Xiaoli Li


2023

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MS-DETR: Natural Language Video Localization with Sampling Moment-Moment Interaction
Wang Jing | Aixin Sun | Hao Zhang | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Given a text query, the task of Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) is to localize a temporal moment in an untrimmed video that semantically matches the query. In this paper, we adopt a proposal-based solution that generates proposals (i.e. candidate moments) and then select the best matching proposal. On top of modeling the cross-modal interaction between candidate moments and the query, our proposed Moment Sampling DETR (MS-DETR) enables efficient moment-moment relation modeling. The core idea is to sample a subset of moments guided by the learnable templates with an adopted DETR framework. To achieve this, we design a multi-scale visual-linguistic encoder, and an anchor-guided moment decoder paired with a set of learnable templates. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MS-DETR.

2022

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Syntactic Multi-view Learning for Open Information Extraction
Kuicai Dong | Aixin Sun | Jung-Jae Kim | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) aims to extract relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Traditional rule-based or statistical models were developed based on syntactic structure of sentence, identified by syntactic parsers. However, previous neural OpenIE models under-explored the useful syntactic information. In this paper, we model both constituency and dependency trees into word-level graphs, and enable neural OpenIE to learn from the syntactic structures. To better fuse heterogeneous information from the two graphs, we adopt multi-view learning to capture multiple relationships from them. Finally, the finetuned constituency and dependency representations are aggregated with sentential semantic representations for tuple generation. Experiments show that both constituency and dependency information, and the multi-view learning are effective.

2021

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GCRC: A New Challenging MRC Dataset from Gaokao Chinese for Explainable Evaluation
Hongye Tan | Xiaoyue Wang | Yu Ji | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Zhiwei Hu | Yunxiao Zhao | Xiaoqi Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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DocOIE: A Document-level Context-Aware Dataset for OpenIE
Kuicai Dong | Zhao Yilin | Aixin Sun | Jung-Jae Kim | Xiaoli Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Integrating Semantic Scenario and Word Relations for Abstractive Sentence Summarization
Yong Guan | Shaoru Guo | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Hu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recently graph-based methods have been adopted for Abstractive Text Summarization. However, existing graph-based methods only consider either word relations or structure information, which neglect the correlation between them. To simultaneously capture the word relations and structure information from sentences, we propose a novel Dual Graph network for Abstractive Sentence Summarization. Specifically, we first construct semantic scenario graph and semantic word relation graph based on FrameNet, and subsequently learn their representations and design graph fusion method to enhance their correlation and obtain better semantic representation for summary generation. Experimental results show our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two popular benchmark datasets, i.e., Gigaword and DUC 2004.

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Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Sentence-level Extractive Text Summarization
Yong Guan | Shaoru Guo | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Hongye Tan
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Sentence-level extractive text summarization aims to select important sentences from a given document. However, it is very challenging to model the importance of sentences. In this paper, we propose a novel Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Extractive Summarization, which leverages Frame semantics to model sentences from both intra-sentence level and inter-sentence level, facilitating the text summarization task. In particular, intra-sentence level semantics leverage Frames and Frame Elements to model internal semantic structure within a sentence, while inter-sentence level semantics leverage Frame-to-Frame relations to model relationships among sentences. Extensive experiments on two benchmark corpus CNN/DM and NYT demonstrate that our model outperforms six state-of-the-art methods significantly.

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A Knowledge-Guided Framework for Frame Identification
Xuefeng Su | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Jeff Z. Pan | Hu Zhang | Qinghua Chai | Xiaoqi Han
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)

Frame Identification (FI) is a fundamental and challenging task in frame semantic parsing. The task aims to find the exact frame evoked by a target word in a given sentence. It is generally regarded as a classification task in existing work, where frames are treated as discrete labels or represented using onehot embeddings. However, the valuable knowledge about frames is neglected. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Guided Frame Identification framework (KGFI) that integrates three types frame knowledge, including frame definitions, frame elements and frame-to-frame relations, to learn better frame representation, which guides the KGFI to jointly map target words and frames into the same embedding space and subsequently identify the best frame by calculating the dot-product similarity scores between the target word embedding and all of the frame embeddings. The extensive experimental results demonstrate KGFI significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.

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A Conditional Splitting Framework for Efficient Constituency Parsing
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
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)

We introduce a generic seq2seq parsing framework that casts constituency parsing problems (syntactic and discourse parsing) into a series of conditional splitting decisions. Our parsing model estimates the conditional probability distribution of possible splitting points in a given text span and supports efficient top-down decoding, which is linear in number of nodes. The conditional splitting formulation together with efficient beam search inference facilitate structural consistency without relying on expensive structured inference. Crucially, for discourse analysis we show that in our formulation, discourse segmentation can be framed as a special case of parsing which allows us to perform discourse parsing without requiring segmentation as a pre-requisite. Experiments show that our model achieves good results on the standard syntactic parsing tasks under settings with/without pre-trained representations and rivals state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods that are more computationally expensive than ours. In discourse parsing, our method outperforms SoTA by a good margin.

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RST Parsing from Scratch
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We introduce a novel top-down end-to-end formulation of document level discourse parsing in the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) framework. In this formulation, we consider discourse parsing as a sequence of splitting decisions at token boundaries and use a seq2seq network to model the splitting decisions. Our framework facilitates discourse parsing from scratch without requiring discourse segmentation as a prerequisite; rather, it yields segmentation as part of the parsing process. Our unified parsing model adopts a beam search to decode the best tree structure by searching through a space of high scoring trees. With extensive experiments on the standard RST discourse treebank, we demonstrate that our parser outperforms existing methods by a good margin in both end-to-end parsing and parsing with gold segmentation. More importantly, it does so without using any handcrafted features, making it faster and easily adaptable to new languages and domains.

2020

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Incorporating Syntax and Frame Semantics in Neural Network for Machine Reading Comprehension
Shaoru Guo | Yong Guan | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Hongye Tan
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is one of the most critical yet challenging tasks in natural language understanding(NLU), where both syntax and semantics information of text are essential components for text understanding. It is surprising that jointly considering syntax and semantics in neural networks was never formally reported in literature. This paper makes the first attempt by proposing a novel Syntax and Frame Semantics model for Machine Reading Comprehension (SS-MRC), which takes full advantage of syntax and frame semantics to get richer text representation. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that SS-MRC performs better than ten state-of-the-art technologies on machine reading comprehension task.

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A Frame-based Sentence Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension
Shaoru Guo | Ru Li | Hongye Tan | Xiaoli Li | Yong Guan | Hongyan Zhao | Yueping Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Sentence representation (SR) is the most crucial and challenging task in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). MRC systems typically only utilize the information contained in the sentence itself, while human beings can leverage their semantic knowledge. To bridge the gap, we proposed a novel Frame-based Sentence Representation (FSR) method, which employs frame semantic knowledge to facilitate sentence modelling. Specifically, different from existing methods that only model lexical units (LUs), Frame Representation Models, which utilize both LUs in frame and Frame-to-Frame (F-to-F) relations, are designed to model frames and sentences with attention schema. Our proposed FSR method is able to integrate multiple-frame semantic information to get much better sentence representations. Our extensive experimental results show that it performs better than state-of-the-art technologies on machine reading comprehension task.

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Efficient Constituency Parsing by Pointing
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose a novel constituency parsing model that casts the parsing problem into a series of pointing tasks. Specifically, our model estimates the likelihood of a span being a legitimate tree constituent via the pointing score corresponding to the boundary words of the span. Our parsing model supports efficient top-down decoding and our learning objective is able to enforce structural consistency without resorting to the expensive CKY inference. The experiments on the standard English Penn Treebank parsing task show that our method achieves 92.78 F1 without using pre-trained models, which is higher than all the existing methods with similar time complexity. Using pre-trained BERT, our model achieves 95.48 F1, which is competitive with the state-of-the-art while being faster. Our approach also establishes new state-of-the-art in Basque and Swedish in the SPMRL shared tasks on multilingual constituency parsing.

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Differentiable Window for Dynamic Local Attention
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose Differentiable Window, a new neural module and general purpose component for dynamic window selection. While universally applicable, we demonstrate a compelling use case of utilizing Differentiable Window to improve standard attention modules by enabling more focused attentions over the input regions. We propose two variants of Differentiable Window, and integrate them within the Transformer architecture in two novel ways. We evaluate our proposed approach on a myriad of NLP tasks, including machine translation, sentiment analysis, subject-verb agreement and language modeling. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent and sizable improvements across all tasks.

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Public Sentiment Drift Analysis Based on Hierarchical Variational Auto-encoder
Wenyue Zhang | Xiaoli Li | Yang Li | Suge Wang | Deyu Li | Jian Liao | Jianxing Zheng
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Detecting public sentiment drift is a challenging task due to sentiment change over time. Existing methods first build a classification model using historical data and subsequently detect drift if the model performs much worse on new data. In this paper, we focus on distribution learning by proposing a novel Hierarchical Variational Auto-Encoder (HVAE) model to learn better distribution representation, and design a new drift measure to directly evaluate distribution changes between historical data and new data.Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves better results than three existing state-of-the-art methods.

2019

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Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Semi-supervised Short Text Classification
Hu Linmei | Tianchi Yang | Chuan Shi | Houye Ji | Xiaoli 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)

Short text classification has found rich and critical applications in news and tweet tagging to help users find relevant information. Due to lack of labeled training data in many practical use cases, there is a pressing need for studying semi-supervised short text classification. Most existing studies focus on long texts and achieve unsatisfactory performance on short texts due to the sparsity and limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network based method for semi-supervised short text classification, leveraging full advantage of few labeled data and large unlabeled data through information propagation along the graph. In particular, we first present a flexible HIN (heterogeneous information network) framework for modeling the short texts, which can integrate any type of additional information as well as capture their relations to address the semantic sparsity. Then, we propose Heterogeneous Graph ATtention networks (HGAT) to embed the HIN for short text classification based on a dual-level attention mechanism, including node-level and type-level attentions. The attention mechanism can learn the importance of different neighboring nodes as well as the importance of different node (information) types to a current node. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six benchmark datasets significantly.

2015

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Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Novel Computational Approaches to Keyphrase Extraction
Sujatha Das Gollapalli | Cornelia Caragea | Xiaoli Li | C. Lee Giles
Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Novel Computational Approaches to Keyphrase Extraction

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Learning Topic Hierarchies for Wikipedia Categories
Linmei Hu | Xuzhong Wang | Mengdi Zhang | Juanzi Li | Xiaoli Li | Chao Shao | Jie Tang | Yongbin Liu
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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TSDPMM: Incorporating Prior Topic Knowledge into Dirichlet Process Mixture Models for Text Clustering
Linmei Hu | Juanzi Li | Xiaoli Li | Chao Shao | Xuzhong Wang
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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EMNLP versus ACL: Analyzing NLP research over time
Sujatha Das Gollapalli | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing