zhengyu Zhao | Caihai Zhu | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Hierarchical Pretraining and Topic Segment
MengNan Qi | Hao Liu | YuZhuo Fu | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

With the increasing abundance of meeting transcripts, meeting summary has attracted more and more attention from researchers. The unsupervised pre-training method based on transformer structure combined with fine-tuning of downstream tasks has achieved great success in the field of text summarization. However, the semantic structure and style of meeting transcripts are quite different from that of articles. In this work, we propose a hierarchical transformer encoder-decoder network with multi-task pre-training. Specifically, we mask key sentences at the word-level encoder and generate them at the decoder. Besides, we randomly mask some of the role alignments in the input text and force the model to recover the original role tags to complete the alignments. In addition, we introduce a topic segmentation mechanism to further improve the quality of the generated summaries. The experimental results show that our model is superior to the previous methods in meeting summary datasets AMI and ICSI.

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Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing by Learning from Mistakes
Jiaqi Guo | Jian-Guang Lou | Ting Liu | Dongmei Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Weakly supervised semantic parsing (WSP) aims at training a parser via utterance-denotation pairs. This task is challenging because it requires (1) searching consistent logical forms in a huge space; and (2) dealing with spurious logical forms. In this work, we propose Learning from Mistakes (LFM), a simple yet effective learning framework for WSP. LFM utilizes the mistakes made by a parser during searching, i.e., generating logical forms that do not execute to correct denotations, for tackling the two challenges. In a nutshell, LFM additionally trains a parser using utterance-logical form pairs created from mistakes, which can quickly bootstrap the parser to search consistent logical forms. Also, it can motivate the parser to learn the correct mapping between utterances and logical forms, thus dealing with the spuriousness of logical forms. We evaluate LFM on WikiTableQuestions, WikiSQL, and TabFact in the WSP setting. The parser trained with LFM outperforms the previous state-of-the-art semantic parsing approaches on the three datasets. Also, we find that LFM can substantially reduce the need for labeled data. Using only 10% of utterance-denotation pairs, the parser achieves 84.2 denotation accuracy on WikiSQL, which is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art approaches using 100% labeled data.

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Logic-level Evidence Retrieval and Graph-based Verification Network for Table-based Fact Verification
Qi Shi | Yu Zhang | Qingyu Yin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Table-based fact verification task aims to verify whether the given statement is supported by the given semi-structured table. Symbolic reasoning with logical operations plays a crucial role in this task. Existing methods leverage programs that contain rich logical information to enhance the verification process. However, due to the lack of fully supervised signals in the program generation process, spurious programs can be derived and employed, which leads to the inability of the model to catch helpful logical operations. To address the aforementioned problems, in this work, we formulate the table-based fact verification task as an evidence retrieval and reasoning framework, proposing the Logic-level Evidence Retrieval and Graph-based Verification network (LERGV). Specifically, we first retrieve logic-level program-like evidence from the given table and statement as supplementary evidence for the table. After that, we construct a logic-level graph to capture the logical relations between entities and functions in the retrieved evidence, and design a graph-based verification network to perform logic-level graph-based reasoning based on the constructed graph to classify the final entailment relation. Experimental results on the large-scale benchmark TABFACT show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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Allocating Large Vocabulary Capacity for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training
Bo Zheng | Li Dong | Shaohan Huang | Saksham Singhal | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Xia Song | Furu Wei
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Compared to monolingual models, cross-lingual models usually require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages adequately. We find that many languages are under-represented in recent cross-lingual language models due to the limited vocabulary capacity. To this end, we propose an algorithm VoCap to determine the desired vocabulary capacity of each language. However, increasing the vocabulary size significantly slows down the pre-training speed. In order to address the issues, we propose k-NN-based target sampling to accelerate the expensive softmax. Our experiments show that the multilingual vocabulary learned with VoCap benefits cross-lingual language model pre-training. Moreover, k-NN-based target sampling mitigates the side-effects of increasing the vocabulary size while achieving comparable performance and faster pre-training speed. The code and the pretrained multilingual vocabularies are available at https://github.com/bozheng-hit/VoCapXLM.

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Neural Natural Logic Inference for Interpretable Question Answering
Jihao Shi | Xiao Ding | Li Du | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Many open-domain question answering problems can be cast as a textual entailment task, where a question and candidate answers are concatenated to form hypotheses. A QA system then determines if the supporting knowledge bases, regarded as potential premises, entail the hypotheses. In this paper, we investigate a neural-symbolic QA approach that integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures, towards developing effective and yet explainable question answering models. The proposed model gradually bridges a hypothesis and candidate premises following natural logic inference steps to build proof paths. Entailment scores between the acquired intermediate hypotheses and candidate premises are measured to determine if a premise entails the hypothesis. As the natural logic reasoning process forms a tree-like, hierarchical structure, we embed hypotheses and premises in a Hyperbolic space rather than Euclidean space to acquire more precise representations. Empirically, our method outperforms prior work on answering multiple-choice science questions, achieving the best results on two publicly available datasets. The natural logic inference process inherently provides evidence to help explain the prediction process.

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N-LTP: An Open-source Neural Language Technology Platform for Chinese
Wanxiang Che | Yunlong Feng | Libo Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We introduce N-LTP, an open-source neural language technology platform supporting six fundamental Chinese NLP tasks: lexical analysis (Chinese word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition), syntactic parsing (dependency parsing), and semantic parsing (semantic dependency parsing and semantic role labeling). Unlike the existing state-of-the-art toolkits, such as Stanza, that adopt an independent model for each task, N-LTP adopts the multi-task framework by using a shared pre-trained model, which has the advantage of capturing the shared knowledge across relevant Chinese tasks. In addition, a knowledge distillation method (Clark et al., 2019) where the single-task model teaches the multi-task model is further introduced to encourage the multi-task model to surpass its single-task teacher. Finally, we provide a collection of easy-to-use APIs and a visualization tool to make users to use and view the processing results more easily and directly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first toolkit to support six Chinese NLP fundamental tasks. Source code, documentation, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/HIT-SCIR/ltp.

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BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data
Haoyu Song | Yan Wang | Kaiyan Zhang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu
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)

Maintaining a consistent persona is essential for dialogue agents. Although tremendous advancements have been brought, the limited-scale of annotated personalized dialogue datasets is still a barrier towards training robust and consistent persona-based dialogue models. This work shows how this challenge can be addressed by disentangling persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks with a novel BERT-over-BERT (BoB) model. Specifically, the model consists of a BERT-based encoder and two BERT-based decoders, where one decoder is for response generation, and another is for consistency understanding. In particular, to learn the ability of consistency understanding from large-scale non-dialogue inference data, we train the second decoder in an unlikelihood manner. Under different limited data settings, both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines in response quality and persona consistency.

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GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling
Libo Qin | Fuxuan Wei | Tianbao Xie | Xiao Xu | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
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)

Multi-intent SLU can handle multiple intents in an utterance, which has attracted increasing attention. However, the state-of-the-art joint models heavily rely on autoregressive approaches, resulting in two issues: slow inference speed and information leakage. In this paper, we explore a non-autoregressive model for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling, achieving more fast and accurate. Specifically, we propose a Global-Locally Graph Interaction Network (GL-GIN) where a local slot-aware graph interaction layer is proposed to model slot dependency for alleviating uncoordinated slots problem while a global intent-slot graph interaction layer is introduced to model the interaction between multiple intents and all slots in the utterance. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while being 11.5 times faster.

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Language Model as an Annotator: Exploring DialoGPT for Dialogue Summarization
Xiachong Feng | Xiaocheng Feng | Libo Qin | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
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)

Current dialogue summarization systems usually encode the text with a number of general semantic features (e.g., keywords and topics) to gain more powerful dialogue modeling capabilities. However, these features are obtained via open-domain toolkits that are dialog-agnostic or heavily relied on human annotations. In this paper, we show how DialoGPT, a pre-trained model for conversational response generation, can be developed as an unsupervised dialogue annotator, which takes advantage of dialogue background knowledge encoded in DialoGPT. We apply DialoGPT to label three types of features on two dialogue summarization datasets, SAMSum and AMI, and employ pre-trained and non pre-trained models as our summarizers. Experimental results show that our proposed method can obtain remarkable improvements on both datasets and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the SAMSum dataset.

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Chase: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Dataset for Cross-Database Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL
Jiaqi Guo | Ziliang Si | Yu Wang | Qian Liu | Ming Fan | Jian-Guang Lou | Zijiang Yang | Ting Liu
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)

The cross-database context-dependent Text-to-SQL (XDTS) problem has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its wide range of potential applications. However, we identify two biases in existing datasets for XDTS: (1) a high proportion of context-independent questions and (2) a high proportion of easy SQL queries. These biases conceal the major challenges in XDTS to some extent. In this work, we present Chase, a large-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset for XDTS. It consists of 5,459 coherent question sequences (17,940 questions with their SQL queries annotated) over 280 databases, in which only 35% of questions are context-independent, and 28% of SQL queries are easy. We experiment on Chase with three state-of-the-art XDTS approaches. The best approach only achieves an exact match accuracy of 40% over all questions and 16% over all question sequences, indicating that Chase highlights the challenging problems of XDTS. We believe that XDTS can provide fertile soil for addressing the problems.

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ExCAR: Event Graph Knowledge Enhanced Explainable Causal Reasoning
Li Du | Xiao Ding | Kai Xiong | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
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)

Prior work infers the causation between events mainly based on the knowledge induced from the annotated causal event pairs. However, additional evidence information intermediate to the cause and effect remains unexploited. By incorporating such information, the logical law behind the causality can be unveiled, and the interpretability and stability of the causal reasoning system can be improved. To facilitate this, we present an Event graph knowledge enhanced explainable CAusal Reasoning framework (ExCAR). ExCAR first acquires additional evidence information from a large-scale causal event graph as logical rules for causal reasoning. To learn the conditional probabilistic of logical rules, we propose the Conditional Markov Neural Logic Network (CMNLN) that combines the representation learning and structure learning of logical rules in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Experimental results demonstrate that ExCAR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Adversarial evaluation shows the improved stability of ExCAR over baseline systems. Human evaluation shows that ExCAR can achieve a promising explainable performance.

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Consistency Regularization for Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning
Bo Zheng | Li Dong | Shaohan Huang | Wenhui Wang | Zewen Chi | Saksham Singhal | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Xia Song | Furu Wei
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)

Fine-tuning pre-trained cross-lingual language models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the others. In this work, we propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization. Specifically, we use example consistency regularization to penalize the prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations, i.e., subword sampling, Gaussian noise, code-switch substitution, and machine translation. In addition, we employ model consistency to regularize the models trained with two augmented versions of the same training set. Experimental results on the XTREME benchmark show that our method significantly improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across various tasks, including text classification, question answering, and sequence labeling.

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Verb Metaphor Detection via Contextual Relation Learning
Wei Song | Shuhui Zhou | Ruiji Fu | Ting Liu | Lizhen Liu
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)

Correct natural language understanding requires computers to distinguish the literal and metaphorical senses of a word. Recent neu- ral models achieve progress on verb metaphor detection by viewing it as sequence labeling. In this paper, we argue that it is appropriate to view this task as relation classification between a verb and its various contexts. We propose the Metaphor-relation BERT (Mr-BERT) model, which explicitly models the relation between a verb and its grammatical, sentential and semantic contexts. We evaluate our method on the VUA, MOH-X and TroFi datasets. Our method gets competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

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Neural Stylistic Response Generation with Disentangled Latent Variables
Qingfu Zhu | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | William Yang Wang
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)

Generating open-domain conversational responses in the desired style usually suffers from the lack of parallel data in the style. Meanwhile, using monolingual stylistic data to increase style intensity often leads to the expense of decreasing content relevance. In this paper, we propose to disentangle the content and style in latent space by diluting sentence-level information in style representations. Combining the desired style representation and a response content representation will then obtain a stylistic response. Our approach achieves a higher BERT-based style intensity score and comparable BLEU scores, compared with baselines. Human evaluation results show that our approach significantly improves style intensity and maintains content relevance.

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Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning
Li Du | Xiao Ding | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
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)

Abductive reasoning aims at inferring the most plausible explanation for observed events, which would play critical roles in various NLP applications, such as reading comprehension and question answering. To facilitate this task, a narrative text based abductive reasoning task 𝛼NLI is proposed, together with explorations about building reasoning framework using pretrained language models. However, abundant event commonsense knowledge is not well exploited for this task. To fill this gap, we propose a variational autoencoder based model ege-RoBERTa, which employs a latent variable to capture the necessary commonsense knowledge from event graph for guiding the abductive reasoning task. Experimental results show that through learning the external event graph knowledge, our approach outperforms the baseline methods on the 𝛼NLI task.

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IFlyEA: A Chinese Essay Assessment System with Automated Rating, Review Generation, and Recommendation
Jiefu Gong | Xiao Hu | Wei Song | Ruiji Fu | Zhichao Sheng | Bo Zhu | Shijin Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way. This paper presents a Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess (IFlyEA), targeting on evaluating essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools. IFlyEA provides multi-level and multi-dimension analytical modules for essay assessment. It has state-of-the-art grammar level analysis techniques, and also integrates components for rhetoric and discourse level analysis, which are important for evaluating native speakers’ writing ability, but still challenging and less studied in previous work. Based on the comprehensive analysis, IFlyEA provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization. These services can benefit both teachers and students during the process of writing teaching and learning.

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Adversarial Training for Machine Reading Comprehension with Virtual Embeddings
Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Chenglei Si | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of *SEM 2021: The Tenth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

Adversarial training (AT) as a regularization method has proved its effectiveness on various tasks. Though there are successful applications of AT on some NLP tasks, the distinguishing characteristics of NLP tasks have not been exploited. In this paper, we aim to apply AT on machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. Furthermore, we adapt AT for MRC tasks by proposing a novel adversarial training method called PQAT that perturbs the embedding matrix instead of word vectors. To differentiate the roles of passages and questions, PQAT uses additional virtual P/Q-embedding matrices to gather the global perturbations of words from passages and questions separately. We test the method on a wide range of MRC tasks, including span-based extractive RC and multiple-choice RC. The results show that adversarial training is effective universally, and PQAT further improves the performance.

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Technical Report on Shared Task in DialDoc21
Jiapeng Li | Mingda Li | Longxuan Ma | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)

We participate in the DialDoc Shared Task sub-task 1 (Knowledge Identification). The task requires identifying the grounding knowledge in form of a document span for the next dialogue turn. We employ two well-known pre-trained language models (RoBERTa and ELECTRA) to identify candidate document spans and propose a metric-based ensemble method for span selection. Our methods include data augmentation, model pre-training/fine-tuning, post-processing, and ensemble. On the submission page, we rank 2nd based on the average of normalized F1 and EM scores used for the final evaluation. Specifically, we rank 2nd on EM and 3rd on F1.

2020

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HIT-SCIR at SemEval-2020 Task 5: Training Pre-trained Language Model with Pseudo-labeling Data for Counterfactuals Detection
Xiao Ding | Dingkui Hao | Yuewei Zhang | Kuo Liao | Zhongyang Li | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

We describe our system for Task 5 of SemEval 2020: Modelling Causal Reasoning in Language: Detecting Counterfactuals. Despite deep learning has achieved significant success in many fields, it still hardly drives today’s AI to strong AI, as it lacks of causation, which is a fundamental concept in human thinking and reasoning. In this task, we dedicate to detecting causation, especially counterfactuals from texts. We explore multiple pre-trained models to learn basic features and then fine-tune models with counterfactual data and pseudo-labeling data. Our team HIT-SCIR wins the first place (1st) in Sub-task 1 — Detecting Counterfactual Statements and is ranked 4th in Sub-task 2 — Detecting Antecedent and Consequence. In this paper we provide a detailed description of the approach, as well as the results obtained in this task.

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Combining ResNet and Transformer for Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis
Shaolei Wang | Baoxin Wang | Jiefu Gong | Zhongyuan Wang | Xiao Hu | Xingyi Duan | Zizhuo Shen | Gang Yue | Ruiji Fu | Dayong Wu | Wanxiang Che | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces our system at NLPTEA-2020 Task: Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED). CGED aims to diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are missing words (M), redundant words (R), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). Our system is built on the model of multi-layer bidirectional transformer encoder and ResNet is integrated into the encoder to improve the performance. We also explore two ensemble strategies including weighted averaging and stepwise ensemble selection from libraries of models to improve the performance of single model. In official evaluation, our system obtains the highest F1 scores at identification level and position level. We also recommend error corrections for specific error types and achieve the second highest F1 score at correction level.

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HIT-SCIR at MRP 2020: Transition-based Parser and Iterative Inference Parser
Longxu Dou | Yunlong Feng | Yuqiu Ji | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2020 Shared Task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing

This paper describes our submission system (HIT-SCIR) for the CoNLL 2020 shared task: Cross-Framework and Cross-Lingual Meaning Representation Parsing. The task includes five frameworks for graph-based meaning representations, i.e., UCCA, EDS, PTG, AMR, and DRG. Our solution consists of two sub-systems: transition-based parser for Flavor (1) frameworks (UCCA, EDS, PTG) and iterative inference parser for Flavor (2) frameworks (DRG, AMR). In the final evaluation, our system is ranked 3rd among the seven team both in Cross-Framework Track and Cross-Lingual Track, with the macro-averaged MRP F1 score of 0.81/0.69.

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CharBERT: Character-aware Pre-trained Language Model
Wentao Ma | Yiming Cui | Chenglei Si | Ting Liu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Most pre-trained language models (PLMs) construct word representations at subword level with Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or its variations, by which OOV (out-of-vocab) words are almost avoidable. However, those methods split a word into subword units and make the representation incomplete and fragile.In this paper, we propose a character-aware pre-trained language model named CharBERT improving on the previous methods (such as BERT, RoBERTa) to tackle these problems. We first construct the contextual word embedding for each token from the sequential character representations, then fuse the representations of characters and the subword representations by a novel heterogeneous interaction module. We also propose a new pre-training task named NLM (Noisy LM) for unsupervised character representation learning. We evaluate our method on question answering, sequence labeling, and text classification tasks, both on the original datasets and adversarial misspelling test sets. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the performance and robustness of PLMs simultaneously.

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TableGPT: Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation with Table Structure Reconstruction and Content Matching
Heng Gong | Yawei Sun | Xiaocheng Feng | Bing Qin | Wei Bi | Xiaojiang Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Although neural table-to-text models have achieved remarkable progress with the help of large-scale datasets, they suffer insufficient learning problem with limited training data. Recently, pre-trained language models show potential in few-shot learning with linguistic knowledge learnt from pretraining on large-scale corpus. However, benefiting table-to-text generation in few-shot setting with the powerful pretrained language model faces three challenges, including (1) the gap between the task’s structured input and the natural language input for pretraining language model. (2) The lack of modeling for table structure and (3) improving text fidelity with less incorrect expressions that are contradicting to the table. To address aforementioned problems, we propose TableGPT for table-to-text generation. At first, we utilize table transformation module with template to rewrite structured table in natural language as input for GPT-2. In addition, we exploit multi-task learning with two auxiliary tasks that preserve table’s structural information by reconstructing the structure from GPT-2’s representation and improving the text’s fidelity with content matching task aligning the table and information in the generated text. By experimenting on Humans, Songs and Books, three few-shot table-to-text datasets in different domains, our model outperforms existing systems on most few-shot settings.

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Molweni: A Challenge Multiparty Dialogues-based Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset with Discourse Structure
Jiaqi Li | Ming Liu | Min-Yen Kan | Zihao Zheng | Zekun Wang | Wenqiang Lei | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Research into the area of multiparty dialog has grown considerably over recent years. We present the Molweni dataset, a machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset with discourse structure built over multiparty dialog. Molweni’s source samples from the Ubuntu Chat Corpus, including 10,000 dialogs comprising 88,303 utterances. We annotate 30,066 questions on this corpus, including both answerable and unanswerable questions. Molweni also uniquely contributes discourse dependency annotations in a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher et al., 2016) style for all of its multiparty dialogs, contributing large-scale (78,245 annotated discourse relations) data to bear on the task of multiparty dialog discourse parsing. Our experiments show that Molweni is a challenging dataset for current MRC models: BERT-wwm, a current, strong SQuAD 2.0 performer, achieves only 67.7% F1 on Molweni’s questions, a 20+% significant drop as compared against its SQuAD 2.0 performance.

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Learn to Combine Linguistic and Symbolic Information for Table-based Fact Verification
Qi Shi | Yu Zhang | Qingyu Yin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Table-based fact verification is expected to perform both linguistic reasoning and symbolic reasoning. Existing methods lack attention to take advantage of the combination of linguistic information and symbolic information. In this work, we propose HeterTFV, a graph-based reasoning approach, that learns to combine linguistic information and symbolic information effectively. We first construct a program graph to encode programs, a kind of LISP-like logical form, to learn the semantic compositionality of the programs. Then we construct a heterogeneous graph to incorporate both linguistic information and symbolic information by introducing program nodes into the heterogeneous graph. Finally, we propose a graph-based reasoning approach to reason over the multiple types of nodes to make an effective combination of both types of information. Experimental results on a large-scale benchmark dataset TABFACT illustrate the effect of our approach.

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A Sentence Cloze Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension
Yiming Cui | Ting Liu | Ziqing Yang | Zhipeng Chen | Wentao Ma | Wanxiang Che | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Owing to the continuous efforts by the Chinese NLP community, more and more Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets become available. To add diversity in this area, in this paper, we propose a new task called Sentence Cloze-style Machine Reading Comprehension (SC-MRC). The proposed task aims to fill the right candidate sentence into the passage that has several blanks. We built a Chinese dataset called CMRC 2019 to evaluate the difficulty of the SC-MRC task. Moreover, to add more difficulties, we also made fake candidates that are similar to the correct ones, which requires the machine to judge their correctness in the context. The proposed dataset contains over 100K blanks (questions) within over 10K passages, which was originated from Chinese narrative stories. To evaluate the dataset, we implement several baseline systems based on the pre-trained models, and the results show that the state-of-the-art model still underperforms human performance by a large margin. We release the dataset and baseline system to further facilitate our community. Resources available through https://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2019

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Slot-consistent NLG for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Iterative Rectification Network
Yangming Li | Kaisheng Yao | Libo Qin | Wanxiang Che | Xiaolong Li | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Data-driven approaches using neural networks have achieved promising performances in natural language generation (NLG). However, neural generators are prone to make mistakes, e.g., neglecting an input slot value and generating a redundant slot value. Prior works refer this to hallucination phenomenon. In this paper, we study slot consistency for building reliable NLG systems with all slot values of input dialogue act (DA) properly generated in output sentences. We propose Iterative Rectification Network (IRN) for improving general NLG systems to produce both correct and fluent responses. It applies a bootstrapping algorithm to sample training candidates and uses reinforcement learning to incorporate discrete reward related to slot inconsistency into training. Comprehensive studies have been conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, showing that the proposed methods have significantly reduced the slot error rate (ERR) for all strong baselines. Human evaluations also have confirmed its effectiveness.

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Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs
Zeming Liu | Haifeng Wang | Zheng-Yu Niu | Hua Wu | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We focus on the study of conversational recommendation in the context of multi-type dialogs, where the bots can proactively and naturally lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog (e.g., QA) to a recommendation dialog, taking into account user’s interests and feedback. To facilitate the study of this task, we create a human-to-human Chinese dialog dataset DuRecDial (about 10k dialogs, 156k utterances), where there are multiple sequential dialogs for a pair of a recommendation seeker (user) and a recommender (bot). In each dialog, the recommender proactively leads a multi-type dialog to approach recommendation targets and then makes multiple recommendations with rich interaction behavior. This dataset allows us to systematically investigate different parts of the overall problem, e.g., how to naturally lead a dialog, how to interact with users for recommendation. Finally we establish baseline results on DuRecDial for future studies.

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Conversational Word Embedding for Retrieval-Based Dialog System
Wentao Ma | Yiming Cui | Ting Liu | Dong Wang | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Human conversations contain many types of information, e.g., knowledge, common sense, and language habits. In this paper, we propose a conversational word embedding method named PR-Embedding, which utilizes the conversation pairs <post, reply> to learn word embedding. Different from previous works, PR-Embedding uses the vectors from two different semantic spaces to represent the words in post and reply.To catch the information among the pair, we first introduce the word alignment model from statistical machine translation to generate the cross-sentence window, then train the embedding on word-level and sentence-level.We evaluate the method on single-turn and multi-turn response selection tasks for retrieval-based dialog systems.The experiment results show that PR-Embedding can improve the quality of the selected response.

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Few-shot Slot Tagging with Collapsed Dependency Transfer and Label-enhanced Task-adaptive Projection Network
Yutai Hou | Wanxiang Che | Yongkui Lai | Zhihan Zhou | Yijia Liu | Han Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we explore the slot tagging with only a few labeled support sentences (a.k.a. few-shot). Few-shot slot tagging faces a unique challenge compared to the other fewshot classification problems as it calls for modeling the dependencies between labels. But it is hard to apply previously learned label dependencies to an unseen domain, due to the discrepancy of label sets. To tackle this, we introduce a collapsed dependency transfer mechanism into the conditional random field (CRF) to transfer abstract label dependency patterns as transition scores. In the few-shot setting, the emission score of CRF can be calculated as a word’s similarity to the representation of each label. To calculate such similarity, we propose a Label-enhanced Task-Adaptive Projection Network (L-TapNet) based on the state-of-the-art few-shot classification model – TapNet, by leveraging label name semantics in representing labels. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the strongest few-shot learning baseline by 14.64 F1 scores in the one-shot setting.

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Conversational Graph Grounded Policy Learning for Open-Domain Conversation Generation
Jun Xu | Haifeng Wang | Zheng-Yu Niu | Hua Wu | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

To address the challenge of policy learning in open-domain multi-turn conversation, we propose to represent prior information about dialog transitions as a graph and learn a graph grounded dialog policy, aimed at fostering a more coherent and controllable dialog. To this end, we first construct a conversational graph (CG) from dialog corpora, in which there are vertices to represent “what to say” and “how to say”, and edges to represent natural transition between a message (the last utterance in a dialog context) and its response. We then present a novel CG grounded policy learning framework that conducts dialog flow planning by graph traversal, which learns to identify a what-vertex and a how-vertex from the CG at each turn to guide response generation. In this way, we effectively leverage the CG to facilitate policy learning as follows: (1) it enables more effective long-term reward design, (2) it provides high-quality candidate actions, and (3) it gives us more control over the policy. Results on two benchmark corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework.

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How Does Selective Mechanism Improve Self-Attention Networks?
Xinwei Geng | Longyue Wang | Xing Wang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Zhaopeng Tu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Self-attention networks (SANs) with selective mechanism has produced substantial improvements in various NLP tasks by concentrating on a subset of input words. However, the underlying reasons for their strong performance have not been well explained. In this paper, we bridge the gap by assessing the strengths of selective SANs (SSANs), which are implemented with a flexible and universal Gumbel-Softmax. Experimental results on several representative NLP tasks, including natural language inference, semantic role labelling, and machine translation, show that SSANs consistently outperform the standard SANs. Through well-designed probing experiments, we empirically validate that the improvement of SSANs can be attributed in part to mitigating two commonly-cited weaknesses of SANs: word order encoding and structure modeling. Specifically, the selective mechanism improves SANs by paying more attention to content words that contribute to the meaning of the sentence.

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Generate, Delete and Rewrite: A Three-Stage Framework for Improving Persona Consistency of Dialogue Generation
Haoyu Song | Yan Wang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Xiaojiang Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Maintaining a consistent personality in conversations is quite natural for human beings, but is still a non-trivial task for machines. The persona-based dialogue generation task is thus introduced to tackle the personality-inconsistent problem by incorporating explicit persona text into dialogue generation models. Despite the success of existing persona-based models on generating human-like responses, their one-stage decoding framework can hardly avoid the generation of inconsistent persona words. In this work, we introduce a three-stage framework that employs a generate-delete-rewrite mechanism to delete inconsistent words from a generated response prototype and further rewrite it to a personality-consistent one. We carry out evaluations by both human and automatic metrics. Experiments on the Persona-Chat dataset show that our approach achieves good performance.

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Dynamic Fusion Network for Multi-Domain End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog
Libo Qin | Xiao Xu | Wanxiang Che | Yue Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in end-to-end task-oriented dialog system. However, most neural models rely on large training data, which are only available for a certain number of task domains, such as navigation and scheduling. This makes it difficult to scalable for a new domain with limited labeled data. However, there has been relatively little research on how to effectively use data from all domains to improve the performance of each domain and also unseen domains. To this end, we investigate methods that can make explicit use of domain knowledge and introduce a shared-private network to learn shared and specific knowledge. In addition, we propose a novel Dynamic Fusion Network (DF-Net) which automatically exploit the relevance between the target domain and each domain. Results show that our models outperforms existing methods on multi-domain dialogue, giving the state-of-the-art in the literature. Besides, with little training data, we show its transferability by outperforming prior best model by 13.9% on average.

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Document Modeling with Graph Attention Networks for Multi-grained Machine Reading Comprehension
Bo Zheng | Haoyang Wen | Yaobo Liang | Nan Duan | Wanxiang Che | Daxin Jiang | Ming Zhou | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Natural Questions is a new challenging machine reading comprehension benchmark with two-grained answers, which are a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities inside the long answer). Despite the effectiveness of existing methods on this benchmark, they treat these two sub-tasks individually during training while ignoring their dependencies. To address this issue, we present a novel multi-grained machine reading comprehension framework that focuses on modeling documents at their hierarchical nature, which are different levels of granularity: documents, paragraphs, sentences, and tokens. We utilize graph attention networks to obtain different levels of representations so that they can be learned simultaneously. The long and short answers can be extracted from paragraph-level representation and token-level representation, respectively. In this way, we can model the dependencies between the two-grained answers to provide evidence for each other. We jointly train the two sub-tasks, and our experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous systems at both long and short answer criteria.

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TextBrewer: An Open-Source Knowledge Distillation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing
Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Zhipeng Chen | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

In this paper, we introduce TextBrewer, an open-source knowledge distillation toolkit designed for natural language processing. It works with different neural network models and supports various kinds of supervised learning tasks, such as text classification, reading comprehension, sequence labeling. TextBrewer provides a simple and uniform workflow that enables quick setting up of distillation experiments with highly flexible configurations. It offers a set of predefined distillation methods and can be extended with custom code. As a case study, we use TextBrewer to distill BERT on several typical NLP tasks. With simple configurations, we achieve results that are comparable with or even higher than the public distilled BERT models with similar numbers of parameters.

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Benchmarking Meaning Representations in Neural Semantic Parsing
Jiaqi Guo | Qian Liu | Jian-Guang Lou | Zhenwen Li | Xueqing Liu | Tao Xie | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Meaning representation is an important component of semantic parsing. Although researchers have designed a lot of meaning representations, recent work focuses on only a few of them. Thus, the impact of meaning representation on semantic parsing is less understood. Furthermore, existing work’s performance is often not comprehensively evaluated due to the lack of readily-available execution engines. Upon identifying these gaps, we propose , a new unified benchmark on meaning representations, by integrating existing semantic parsing datasets, completing the missing logical forms, and implementing the missing execution engines. The resulting unified benchmark contains the complete enumeration of logical forms and execution engines over three datasets × four meaning representations. A thorough experimental study on Unimer reveals that neural semantic parsing approaches exhibit notably different performance when they are trained to generate different meaning representations. Also, program alias and grammar rules heavily impact the performance of different meaning representations. Our benchmark, execution engines and implementation can be found on: https://github.com/JasperGuo/Unimer.

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Combining Self-Training and Self-Supervised Learning for Unsupervised Disfluency Detection
Shaolei Wang | Zhongyuan Wang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Most existing approaches to disfluency detection heavily rely on human-annotated corpora, which is expensive to obtain in practice. There have been several proposals to alleviate this issue with, for instance, self-supervised learning techniques, but they still require human-annotated corpora. In this work, we explore the unsupervised learning paradigm which can potentially work with unlabeled text corpora that are cheaper and easier to obtain. Our model builds upon the recent work on Noisy Student Training, a semi-supervised learning approach that extends the idea of self-training. Experimental results on the commonly used English Switchboard test set show that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art supervised systems using contextualized word embeddings (e.g. BERT and ELECTRA).

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Discourse Self-Attention for Discourse Element Identification in Argumentative Student Essays
Wei Song | Ziyao Song | Ruiji Fu | Lizhen Liu | Miaomiao Cheng | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

This paper proposes to adapt self-attention to discourse level for modeling discourse elements in argumentative student essays. Specifically, we focus on two issues. First, we propose structural sentence positional encodings to explicitly represent sentence positions. Second, we propose to use inter-sentence attentions to capture sentence interactions and enhance sentence representation. We conduct experiments on two datasets: a Chinese dataset and an English dataset. We find that (i) sentence positional encoding can lead to a large improvement for identifying discourse elements; (ii) a structural relative positional encoding of sentences shows to be most effective; (iii) inter-sentence attention vectors are useful as a kind of sentence representations for identifying discourse elements.

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Counterfactual Off-Policy Training for Neural Dialogue Generation
Qingfu Zhu | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Open-domain dialogue generation suffers from the data insufficiency problem due to the vast size of potential responses. In this paper, we propose to explore potential responses by counterfactual reasoning. Given an observed response, the counterfactual reasoning model automatically infers the outcome of an alternative policy that could have been taken. The resulting counterfactual response synthesized in hindsight is of higher quality than the response synthesized from scratch. Training on the counterfactual responses under the adversarial learning framework helps to explore the high-reward area of the potential response space. An empirical study on the DailyDialog dataset shows that our approach significantly outperforms the HRED model as well as the conventional adversarial learning approaches.

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Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents
Haoyu Song | Yan Wang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Zhengyu Zhao | Ting Liu | Xiaojiang Liu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Maintaining a consistent attribute profile is crucial for dialogue agents to naturally converse with humans. Existing studies on improving attribute consistency mainly explored how to incorporate attribute information in the responses, but few efforts have been made to identify the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. To facilitate the study of profile consistency identification, we create a large-scale human-annotated dataset with over 110K single-turn conversations and their key-value attribute profiles. Explicit relation between response and profile is manually labeled. We also propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency, and it gained improvements over strong baselines. Further evaluations on downstream tasks demonstrate that the profile consistency identification model is conducive for improving dialogue consistency.

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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..

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Is Graph Structure Necessary for Multi-hop Question Answering?
Nan Shao | Yiming Cui | Ting Liu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recently, attempting to model texts as graph structure and introducing graph neural networks to deal with it has become a trend in many NLP research areas. In this paper, we investigate whether the graph structure is necessary for textual multi-hop reasoning. Our analysis is centered on HotpotQA. We construct a strong baseline model to establish that, with the proper use of pre-trained models, graph structure may not be necessary for textual multi-hop reasoning. We point out that both graph structure and adjacency matrix are task-related prior knowledge, and graph-attention can be considered as a special case of self-attention. Experiments demonstrate that graph-attention or the entire graph structure can be replaced by self-attention or Transformers.

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Recall and Learn: Fine-tuning Deep Pretrained Language Models with Less Forgetting
Sanyuan Chen | Yutai Hou | Yiming Cui | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Xiangzhan Yu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Deep pretrained language models have achieved great success in the way of pretraining first and then fine-tuning. But such a sequential transfer learning paradigm often confronts the catastrophic forgetting problem and leads to sub-optimal performance. To fine-tune with less forgetting, we propose a recall and learn mechanism, which adopts the idea of multi-task learning and jointly learns pretraining tasks and downstream tasks. Specifically, we introduce a Pretraining Simulation mechanism to recall the knowledge from pretraining tasks without data, and an Objective Shifting mechanism to focus the learning on downstream tasks gradually. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE benchmark. Our method also enables BERT-base to achieve better average performance than directly fine-tuning of BERT-large. Further, we provide the open-source RecAdam optimizer, which integrates the proposed mechanisms into Adam optimizer, to facility the NLP community.

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Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing
Yiming Cui | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Bing Qin | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks, and consecutive variants have been proposed to further improve the performance of the pre-trained language models. In this paper, we target on revisiting Chinese pre-trained language models to examine their effectiveness in a non-English language and release the Chinese pre-trained language model series to the community. We also propose a simple but effective model called MacBERT, which improves upon RoBERTa in several ways, especially the masking strategy that adopts MLM as correction (Mac). We carried out extensive experiments on eight Chinese NLP tasks to revisit the existing pre-trained language models as well as the proposed MacBERT. Experimental results show that MacBERT could achieve state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks, and we also ablate details with several findings that may help future research. https://github.com/ymcui/MacBERT

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A Compare Aggregate Transformer for Understanding Document-grounded Dialogue
Longxuan Ma | Wei-Nan Zhang | Runxin Sun | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Unstructured documents serving as external knowledge of the dialogues help to generate more informative responses. Previous research focused on knowledge selection (KS) in the document with dialogue. However, dialogue history that is not related to the current dialogue may introduce noise in the KS processing. In this paper, we propose a Compare Aggregate Transformer (CAT) to jointly denoise the dialogue context and aggregate the document information for response generation. We designed two different comparison mechanisms to reduce noise (before and during decoding). In addition, we propose two metrics for evaluating document utilization efficiency based on word overlap. Experimental results on the CMU_DoG dataset show that the proposed CAT model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach and strong baselines.

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CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages
Zhangyin Feng | Daya Guo | Duyu Tang | Nan Duan | Xiaocheng Feng | Ming Gong | Linjun Shou | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Daxin Jiang | Ming Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

We present CodeBERT, a bimodal pre-trained model for programming language (PL) and natural language (NL). CodeBERT learns general-purpose representations that support downstream NL-PL applications such as natural language code search, code documentation generation, etc. We develop CodeBERT with Transformer-based neural architecture, and train it with a hybrid objective function that incorporates the pre-training task of replaced token detection, which is to detect plausible alternatives sampled from generators. This enables us to utilize both “bimodal” data of NL-PL pairs and “unimodal data, where the former provides input tokens for model training while the latter helps to learn better generators. We evaluate CodeBERT on two NL-PL applications by fine-tuning model parameters. Results show that CodeBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance on both natural language code search and code documentation generation. Furthermore, to investigate what type of knowledge is learned in CodeBERT, we construct a dataset for NL-PL probing, and evaluate in a zero-shot setting where parameters of pre-trained models are fixed. Results show that CodeBERT performs better than previous pre-trained models on NLPL probing.

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AGIF: An Adaptive Graph-Interactive Framework for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling
Libo Qin | Xiao Xu | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

In real-world scenarios, users usually have multiple intents in the same utterance. Unfortunately, most spoken language understanding (SLU) models either mainly focused on the single intent scenario, or simply incorporated an overall intent context vector for all tokens, ignoring the fine-grained multiple intents information integration for token-level slot prediction. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Graph-Interactive Framework (AGIF) for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling, where we introduce an intent-slot graph interaction layer to model the strong correlation between the slot and intents. Such an interaction layer is applied to each token adaptively, which has the advantage to automatically extract the relevant intents information, making a fine-grained intent information integration for the token-level slot prediction. Experimental results on three multi-intent datasets show that our framework obtains substantial improvement and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. In addition, our framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two single-intent datasets.

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Enhancing Content Planning for Table-to-Text Generation with Data Understanding and Verification
Heng Gong | Wei Bi | Xiaocheng Feng | Bing Qin | Xiaojiang Liu | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Neural table-to-text models, which select and order salient data, as well as verbalizing them fluently via surface realization, have achieved promising progress. Based on results from previous work, the performance bottleneck of current models lies in the stage of content planing (selecting and ordering salient content from the input). That is, performance drops drastically when an oracle content plan is replaced by a model-inferred one during surface realization. In this paper, we propose to enhance neural content planning by (1) understanding data values with contextual numerical value representations that bring the sense of value comparison into content planning; (2) verifying the importance and ordering of the selected sequence of records with policy gradient. We evaluated our model on ROTOWIRE and MLB, two datasets on this task, and results show that our model outperforms existing systems with respect to content planning metrics.

2019

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Entity-Consistent End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue System with KB Retriever
Libo Qin | Yijia Liu | Wanxiang Che | Haoyang Wen | Yangming Li | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Querying the knowledge base (KB) has long been a challenge in the end-to-end task-oriented dialogue system. Previous sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) dialogue generation work treats the KB query as an attention over the entire KB, without the guarantee that the generated entities are consistent with each other. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which queries the KB in two steps to improve the consistency of generated entities. In the first step, inspired by the observation that a response can usually be supported by a single KB row, we introduce a KB retrieval component which explicitly returns the most relevant KB row given a dialogue history. The retrieval result is further used to filter the irrelevant entities in a Seq2Seq response generation model to improve the consistency among the output entities. In the second step, we further perform the attention mechanism to address the most correlated KB column. Two methods are proposed to make the training feasible without labeled retrieval data, which include distant supervision and Gumbel-Softmax technique. Experiments on two publicly available task oriented dialog datasets show the effectiveness of our model by outperforming the baseline systems and producing entity-consistent responses.

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Multi-Input Multi-Output Sequence Labeling for Joint Extraction of Fact and Condition Tuples from Scientific Text
Tianwen Jiang | Tong Zhao | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Nitesh Chawla | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Condition is essential in scientific statement. Without the conditions (e.g., equipment, environment) that were precisely specified, facts (e.g., observations) in the statements may no longer be valid. Existing ScienceIE methods, which aim at extracting factual tuples from scientific text, do not consider the conditions. In this work, we propose a new sequence labeling framework (as well as a new tag schema) to jointly extract the fact and condition tuples from statement sentences. The framework has (1) a multi-output module to generate one or multiple tuples and (2) a multi-input module to feed in multiple types of signals as sequences. It improves F1 score relatively by 4.2% on BioNLP2013 and by 6.2% on a new bio-text dataset for tuple extraction.

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Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension
Yiming Cui | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Bing Qin | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Though the community has made great progress on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task, most of the previous works are solving English-based MRC problems, and there are few efforts on other languages mainly due to the lack of large-scale training data.In this paper, we propose Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) task for the languages other than English. Firstly, we present several back-translation approaches for CLMRC task which is straightforward to adopt. However, to exactly align the answer into source language is difficult and could introduce additional noise. In this context, we propose a novel model called Dual BERT, which takes advantage of the large-scale training data provided by rich-resource language (such as English) and learn the semantic relations between the passage and question in bilingual context, and then utilize the learned knowledge to improve reading comprehension performance of low-resource language. We conduct experiments on two Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets CMRC 2018 and DRCD. The results show consistent and significant improvements over various state-of-the-art systems by a large margin, which demonstrate the potentials in CLMRC task. Resources available: https://github.com/ymcui/Cross-Lingual-MRC

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A Stack-Propagation Framework with Token-Level Intent Detection for Spoken Language Understanding
Libo Qin | Wanxiang Che | Yangming Li | Haoyang Wen | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Intent detection and slot filling are two main tasks for building a spoken language understanding (SLU) system. The two tasks are closely tied and the slots often highly depend on the intent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for SLU to better incorporate the intent information, which further guiding the slot filling. In our framework, we adopt a joint model with Stack-Propagation which can directly use the intent information as input for slot filling, thus to capture the intent semantic knowledge. In addition, to further alleviate the error propagation, we perform the token-level intent detection for the Stack-Propagation framework. Experiments on two publicly datasets show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance and outperforms other previous methods by a large margin. Finally, we use the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) model in our framework, which further boost our performance in SLU task.

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Modeling Event Background for If-Then Commonsense Reasoning Using Context-aware Variational Autoencoder
Li Du | Xiao Ding | Ting Liu | Zhongyang Li
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Understanding event and event-centered commonsense reasoning are crucial for natural language processing (NLP). Given an observed event, it is trivial for human to infer its intents and effects, while this type of If-Then reasoning still remains challenging for NLP systems. To facilitate this, a If-Then commonsense reasoning dataset Atomic is proposed, together with an RNN-based Seq2Seq model to conduct such reasoning. However, two fundamental problems still need to be addressed: first, the intents of an event may be multiple, while the generations of RNN-based Seq2Seq models are always semantically close; second, external knowledge of the event background may be necessary for understanding events and conducting the If-Then reasoning. To address these issues, we propose a novel context-aware variational autoencoder effectively learning event background information to guide the If-Then reasoning. Experimental results show that our approach improves the accuracy and diversity of inferences compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods.

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Table-to-Text Generation with Effective Hierarchical Encoder on Three Dimensions (Row, Column and Time)
Heng Gong | Xiaocheng Feng | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Although Seq2Seq models for table-to-text generation have achieved remarkable progress, modeling table representation in one dimension is inadequate. This is because (1) the table consists of multiple rows and columns, which means that encoding a table should not depend only on one dimensional sequence or set of records and (2) most of the tables are time series data (e.g. NBA game data, stock market data), which means that the description of the current table may be affected by its historical data. To address aforementioned problems, not only do we model each table cell considering other records in the same row, we also enrich table’s representation by modeling each table cell in context of other cells in the same column or with historical (time dimension) data respectively. In addition, we develop a table cell fusion gate to combine representations from row, column and time dimension into one dense vector according to the saliency of each dimension’s representation. We evaluated our methods on ROTOWIRE, a benchmark dataset of NBA basketball games. Both automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with improvement of 2.66 in BLEU over the strong baseline and outperformance of state-of-the-art model.

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Event Representation Learning Enhanced with External Commonsense Knowledge
Xiao Ding | Kuo Liao | Ting Liu | Zhongyang Li | Junwen Duan
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Prior work has proposed effective methods to learn event representations that can capture syntactic and semantic information over text corpus, demonstrating their effectiveness for downstream tasks such as script event prediction. On the other hand, events extracted from raw texts lacks of commonsense knowledge, such as the intents and emotions of the event participants, which are useful for distinguishing event pairs when there are only subtle differences in their surface realizations. To address this issue, this paper proposes to leverage external commonsense knowledge about the intent and sentiment of the event. Experiments on three event-related tasks, i.e., event similarity, script event prediction and stock market prediction, show that our model obtains much better event embeddings for the tasks, achieving 78% improvements on hard similarity task, yielding more precise inferences on subsequent events under given contexts, and better accuracies in predicting the volatilities of the stock market.

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Cross-Lingual BERT Transformation for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing
Yuxuan Wang | Wanxiang Che | Jiang Guo | Yijia Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

This paper investigates the problem of learning cross-lingual representations in a contextual space. We propose Cross-Lingual BERT Transformation (CLBT), a simple and efficient approach to generate cross-lingual contextualized word embeddings based on publicly available pre-trained BERT models (Devlin et al., 2018). In this approach, a linear transformation is learned from contextual word alignments to align the contextualized embeddings independently trained in different languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer parsing. Experiments show that our embeddings substantially outperform the previous state-of-the-art that uses static embeddings. We further compare our approach with XLM (Lample and Conneau, 2019), a recently proposed cross-lingual language model trained with massive parallel data, and achieve highly competitive results.

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A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension
Yiming Cui | Ting Liu | Wanxiang Che | Li Xiao | Zhipeng Chen | Wentao Ma | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. In this paper, we introduce a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities in this area. The dataset is composed by near 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. We also annotated a challenge set which contains the questions that need comprehensive understanding and multi-sentence inference throughout the context. We present several baseline systems as well as anonymous submissions for demonstrating the difficulties in this dataset. With the release of the dataset, we hosted the Second Evaluation Workshop on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC 2018). We hope the release of the dataset could further accelerate the Chinese machine reading comprehension research. Resources are available: https://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2018

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IFlyLegal: A Chinese Legal System for Consultation, Law Searching, and Document Analysis
Ziyue Wang | Baoxin Wang | Xingyi Duan | Dayong Wu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

Legal Tech is developed to help people with legal services and solve legal problems via machines. To achieve this, one of the key requirements for machines is to utilize legal knowledge and comprehend legal context. This can be fulfilled by natural language processing (NLP) techniques, for instance, text representation, text categorization, question answering (QA) and natural language inference, etc. To this end, we introduce a freely available Chinese Legal Tech system (IFlyLegal) that benefits from multiple NLP tasks. It is an integrated system that performs legal consulting, multi-way law searching, and legal document analysis by exploiting techniques such as deep contextual representations and various attention mechanisms. To our knowledge, IFlyLegal is the first Chinese legal system that employs up-to-date NLP techniques and caters for needs of different user groups, such as lawyers, judges, procurators, and clients. Since Jan, 2019, we have gathered 2,349 users and 28,238 page views (till June, 23, 2019).

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TripleNet: Triple Attention Network for Multi-Turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots
Wentao Ma | Yiming Cui | Nan Shao | Su He | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

We consider the importance of different utterances in the context for selecting the response usually depends on the current query. In this paper, we propose the model TripleNet to fully model the task with the triple <context, query, response> instead of <context, response > in previous works. The heart of TripleNet is a novel attention mechanism named triple attention to model the relationships within the triple at four levels. The new mechanism updates the representation of each element based on the attention with the other two concurrently and symmetrically.We match the triple <C, Q, R> centered on the response from char to context level for prediction.Experimental results on two large-scale multi-turn response selection datasets show that the proposed model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

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HIT-SCIR at MRP 2019: A Unified Pipeline for Meaning Representation Parsing via Efficient Training and Effective Encoding
Wanxiang Che | Longxu Dou | Yang Xu | Yuxuan Wang | Yijia Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the Shared Task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing at the 2019 Conference on Natural Language Learning

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) for CoNLL 2019 shared task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing. We extended the basic transition-based parser with two improvements: a) Efficient Training by realizing Stack LSTM parallel training; b) Effective Encoding via adopting deep contextualized word embeddings BERT. Generally, we proposed a unified pipeline to meaning representation parsing, including framework-specific transition-based parsers, BERT-enhanced word representation, and post-processing. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to ALL-F1 (86.2%) and especially ranked first in UCCA framework (81.67%).

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Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training for Neural Response Generation
Qingfu Zhu | Lei Cui | Wei-Nan Zhang | Furu Wei | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Dialogue systems are usually built on either generation-based or retrieval-based approaches, yet they do not benefit from the advantages of different models. In this paper, we propose a Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training (REAT) method for neural response generation. Distinct from existing approaches, the REAT method leverages an encoder-decoder framework in terms of an adversarial training paradigm, while taking advantage of N-best response candidates from a retrieval-based system to construct the discriminator. An empirical study on a large scale public available benchmark dataset shows that the REAT method significantly outperforms the vanilla Seq2Seq model as well as the conventional adversarial training approach.

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Learning to Ask Unanswerable Questions for Machine Reading Comprehension
Haichao Zhu | Li Dong | Furu Wei | Wenhui Wang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Machine reading comprehension with unanswerable questions is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a data augmentation technique by automatically generating relevant unanswerable questions according to an answerable question paired with its corresponding paragraph that contains the answer. We introduce a pair-to-sequence model for unanswerable question generation, which effectively captures the interactions between the question and the paragraph. We also present a way to construct training data for our question generation models by leveraging the existing reading comprehension dataset. Experimental results show that the pair-to-sequence model performs consistently better compared with the sequence-to-sequence baseline. We further use the automatically generated unanswerable questions as a means of data augmentation on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset, yielding 1.9 absolute F1 improvement with BERT-base model and 1.7 absolute F1 improvement with BERT-large model.

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Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation
Jiaqi Guo | Zecheng Zhan | Yan Gao | Yan Xiao | Jian-Guang Lou | Ting Liu | Dongmei Zhang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. IRNet aims to address two challenges: 1) the mismatch between intents expressed in natural language (NL) and the implementation details in SQL; 2) the challenge in predicting columns caused by the large number of out-of-domain words. Instead of end-to-end synthesizing a SQL query, IRNet decomposes the synthesis process into three phases. In the first phase, IRNet performs a schema linking over a question and a database schema. Then, IRNet adopts a grammar-based neural model to synthesize a SemQL query which is an intermediate representation that we design to bridge NL and SQL. Finally, IRNet deterministically infers a SQL query from the synthesized SemQL query with domain knowledge. On the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider, IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy, obtaining 19.5% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches. At the time of writing, IRNet achieves the first position on the Spider leaderboard.

2018

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Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis using Statistical and Prior Knowledge driven Features with Probabilistic Ensemble Enhancement
Ruiji Fu | Zhengqi Pei | Jiefu Gong | Wei Song | Dechuan Teng | Wanxiang Che | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

This paper describes our system at NLPTEA-2018 Task #1: Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis. Grammatical Error Diagnosis is one of the most challenging NLP tasks, which is to locate grammar errors and tell error types. Our system is built on the model of bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with a conditional random field layer (BiLSTM-CRF) but integrates with several new features. First, richer features are considered in the BiLSTM-CRF model; second, a probabilistic ensemble approach is adopted; third, Template Matcher are used during a post-processing to bring in human knowledge. In official evaluation, our system obtains the highest F1 scores at identifying error types and locating error positions, the second highest F1 score at sentence level error detection. We also recommend error corrections for specific error types and achieve the best F1 performance among all participants.

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Semantic Parsing with Syntax- and Table-Aware SQL Generation
Yibo Sun | Duyu Tang | Nan Duan | Jianshu Ji | Guihong Cao | Xiaocheng Feng | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a generative model to map natural language questions into SQL queries. Existing neural network based approaches typically generate a SQL query word-by-word, however, a large portion of the generated results is incorrect or not executable due to the mismatch between question words and table contents. Our approach addresses this problem by considering the structure of table and the syntax of SQL language. The quality of the generated SQL query is significantly improved through (1) learning to replicate content from column names, cells or SQL keywords; and (2) improving the generation of WHERE clause by leveraging the column-cell relation. Experiments are conducted on WikiSQL, a recently released dataset with the largest question- SQL pairs. Our approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy from 69.0% to 74.4%.

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Deep Reinforcement Learning for Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution
Qingyu Yin | Yu Zhang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent neural network models for Chinese zero pronoun resolution gain great performance by capturing semantic information for zero pronouns and candidate antecedents, but tend to be short-sighted, operating solely by making local decisions. They typically predict coreference links between the zero pronoun and one single candidate antecedent at a time while ignoring their influence on future decisions. Ideally, modeling useful information of preceding potential antecedents is crucial for classifying later zero pronoun-candidate antecedent pairs, a need which leads traditional models of zero pronoun resolution to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to deal with the task. With the help of the reinforcement learning agent, our system learns the policy of selecting antecedents in a sequential manner, where useful information provided by earlier predicted antecedents could be utilized for making later coreference decisions. Experimental results on OntoNotes 5.0 show that our approach substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under three experimental settings.

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Distilling Knowledge for Search-based Structured Prediction
Yijia Liu | Wanxiang Che | Huaipeng Zhao | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Many natural language processing tasks can be modeled into structured prediction and solved as a search problem. In this paper, we distill an ensemble of multiple models trained with different initialization into a single model. In addition to learning to match the ensemble’s probability output on the reference states, we also use the ensemble to explore the search space and learn from the encountered states in the exploration. Experimental results on two typical search-based structured prediction tasks – transition-based dependency parsing and neural machine translation show that distillation can effectively improve the single model’s performance and the final model achieves improvements of 1.32 in LAS and 2.65 in BLEU score on these two tasks respectively over strong baselines and it outperforms the greedy structured prediction models in previous literatures.

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Dataset for the First Evaluation on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension
Yiming Cui | Ting Liu | Zhipeng Chen | Wentao Ma | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Zero Pronoun Resolution with Attention-based Neural Network
Qingyu Yin | Yu Zhang | Weinan Zhang | Ting Liu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recent neural network methods for zero pronoun resolution explore multiple models for generating representation vectors for zero pronouns and their candidate antecedents. Typically, contextual information is utilized to encode the zero pronouns since they are simply gaps that contain no actual content. To better utilize contexts of the zero pronouns, we here introduce the self-attention mechanism for encoding zero pronouns. With the help of the multiple hops of attention, our model is able to focus on some informative parts of the associated texts and therefore produces an efficient way of encoding the zero pronouns. In addition, an attention-based recurrent neural network is proposed for encoding candidate antecedents by their contents. Experiment results are encouraging: our proposed attention-based model gains the best performance on the Chinese portion of the OntoNotes corpus, substantially surpasses existing Chinese zero pronoun resolution baseline systems.

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Generating Reasonable and Diversified Story Ending Using Sequence to Sequence Model with Adversarial Training
Zhongyang Li | Xiao Ding | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Story generation is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence (AI) and has received a lot of interests in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Most previous work tried to solve this problem using Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). However, the pure MLE training objective much limits the power of Seq2Seq model in generating high-quality storys. In this paper, we propose using adversarial training augmented Seq2Seq model to generate reasonable and diversified story endings given a story context. Our model includes a generator that defines the policy of generating a story ending, and a discriminator that labels story endings as human-generated or machine-generated. Carefully designed human and automatic evaluation metrics demonstrate that our adversarial training augmented Seq2Seq model can generate more reasonable and diversified story endings compared to purely MLE-trained Seq2Seq model. Moreover, our model achieves better performance on the task of Story Cloze Test with an accuracy of 62.6% compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods.

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Sequence-to-Sequence Data Augmentation for Dialogue Language Understanding
Yutai Hou | Yijia Liu | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we study the problem of data augmentation for language understanding in task-oriented dialogue system. In contrast to previous work which augments an utterance without considering its relation with other utterances, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation based data augmentation framework that leverages one utterance’s same semantic alternatives in the training data. A novel diversity rank is incorporated into the utterance representation to make the model produce diverse utterances and these diversely augmented utterances help to improve the language understanding module. Experimental results on the Airline Travel Information System dataset and a newly created semantic frame annotation on Stanford Multi-turn, Multi-domain Dialogue Dataset show that our framework achieves significant improvements of 6.38 and 10.04 F-scores respectively when only a training set of hundreds utterances is represented. Case studies also confirm that our method generates diverse utterances.

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Context-Sensitive Generation of Open-Domain Conversational Responses
Weinan Zhang | Yiming Cui | Yifa Wang | Qingfu Zhu | Lingzhi Li | Lianqiang Zhou | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite the success of existing works on single-turn conversation generation, taking the coherence in consideration, human conversing is actually a context-sensitive process. Inspired by the existing studies, this paper proposed the static and dynamic attention based approaches for context-sensitive generation of open-domain conversational responses. Experimental results on two public datasets show that the proposed static attention based approach outperforms all the baselines on automatic and human evaluation.

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Learning Target-Specific Representations of Financial News Documents For Cumulative Abnormal Return Prediction
Junwen Duan | Yue Zhang | Xiao Ding | Ching-Yun Chang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Texts from the Internet serve as important data sources for financial market modeling. Early statistical approaches rely on manually defined features to capture lexical, sentiment and event information, which suffers from feature sparsity. Recent work has considered learning dense representations for news titles and abstracts. Compared to news titles, full documents can contain more potentially helpful information, but also noise compared to events and sentences, which has been less investigated in previous work. To fill this gap, we propose a novel target-specific abstract-guided news document representation model. The model uses a target-sensitive representation of the news abstract to weigh sentences in the news content, so as to select and combine the most informative sentences for market modeling. Results show that document representations can give better performance for estimating cumulative abnormal returns of companies when compared to titles and abstracts. Our model is especially effective when it used to combine information from multiple document sources compared to the sentence-level baselines.

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Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue with Dialogue State Representation
Haoyang Wen | Yijia Liu | Wanxiang Che | Libo Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Classic pipeline models for task-oriented dialogue system require explicit modeling the dialogue states and hand-crafted action spaces to query a domain-specific knowledge base. Conversely, sequence-to-sequence models learn to map dialogue history to the response in current turn without explicit knowledge base querying. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages the advantages of classic pipeline and sequence-to-sequence models. Our framework models a dialogue state as a fixed-size distributed representation and use this representation to query a knowledge base via an attention mechanism. Experiment on Stanford Multi-turn Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialogue Dataset shows that our framework significantly outperforms other sequence-to-sequence based baseline models on both automatic and human evaluation.

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Learning Sentence Representations over Tree Structures for Target-Dependent Classification
Junwen Duan | Xiao Ding | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Target-dependent classification tasks, such as aspect-level sentiment analysis, perform fine-grained classifications towards specific targets. Semantic compositions over tree structures are promising for such tasks, as they can potentially capture long-distance interactions between targets and their contexts. However, previous work that operates on tree structures resorts to syntactic parsers or Treebank annotations, which are either subject to noise in informal texts or highly expensive to obtain. To address above issues, we propose a reinforcement learning based approach, which automatically induces target-specific sentence representations over tree structures. The underlying model is a RNN encoder-decoder that explores possible binary tree structures and a reward mechanism that encourages structures that improve performances on downstream tasks. We evaluate our approach on two benchmark tasks: firm-specific cumulative abnormal return prediction (based on formal news texts) and aspect-level sentiment analysis (based on informal social media texts). Experimental results show that our model gives superior performances compared to previous work that operates on parsed trees. Moreover, our approach gives some intuitions on how target-specific sentence representations can be achieved from its word constituents.

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Adaptive Multi-pass Decoder for Neural Machine Translation
Xinwei Geng | Xiaocheng Feng | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Although end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable progress in the recent years, the idea of adopting multi-pass decoding mechanism into conventional NMT is not well explored. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called adaptive multi-pass decoder, which introduces a flexible multi-pass polishing mechanism to extend the capacity of NMT via reinforcement learning. More specifically, we adopt an extra policy network to automatically choose a suitable and effective number of decoding passes, according to the complexity of source sentences and the quality of the generated translations. Extensive experiments on Chinese-English translation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed adaptive multi-pass decoder upon the conventional NMT with a significant improvement about 1.55 BLEU.

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Neural Multitask Learning for Simile Recognition
Lizhen Liu | Xiao Hu | Wei Song | Ruiji Fu | Ting Liu | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Simile is a special type of metaphor, where comparators such as like and as are used to compare two objects. Simile recognition is to recognize simile sentences and extract simile components, i.e., the tenor and the vehicle. This paper presents a study of simile recognition in Chinese. We construct an annotated corpus for this research, which consists of 11.3k sentences that contain a comparator. We propose a neural network framework for jointly optimizing three tasks: simile sentence classification, simile component extraction and language modeling. The experimental results show that the neural network based approaches can outperform all rule-based and feature-based baselines. Both simile sentence classification and simile component extraction can benefit from multitask learning. The former can be solved very well, while the latter is more difficult.

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SemRegex: A Semantics-Based Approach for Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications
Zexuan Zhong | Jiaqi Guo | Wei Yang | Jian Peng | Tao Xie | Jian-Guang Lou | Ting Liu | Dongmei Zhang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent research proposes syntax-based approaches to address the problem of generating programs from natural language specifications. These approaches typically train a sequence-to-sequence learning model using a syntax-based objective: maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Such syntax-based approaches do not effectively address the goal of generating semantically correct programs, because these approaches fail to handle Program Aliasing, i.e., semantically equivalent programs may have many syntactically different forms. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a semantics-based approach named SemRegex. SemRegex provides solutions for a subtask of the program-synthesis problem: generating regular expressions from natural language. Different from the existing syntax-based approaches, SemRegex trains the model by maximizing the expected semantic correctness of the generated regular expressions. The semantic correctness is measured using the DFA-equivalence oracle, random test cases, and distinguishing test cases. The experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SemRegex over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.

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An AMR Aligner Tuned by Transition-based Parser
Yijia Liu | Wanxiang Che | Bo Zheng | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we propose a new rich resource enhanced AMR aligner which produces multiple alignments and a new transition system for AMR parsing along with its oracle parser. Our aligner is further tuned by our oracle parser via picking the alignment that leads to the highest-scored achievable AMR graph. Experimental results show that our aligner outperforms the rule-based aligner in previous work by achieving higher alignment F1 score and consistently improving two open-sourced AMR parsers. Based on our aligner and transition system, we develop a transition-based AMR parser that parses a sentence into its AMR graph directly. An ensemble of our parsers with only words and POS tags as input leads to 68.4 Smatch F1 score, which outperforms the current state-of-the-art parser.

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Towards Better UD Parsing: Deep Contextualized Word Embeddings, Ensemble, and Treebank Concatenation
Wanxiang Che | Yijia Liu | Yuxuan Wang | Bo Zheng | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) submitted to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. We base our submission on Stanford’s winning system for the CoNLL 2017 shared task and make two effective extensions: 1) incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings into both the part of speech tagger and parser; 2) ensembling parsers trained with different initialization. We also explore different ways of concatenating treebanks for further improvements. Experimental results on the development data show the effectiveness of our methods. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to LAS (75.84%) and outperformed the other systems by a large margin.

2017

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Generating and Exploiting Large-scale Pseudo Training Data for Zero Pronoun Resolution
Ting Liu | Yiming Cui | Qingyu Yin | Wei-Nan Zhang | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Most existing approaches for zero pronoun resolution are heavily relying on annotated data, which is often released by shared task organizers. Therefore, the lack of annotated data becomes a major obstacle in the progress of zero pronoun resolution task. Also, it is expensive to spend manpower on labeling the data for better performance. To alleviate the problem above, in this paper, we propose a simple but novel approach to automatically generate large-scale pseudo training data for zero pronoun resolution. Furthermore, we successfully transfer the cloze-style reading comprehension neural network model into zero pronoun resolution task and propose a two-step training mechanism to overcome the gap between the pseudo training data and the real one. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art systems with an absolute improvements of 3.1% F-score on OntoNotes 5.0 data.

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Discourse Mode Identification in Essays
Wei Song | Dong Wang | Ruiji Fu | Lizhen Liu | Ting Liu | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Discourse modes play an important role in writing composition and evaluation. This paper presents a study on the manual and automatic identification of narration,exposition, description, argument and emotion expressing sentences in narrative essays. We annotate a corpus to study the characteristics of discourse modes and describe a neural sequence labeling model for identification. Evaluation results show that discourse modes can be identified automatically with an average F1-score of 0.7. We further demonstrate that discourse modes can be used as features that improve automatic essay scoring (AES). The impacts of discourse modes for AES are also discussed.

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Attention-over-Attention Neural Networks for Reading Comprehension
Yiming Cui | Zhipeng Chen | Si Wei | Shijin Wang | Ting Liu | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Cloze-style reading comprehension is a representative problem in mining relationship between document and query. In this paper, we present a simple but novel model called attention-over-attention reader for better solving cloze-style reading comprehension task. The proposed model aims to place another attention mechanism over the document-level attention and induces “attended attention” for final answer predictions. One advantage of our model is that it is simpler than related works while giving excellent performance. In addition to the primary model, we also propose an N-best re-ranking strategy to double check the validity of the candidates and further improve the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed methods significantly outperform various state-of-the-art systems by a large margin in public datasets, such as CNN and Children’s Book Test.

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Benben: A Chinese Intelligent Conversational Robot
Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | Bing Qin | Yu Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Yanyan Zhao | Xiao Ding
Proceedings of ACL 2017, System Demonstrations

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The HIT-SCIR System for End-to-End Parsing of Universal Dependencies
Wanxiang Che | Jiang Guo | Yuxuan Wang | Bo Zheng | Huaipeng Zhao | Yang Liu | Dechuan Teng | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) for the CoNLL 2017 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system includes three pipelined components: tokenization, Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. We use character-based bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for both tokenization and POS tagging. Afterwards, we employ a list-based transition-based algorithm for general non-projective parsing and present an improved Stack-LSTM-based architecture for representing each transition state and making predictions. Furthermore, to parse low/zero-resource languages and cross-domain data, we use a model transfer approach to make effective use of existing resources. We demonstrate substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 3.76% in LAS of all languages. And finally, we rank the 4th place on the official test sets.

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Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution with Deep Memory Network
Qingyu Yin | Yu Zhang | Weinan Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Existing approaches for Chinese zero pronoun resolution typically utilize only syntactical and lexical features while ignoring semantic information. The fundamental reason is that zero pronouns have no descriptive information, which brings difficulty in explicitly capturing their semantic similarities with antecedents. Meanwhile, representing zero pronouns is challenging since they are merely gaps that convey no actual content. In this paper, we address this issue by building a deep memory network that is capable of encoding zero pronouns into vector representations with information obtained from their contexts and potential antecedents. Consequently, our resolver takes advantage of semantic information by using these continuous distributed representations. Experiments on the OntoNotes 5.0 dataset show that the proposed memory network could substantially outperform the state-of-the-art systems in various experimental settings.

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Transition-Based Disfluency Detection using LSTMs
Shaolei Wang | Wanxiang Che | Yue Zhang | Meishan Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we model the problem of disfluency detection using a transition-based framework, which incrementally constructs and labels the disfluency chunk of input sentences using a new transition system without syntax information. Compared with sequence labeling methods, it can capture non-local chunk-level features; compared with joint parsing and disfluency detection methods, it is free for noise in syntax. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art f-score of 87.5% on the commonly used English Switchboard test set, and a set of in-house annotated Chinese data.

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SCIR-QA at SemEval-2017 Task 3: CNN Model Based on Similar and Dissimilar Information between Keywords for Question Similarity
Le Qi | Yu Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

We describe a method of calculating the similarity of questions in community QA. Question in cQA are usually very long and there are a lot of useless information about calculating the similarity of questions. Therefore,we implement a CNN model based on similar and dissimilar information between question’s keywords. We extract the keywords of questions, and then model the similar and dissimilar information between the keywords, and use the CNN model to calculate the similarity.

2016

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ANEW+: Automatic Expansion and Validation of Affective Norms of Words Lexicons in Multiple Languages
Samira Shaikh | Kit Cho | Tomek Strzalkowski | Laurie Feldman | John Lien | Ting Liu | George Aaron Broadwell
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

In this article we describe our method of automatically expanding an existing lexicon of words with affective valence scores. The automatic expansion process was done in English. In addition, we describe our procedure for automatically creating lexicons in languages where such resources may not previously exist. The foreign languages we discuss in this paper are Spanish, Russian and Farsi. We also describe the procedures to systematically validate our newly created resources. The main contributions of this work are: 1) A general method for expansion and creation of lexicons with scores of words on psychological constructs such as valence, arousal or dominance; and 2) a procedure for ensuring validity of the newly constructed resources.

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The Validation of MRCPD Cross-language Expansions on Imageability Ratings
Ting Liu | Kit Cho | Tomek Strzalkowski | Samira Shaikh | Mehrdad Mirzaei
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

In this article, we present a method to validate a multi-lingual (English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi) corpus on imageability ratings automatically expanded from MRCPD (Liu et al., 2014). We employed the corpus (Brysbaert et al., 2014) on concreteness ratings for our English MRCPD+ validation because of lacking human assessed imageability ratings and high correlation between concreteness ratings and imageability ratings (e.g. r = .83). For the same reason, we built a small corpus with human imageability assessment for the other language corpus validation. The results show that the automatically expanded imageability ratings are highly correlated with human assessment in all four languages, which demonstrate our automatic expansion method is valid and robust. We believe these new resources can be of significant interest to the research community, particularly in natural language processing and computational sociolinguistics.

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Aspect Level Sentiment Classification with Deep Memory Network
Duyu Tang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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SemEval-2016 Task 9: Chinese Semantic Dependency Parsing
Wanxiang Che | Yanqiu Shao | Ting Liu | Yu Ding
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

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A Universal Framework for Inductive Transfer Parsing across Multi-typed Treebanks
Jiang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Various treebanks have been released for dependency parsing. Despite that treebanks may belong to different languages or have different annotation schemes, they contain common syntactic knowledge that is potential to benefit each other. This paper presents a universal framework for transfer parsing across multi-typed treebanks with deep multi-task learning. We consider two kinds of treebanks as source: the multilingual universal treebanks and the monolingual heterogeneous treebanks. Knowledge across the source and target treebanks are effectively transferred through multi-level parameter sharing. Experiments on several benchmark datasets in various languages demonstrate that our approach can make effective use of arbitrary source treebanks to improve target parsing models.

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A Neural Attention Model for Disfluency Detection
Shaolei Wang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

In this paper, we study the problem of disfluency detection using the encoder-decoder framework. We treat disfluency detection as a sequence-to-sequence problem and propose a neural attention-based model which can efficiently model the long-range dependencies between words and make the resulting sentence more likely to be grammatically correct. Our model firstly encode the source sentence with a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BI-LSTM) and then use the neural attention as a pointer to select an ordered sub sequence of the input as the output. Experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art f-score of 86.7% on the commonly used English Switchboard test set. We also evaluate the performance of our model on the in-house annotated Chinese data and achieve a significantly higher f-score compared to the baseline of CRF-based approach.

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Learning to Identify Sentence Parallelism in Student Essays
Wei Song | Tong Liu | Ruiji Fu | Lizhen Liu | Hanshi Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Parallelism is an important rhetorical device. We propose a machine learning approach for automated sentence parallelism identification in student essays. We build an essay dataset with sentence level parallelism annotated. We derive features by combining generalized word alignment strategies and the alignment measures between word sequences. The experimental results show that sentence parallelism can be effectively identified with a F1 score of 82% at pair-wise level and 72% at parallelism chunk level.Based on this approach, we automatically identify sentence parallelism in more than 2000 student essays and study the correlation between the use of sentence parallelism and the types and quality of essays.

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A Unified Architecture for Semantic Role Labeling and Relation Classification
Jiang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu | Jun Xu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

This paper describes a unified neural architecture for identifying and classifying multi-typed semantic relations between words in a sentence. We investigate two typical and well-studied tasks: semantic role labeling (SRL) which identifies the relations between predicates and arguments, and relation classification (RC) which focuses on the relation between two entities or nominals. While mostly studied separately in prior work, we show that the two tasks can be effectively connected and modeled using a general architecture. Experiments on CoNLL-2009 benchmark datasets show that our SRL models significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches. Our RC models also yield competitive performance with the best published records. Furthermore, we show that the two tasks can be trained jointly with multi-task learning, resulting in additive significant improvements for SRL.

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Consensus Attention-based Neural Networks for Chinese Reading Comprehension
Yiming Cui | Ting Liu | Zhipeng Chen | Shijin Wang | Guoping Hu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Reading comprehension has embraced a booming in recent NLP research. Several institutes have released the Cloze-style reading comprehension data, and these have greatly accelerated the research of machine comprehension. In this work, we firstly present Chinese reading comprehension datasets, which consist of People Daily news dataset and Children’s Fairy Tale (CFT) dataset. Also, we propose a consensus attention-based neural network architecture to tackle the Cloze-style reading comprehension problem, which aims to induce a consensus attention over every words in the query. Experimental results show that the proposed neural network significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in several public datasets. Furthermore, we setup a baseline for Chinese reading comprehension task, and hopefully this would speed up the process for future research.

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Knowledge-Driven Event Embedding for Stock Prediction
Xiao Ding | Yue Zhang | Ting Liu | Junwen Duan
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Representing structured events as vectors in continuous space offers a new way for defining dense features for natural language processing (NLP) applications. Prior work has proposed effective methods to learn event representations that can capture syntactic and semantic information over text corpus, demonstrating their effectiveness for downstream tasks such as event-driven stock prediction. On the other hand, events extracted from raw texts do not contain background knowledge on entities and relations that they are mentioned. To address this issue, this paper proposes to leverage extra information from knowledge graph, which provides ground truth such as attributes and properties of entities and encodes valuable relations between entities. Specifically, we propose a joint model to combine knowledge graph information into the objective function of an event embedding learning model. Experiments on event similarity and stock market prediction show that our model is more capable of obtaining better event embeddings and making more accurate prediction on stock market volatilities.

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Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation
Wei Song | Ruiji Fu | Lizhen Liu | Hanshi Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We introduce a novel task Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation. An anecdote is a story with a point revealing account of an individual person. Recommending proper anecdotes can be used as evidence to support argumentative writing or as a clue for further reading. We represent an anecdote as a structured tuple — < person, story, implication >. Anecdote recognition runs on archived argumentative essays. We extract narratives containing events of a person as the anecdote story. More importantly, we uncover the anecdote implication, which reveals the meaning and topic of an anecdote. Our approach depends on discourse role identification. Discourse roles such as thesis, main ideas and support help us locate stories and their implications in essays. The experiments show that informative and interpretable anecdotes can be recognized. These anecdotes are used for anecdote recommendation. The anecdote recommender can recommend proper anecdotes in response to given topics. The anecdote implication contributes most for bridging user interested topics and relevant anecdotes.

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English-Chinese Knowledge Base Translation with Neural Network
Xiaocheng Feng | Duyu Tang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Knowledge base (KB) such as Freebase plays an important role for many natural language processing tasks. English knowledge base is obviously larger and of higher quality than low resource language like Chinese. To expand Chinese KB by leveraging English KB resources, an effective way is to translate English KB (source) into Chinese (target). In this direction, two major challenges are to model triple semantics and to build a robust KB translator. We address these challenges by presenting a neural network approach, which learns continuous triple representation with a gated neural network. Accordingly, source triples and target triples are mapped in the same semantic vector space. We build a new dataset for English-Chinese KB translation from Freebase, and compare with several baselines on it. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves translation accuracy compared with baseline methods. We show that adaptive composition model improves standard solution such as neural tensor network in terms of translation accuracy.

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Hashtag Recommendation with Topical Attention-Based LSTM
Yang Li | Ting Liu | Jing Jiang | Liang Zhang
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Microblogging services allow users to create hashtags to categorize their posts. In recent years, the task of recommending hashtags for microblogs has been given increasing attention. However, most of existing methods depend on hand-crafted features. Motivated by the successful use of long short-term memory (LSTM) for many natural language processing tasks, in this paper, we adopt LSTM to learn the representation of a microblog post. Observing that hashtags indicate the primary topics of microblog posts, we propose a novel attention-based LSTM model which incorporates topic modeling into the LSTM architecture through an attention mechanism. We evaluate our model using a large real-world dataset. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms various competitive baseline methods. Furthermore, the incorporation of topical attention mechanism gives more than 7.4% improvement in F1 score compared with standard LSTM method.

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Effective LSTMs for Target-Dependent Sentiment Classification
Duyu Tang | Bing Qin | Xiaocheng Feng | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Target-dependent sentiment classification remains a challenge: modeling the semantic relatedness of a target with its context words in a sentence. Different context words have different influences on determining the sentiment polarity of a sentence towards the target. Therefore, it is desirable to integrate the connections between target word and context words when building a learning system. In this paper, we develop two target dependent long short-term memory (LSTM) models, where target information is automatically taken into account. We evaluate our methods on a benchmark dataset from Twitter. Empirical results show that modeling sentence representation with standard LSTM does not perform well. Incorporating target information into LSTM can significantly boost the classification accuracy. The target-dependent LSTM models achieve state-of-the-art performances without using syntactic parser or external sentiment lexicons.

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A Language-Independent Neural Network for Event Detection
Xiaocheng Feng | Lifu Huang | Duyu Tang | Heng Ji | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis with Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Bo Zheng | Wanxiang Che | Jiang Guo | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA2016)

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces our Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED) system in the NLP-TEA-3 shared task for CGED. The CGED system can diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are redundant words (R), missing words (M), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). We treat the CGED task as a sequence labeling task and describe three models, including a CRF-based model, an LSTM-based model and an ensemble model using stacking. We also show in details how we build and train the models. Evaluation includes three levels, which are detection level, identification level and position level. On the CGED-HSK dataset of NLP-TEA-3 shared task, our system presents the best F1-scores in all the three levels and also the best recall in the last two levels.

2015

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Understanding Cultural Conflicts using Metaphors and Sociolinguistic Measures of Influence
Samira Shaikh | Tomek Strzalkowski | Sarah Taylor | John Lien | Ting Liu | George Aaron Broadwell | Laurie Feldman | Boris Yamrom | Kit Cho | Yuliya Peshkova
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Metaphor in NLP

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Encoding World Knowledge in the Evaluation of Local Coherence
Muyu Zhang | Vanessa Wei Feng | Bing Qin | Graeme Hirst | Ting Liu | Jingwen Huang
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Encoding Distributional Semantics into Triple-Based Knowledge Ranking for Document Enrichment
Muyu Zhang | Bing Qin | Mao Zheng | Graeme Hirst | Ting Liu
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)

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Learning Semantic Representations of Users and Products for Document Level Sentiment Classification
Duyu Tang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
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)

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Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing Based on Distributed Representations
Jiang Guo | Wanxiang Che | David Yarowsky | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
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)

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Document Modeling with Gated Recurrent Neural Network for Sentiment Classification
Duyu Tang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Discourse Element Identification in Student Essays based on Global and Local Cohesion
Wei Song | Ruiji Fu | Lizhen Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2014

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Type-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Joint Segmentation and POS-Tagging
Meishan Zhang | Yue Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Revisiting Embedding Features for Simple Semi-supervised Learning
Jiang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Improve Statistical Machine Translation with Context-Sensitive Bilingual Semantic Embedding Model
Haiyang Wu | Daxiang Dong | Xiaoguang Hu | Dianhai Yu | Wei He | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Transformation from Discontinuous to Continuous Word Alignment Improves Translation Quality
Zhongjun He | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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A Joint Segmentation and Classification Framework for Sentiment Analysis
Duyu Tang | Furu Wei | Bing Qin | Li Dong | Ting Liu | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Domain Adaptation for CRF-based Chinese Word Segmentation using Free Annotations
Yijia Liu | Yue Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Fan Wu
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Using Structured Events to Predict Stock Price Movement: An Empirical Investigation
Xiao Ding | Yue Zhang | Ting Liu | Junwen Duan
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Computing Affect in Metaphors
Tomek Strzalkowski | Samira Shaikh | Kit Cho | George Aaron Broadwell | Laurie Feldman | Sarah Taylor | Boris Yamrom | Ting Liu | Ignacio Cases | Yuliya Peshkova | Kyle Elliot
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Metaphor in NLP

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Discovering Conceptual Metaphors using Source Domain Spaces
Samira Shaikh | Tomek Strzalkowski | Kit Cho | Ting Liu | George Aaron Broadwell | Laurie Feldman | Sarah Taylor | Boris Yamrom | Ching-Sheng Lin | Ning Sa | Ignacio Cases | Yuliya Peshkova | Kyle Elliot
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex)

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Automatic Expansion of the MRC Psycholinguistic Database Imageability Ratings
Ting Liu | Kit Cho | G. Aaron Broadwell | Samira Shaikh | Tomek Strzalkowski | John Lien | Sarah Taylor | Laurie Feldman | Boris Yamrom | Nick Webb | Umit Boz | Ignacio Cases | Ching-sheng Lin
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

Recent studies in metaphor extraction across several languages (Broadwell et al., 2013; Strzalkowski et al., 2013) have shown that word imageability ratings are highly correlated with the presence of metaphors in text. Information about imageability of words can be obtained from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (MRCPD) for English words and Léxico Informatizado del Español Programa (LEXESP) for Spanish words, which is a collection of human ratings obtained in a series of controlled surveys. Unfortunately, word imageability ratings were collected for only a limited number of words: 9,240 words in English, 6,233 in Spanish; and are unavailable at all in the other two languages studied: Russian and Farsi. The present study describes an automated method for expanding the MRCPD by conferring imageability ratings over the synonyms and hyponyms of existing MRCPD words, as identified in Wordnet. The result is an expanded MRCPD+ database with imagea-bility scores for more than 100,000 words. The appropriateness of this expansion process is assessed by examining the structural coherence of the expanded set and by validating the expanded lexicon against human judgment. Finally, the performance of the metaphor extraction system is shown to improve significantly with the expanded database. This paper describes the process for English MRCPD+ and the resulting lexical resource. The process is analogous for other languages.

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A Multi-Cultural Repository of Automatically Discovered Linguistic and Conceptual Metaphors
Samira Shaikh | Tomek Strzalkowski | Ting Liu | George Aaron Broadwell | Boris Yamrom | Sarah Taylor | Laurie Feldman | Kit Cho | Umit Boz | Ignacio Cases | Yuliya Peshkova | Ching-Sheng Lin
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In this article, we present details about our ongoing work towards building a repository of Linguistic and Conceptual Metaphors. This resource is being developed as part of our research effort into the large-scale detection of metaphors from unrestricted text. We have stored a large amount of automatically extracted metaphors in American English, Mexican Spanish, Russian and Iranian Farsi in a relational database, along with pertinent metadata associated with these metaphors. A substantial subset of the contents of our repository has been systematically validated via rigorous social science experiments. Using information stored in the repository, we are able to posit certain claims in a cross-cultural context about how peoples in these cultures (America, Mexico, Russia and Iran) view particular concepts related to Governance and Economic Inequality through the use of metaphor. Researchers in the field can use this resource as a reference of typical metaphors used across these cultures. In addition, it can be used to recognize metaphors of the same form or pattern, in other domains of research.

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Learning Semantic Hierarchies via Word Embeddings
Ruiji Fu | Jiang Guo | Bing Qin | Wanxiang Che | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing
Meishan Zhang | Yue Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Learning Sentiment-Specific Word Embedding for Twitter Sentiment Classification
Duyu Tang | Furu Wei | Nan Yang | Ming Zhou | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Syntactic Processing Using Global Discriminative Learning and Beam-Search Decoding
Yue Zhang | Meishan Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorials

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Coooolll: A Deep Learning System for Twitter Sentiment Classification
Duyu Tang | Furu Wei | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2014)

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Building Large-Scale Twitter-Specific Sentiment Lexicon : A Representation Learning Approach
Duyu Tang | Furu Wei | Bing Qin | Ming Zhou | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

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Learning Sense-specific Word Embeddings By Exploiting Bilingual Resources
Jiang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

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Jointly or Separately: Which is Better for Parsing Heterogeneous Dependencies?
Meishan Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Yanqiu Shao | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

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Triple based Background Knowledge Ranking for Document Enrichment
Muyu Zhang | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Mao Zheng
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

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Sentence Compression for Target-Polarity Word Collocation Extraction
Yanyan Zhao | Wanxiang Che | Honglei Guo | Bing Qin | Zhong Su | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

2013

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Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating Structured Annotation of Queries
Xiao Ding | Zhicheng Dou | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Ji-Rong Wen
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Microblog Entity Linking by Leveraging Extra Posts
Yuhang Guo | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Exploiting Multiple Sources for Open-Domain Hypernym Discovery
Ruiji Fu | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Robust Extraction of Metaphor from Novel Data
Tomek Strzalkowski | George Aaron Broadwell | Sarah Taylor | Laurie Feldman | Samira Shaikh | Ting Liu | Boris Yamrom | Kit Cho | Umit Boz | Ignacio Cases | Kyle Elliot
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Metaphor in NLP

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Named Entity Recognition with Bilingual Constraints
Wanxiang Che | Mengqiu Wang | Christopher D. Manning | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Building Chinese Event Type Paradigm Based on Trigger Clustering
Xiao Ding | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Topical Key Concept Extraction from Folksonomy
Han Xue | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Chao Xiang
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Chinese Parsing Exploiting Characters
Meishan Zhang | Yue Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

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Extending the MPC corpus to Chinese and Urdu - A Multiparty Multi-Lingual Chat Corpus for Modeling Social Phenomena in Language
Ting Liu | Samira Shaikh | Tomek Strzalkowski | Aaron Broadwell | Jennifer Stromer-Galley | Sarah Taylor | Umit Boz | Xiaoai Ren | Jingsi Wu
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

In this paper, we report our efforts in building a multi-lingual multi-party online chat corpus in order to develop a firm understanding in a set of social constructs such as agenda control, influence, and leadership as well as to computationally model such constructs in online interactions. These automated models will help capture the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents. In this paper, we first introduce our experiment design and data collection method in Chinese and Urdu, and then report on the current stage of our data collection. We annotated the collected corpus on four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics, and meso-topics. Results from the analyses of annotated data on different languages indicate some interesting phenomena, which are reported in this paper.

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Collocation Polarity Disambiguation Using Web-based Pseudo Contexts
Yanyan Zhao | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

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Exploiting Multiple Treebanks for Parsing with Quasi-synchronous Grammars
Zhenghua Li | Ting Liu | Wanxiang Che
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Improve SMT Quality with Automatically Extracted Paraphrase Rules
Wei He | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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A Comparison of Chinese Parsers for Stanford Dependencies
Wanxiang Che | Valentin Spitkovsky | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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SemEval-2012 Task 5: Chinese Semantic Dependency Parsing
Wanxiang Che | Meishan Zhang | Yanqiu Shao | Ting Liu
*SEM 2012: The First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics – Volume 1: Proceedings of the main conference and the shared task, and Volume 2: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2012)

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A Separately Passive-Aggressive Training Algorithm for Joint POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing
Zhenghua Li | Min Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Modeling Leadership and Influence in Multi-party Online Discourse
Tomek Strzalkowski | Samira Shaikh | Ting Liu | George Aaron Broadwell | Jenny Stromer-Galley | Sarah Taylor | Umit Boz | Veena Ravishankar | Xiaoai Ren
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Stacking Heterogeneous Joint Models of Chinese POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing
Meishan Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Zhenghua Li
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

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User Behaviors Lend a Helping Hand: Learning Paraphrase Query Patterns from Search Log Sessions
Shiqi Zhao | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Micro blogs Oriented Word Segmentation System
Yijia Liu | Meishan Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Yihe Deng
Proceedings of the Second CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing

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Multiple TreeBanks Integration for Chinese Phrase Structure Grammar Parsing Using Bagging
Meishan Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the Second CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing

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Bootstrapping Events and Relations from Text
Ting Liu | Tomek Strzalkowski
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2011

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Generating Chinese Named Entity Data from a Parallel Corpus
Ruiji Fu | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Enriching SMT Training Data via Paraphrasing
Wei He | Shiqi Zhao | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Automatically Generating Questions from Queries for Community-based Question Answering
Shiqi Zhao | Haifeng Wang | Chao Li | Ting Liu | Yi Guan
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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A Graph-based Method for Entity Linking
Yuhang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Improving Chinese POS Tagging with Dependency Parsing
Zhenghua Li | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Word Sense Disambiguation Corpora Acquisition via Confirmation Code
Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Joint Models for Chinese POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing
Zhenghua Li | Min Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Wenliang Chen | Haizhou Li
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Reordering with Source Language Collocations
Zhanyi Liu | Haifeng Wang | Hua Wu | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2010

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Jointly Modeling WSD and SRL with Markov Logic
Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

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Paraphrasing with Search Engine Query Logs
Shiqi Zhao | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

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Leveraging Multiple MT Engines for Paraphrase Generation
Shiqi Zhao | Haifeng Wang | Xiang Lan | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

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Bridging Topic Modeling and Personalized Search
Wei Song | Yu Zhang | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Coling 2010: Posters

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Coling 2010: Demonstrations
Yang Liu | Ting Liu
Coling 2010: Demonstrations

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LTP: A Chinese Language Technology Platform
Wanxiang Che | Zhenghua Li | Ting Liu
Coling 2010: Demonstrations

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Improving Semantic Role Labeling with Word Sense
Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Yongqiang Li
Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Generalizing Syntactic Structures for Product Attribute Candidate Extraction
Yanyan Zhao | Bing Qin | Shen Hu | Ting Liu
Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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HIT-CIR: An Unsupervised WSD System Based on Domain Most Frequent Sense Estimation
Yuhang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Wei He | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

2009

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Dependency Based Chinese Sentence Realization
Wei He | Haifeng Wang | Yuqing Guo | Ting Liu
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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Application-driven Statistical Paraphrase Generation
Shiqi Zhao | Xiang Lan | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
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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Multilingual Dependency-based Syntactic and Semantic Parsing
Wanxiang Che | Zhenghua Li | Yongqiang Li | Yuhang Guo | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2009): Shared Task

2008

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Investigating the Portability of Corpus-Derived Cue Phrases for Dialogue Act Classification
Nick Webb | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008)

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Fast Computing Grammar-driven Convolution Tree Kernel for Semantic Role Labeling
Wanxiang Che | Min Zhang | Ai Ti Aw | Chew Lim Tan | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Volume-II

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Cross-Domain Dialogue Act Tagging
Nick Webb | Ting Liu | Mark Hepple | Yorick Wilks
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

We present recent work in the area of Cross-Domain Dialogue Act (DA) tagging. We have previously reported on the use of a simple dialogue act classifier based on purely intra-utterance features - principally involving word n-gram cue phrases automatically generated from a training corpus. Such a classifier performs surprisingly well, rivalling scores obtained using far more sophisticated language modelling techniques. In this paper, we apply these automatically extracted cues to a new annotated corpus, to determine the portability and generality of the cues we learn.

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Pivot Approach for Extracting Paraphrase Patterns from Bilingual Corpora
Shiqi Zhao | Haifeng Wang | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT

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An Entity-Mention Model for Coreference Resolution with Inductive Logic Programming
Xiaofeng Yang | Jian Su | Jun Lang | Chew Lim Tan | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT

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Combining Multiple Resources to Improve SMT-based Paraphrasing Model
Shiqi Zhao | Cheng Niu | Ming Zhou | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT

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A Cascaded Syntactic and Semantic Dependency Parsing System
Wanxiang Che | Zhenghua Li | Yuxuan Hu | Yongqiang Li | Bing Qin | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
CoNLL 2008: Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

2007

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HIT-IR-WSD: A WSD System for English Lexical Sample Task
Yuhang Guo | Wanxiang Che | Yuxuan Hu | Wei Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2007)

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HIT: Web based Scoring Method for English Lexical Substitution
Shiqi Zhao | Lin Zhao | Yu Zhang | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2007)

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A Grammar-driven Convolution Tree Kernel for Semantic Role Classification
Min Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Aiti Aw | Chew Lim Tan | Guodong Zhou | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics

2006

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An Equivalent Pseudoword Solution to Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation
Zhimao Lu | Haifeng Wang | Jianmin Yao | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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A Hybrid Convolution Tree Kernel for Semantic Role Labeling
Wanxiang Che | Min Zhang | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions

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Dependency Parsing Based on Dynamic Local Optimization
Ting Liu | Jinshan Ma | Huijia Zhu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-X)

2005

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Semantic Role Labeling System Using Maximum Entropy Classifier
Ting Liu | Wanxiang Che | Sheng Li | Yuxuan Hu | Huaijun Liu
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005)

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Improved-Edit-Distance Kernel for Chinese Relation Extraction
Wanxiang Che | Jianmin Jiang | Zhong Su | Yue Pan | Ting Liu
Companion Volume to the Proceedings of Conference including Posters/Demos and tutorial abstracts

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Chinese Word Segmentation with Multiple Postprocessors in HIT-IRLab
Huipeng Zhang | Ting Liu | Jinshan Ma | Xiantao Liao
Proceedings of the Fourth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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Automated Generalization of Phrasal Paraphrases from the Web
Weigang Li | Ting Liu | Yu Zhang | Sheng Li | Wei He
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Paraphrasing (IWP2005)

2004

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HITIQA: Towards Analytical Question Answering
Sharon Small | Tomek Strzalkowski | Ting Liu | Sean Ryan | Robert Salkin | Nobuyuki Shimizu | Paul Kantor | Diane Kelly | Robert Rittman | Nina Wacholder
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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Designing a Realistic Evaluation of an End-to-end Interactive Question Answering System
Nina Wacholder | Sharon Small | Bing Bai | Diane Kelly | Robert Rittman | Sean Ryan | Robert Salkin | Peng Song | Ying Sun | Ting Liu | Paul Kantor | Tomek Strzalkowski
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

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Combining Neural Networks and Statistics for Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation
Zhimao Lu | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the Third SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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A New Chinese Natural Language Understanding Architecture Based on Multilayer Search Mechanism
Wanxiang Che | Ting Liu | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the Third SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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Aligning Bilingual Corpora Using Sentences Location Information
Weigang Li | Ting Liu | Zhen Wang | Sheng Li
Proceedings of the Third SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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HITIQA: Scenario Based Question Answering
Sharon Small | Tomek Strzalkowski | Ting Liu | Sean Ryan | Robert Salkin | Nobuyuki Shimizu | Paul Kantor | Diane Kelly | Robert Rittman | Nina Wacholder | Boris Yamrom
Proceedings of the Workshop on Pragmatics of Question Answering at HLT-NAACL 2004

2003

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HITIQA: An Interactive Question Answering System: A Preliminary Report
Sharon Small | Ting Liu | Nobuyuki Shimizu | Tomek Strzalkowski
Proceedings of the ACL 2003 Workshop on Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering

2000

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PENS: A Machine-aided English Writing System for Chinese Users
Ting Liu | Ming Zhou | Jianfeng Gao | Endong Xun | Changning Huang
Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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