Wei Fang


2024

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Joint Inference of Retrieval and Generation for Passage Re-ranking
Wei Fang | Yung-Sung Chuang | James Glass
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Passage retrieval is a crucial component of modern open-domain question answering (QA) systems, providing information for downstream QA components to generate accurate and transparent answers. In this study we focus on passage re-ranking, proposing a simple yet effective method, Joint Passage Re-ranking (JPR), that optimizes the mutual information between query and passage distributions, integrating both cross-encoders and generative models in the re-ranking process. Experimental results demonstrate that JPR outperforms conventional re-rankers and language model scorers in both open-domain QA retrieval settings and diverse retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings.

2023

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ConvRGX: Recognition, Generation, and Extraction for Self-trained Conversational Question Answering
Tianhua Zhang | Liping Tang | Wei Fang | Hongyin Luo | Xixin Wu | Helen Meng | James Glass
Proceedings of the Third DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

Collecting and constructing human-annotated corpora for training conversational question-answering (CQA) models has recently been shown to be inefficient and costly. To solve this problem, previous works have proposed training QA models with automatically generated QA data. In this work, we extend earlier studies on QA synthesis, and propose an efficient QA data generation algorithm under conversational settings. Our model recognizes potential dialogue topics, generates corresponding questions, and extracts answers from grounding passages. To improve the quality of generated QAs and downstream self-training of CQA models, we propose dropout and agreement-based QA selection methods. We conduct experiments on both data augmentation and domain adaptation settings. Experiments on the QuAC and Doc2Dial tasks show that the proposed method can significantly improve the quality of generated QA data, and also improves the accuracy of self-trained CQA models based on the constructed training corpora.

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Expand, Rerank, and Retrieve: Query Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering
Yung-Sung Chuang | Wei Fang | Shang-Wen Li | Wen-tau Yih | James Glass
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

We propose EAR, a query Expansion And Reranking approach for improving passage retrieval, with the application to open-domain question answering. EAR first applies a query expansion model to generate a diverse set of queries, and then uses a query reranker to select the ones that could lead to better retrieval results. Motivated by the observation that the best query expansion often is not picked by greedy decoding, EAR trains its reranker to predict the rank orders of the gold passages when issuing the expanded queries to a given retriever. By connecting better the query expansion model and retriever, EAR significantly enhances a traditional sparse retrieval method, BM25. Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points in in-domain and out-of-domain settings, respectively, when compared to a vanilla query expansion model, GAR, and a dense retrieval model, DPR.

2022

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Where to Attack: A Dynamic Locator Model for Backdoor Attack in Text Classifications
Heng-yang Lu | Chenyou Fan | Jun Yang | Cong Hu | Wei Fang | Xiao-jun Wu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Nowadays, deep-learning based NLP models are usually trained with large-scale third-party data which can be easily injected with malicious backdoors. Thus, BackDoor Attack (BDA) study has become a trending research to help promote the robustness of an NLP system. Text-based BDA aims to train a poisoned model with both clean and poisoned texts to perform normally on clean inputs while being misled to predict those trigger-embedded texts as target labels set by attackers. Previous works usually choose fixed Positions-to-Poison (P2P) first, then add triggers upon those positions such as letter insertion or deletion. However, considering the positions of words with important semantics may vary in different contexts, fixed P2P models are severely limited in flexibility and performance. We study the text-based BDA from the perspective of automatically and dynamically selecting P2P from contexts. We design a novel Locator model which can predict P2P dynamically without human intervention. Based on the predicted P2P, four effective strategies are introduced to show the BDA performance. Experiments on two public datasets show both tinier test accuracy gap on clean data and higher attack success rate on poisoned ones. Human evaluation with volunteers also shows the P2P predicted by our model are important for classification. Source code is available at https://github.com/jncsnlp/LocatorModel

2019

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Neural Multi-Task Learning for Stance Prediction
Wei Fang | Moin Nadeem | Mitra Mohtarami | James Glass
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

We present a multi-task learning model that leverages large amount of textual information from existing datasets to improve stance prediction. In particular, we utilize multiple NLP tasks under both unsupervised and supervised settings for the target stance prediction task. Our model obtains state-of-the-art performance on a public benchmark dataset, Fake News Challenge, outperforming current approaches by a wide margin.

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FAKTA: An Automatic End-to-End Fact Checking System
Moin Nadeem | Wei Fang | Brian Xu | Mitra Mohtarami | James Glass
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)

We present FAKTA which is a unified framework that integrates various components of a fact-checking process: document retrieval from media sources with various types of reliability, stance detection of documents with respect to given claims, evidence extraction, and linguistic analysis. FAKTA predicts the factuality of given claims and provides evidence at the document and sentence level to explain its predictions.

2016

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Entity Disambiguation by Knowledge and Text Jointly Embedding
Wei Fang | Jianwen Zhang | Dilin Wang | Zheng Chen | Ming Li
Proceedings of the 20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning