Yanchao Hao


2023

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Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks
Qingbin Liu | Yanchao Hao | Xiaolong Liu | Bo Li | Dianbo Sui | Shizhu He | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Xi Chen | Ningyu Zhang | Jiaoyan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Intent detection, which estimates diverse intents behind user utterances, is an essential component of task-oriented dialogue systems. Previous intent detection models are usually trained offline, which can only handle predefined intent classes. In the real world, new intents may keep challenging deployed models. For example, with the prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic, users may pose various issues related to the pandemic to conversational systems, which brings many new intents. A general intent detection model should be intelligent enough to continually learn new data and recognize new arriving intent classes. Therefore, this work explores Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection (CLL-ID), where the model continually learns new intent classes from new data while avoiding catastrophic performance degradation on old data. To this end, we propose a novel lifelong learning method, called Structure Consolidation Networks (SCN), which consists of structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation to handle the problems of expression diversity and class imbalance in the CLL-ID task. In addition to formulating the new task, we construct 3 benchmarks based on 8 intent detection datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SCN, which significantly outperforms previous lifelong learning methods on the three benchmarks.

2018

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Pattern-revising Enhanced Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Bases
Yanchao Hao | Hao Liu | Shizhu He | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Question Answering over Knowledge Bases (KB-QA), which automatically answer natural language questions based on the facts contained by a knowledge base, is one of the most important natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Simple questions constitute a large part of questions queried on the web, still being a challenge to QA systems. In this work, we propose to conduct pattern extraction and entity linking first, and put forward pattern revising procedure to mitigate the error propagation problem. In order to learn to rank candidate subject-predicate pairs to enable the relevant facts retrieval given a question, we propose to do joint fact selection enhanced by relation detection. Multi-level encodings and multi-dimension information are leveraged to strengthen the whole procedure. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach sets a new record in this task, outperforming the current state-of-the-art by an absolute large margin.

2017

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An End-to-End Model for Question Answering over Knowledge Base with Cross-Attention Combining Global Knowledge
Yanchao Hao | Yuanzhe Zhang | Kang Liu | Shizhu He | Zhanyi Liu | Hua Wu | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

With the rapid growth of knowledge bases (KBs) on the web, how to take full advantage of them becomes increasingly important. Question answering over knowledge base (KB-QA) is one of the promising approaches to access the substantial knowledge. Meanwhile, as the neural network-based (NN-based) methods develop, NN-based KB-QA has already achieved impressive results. However, previous work did not put more emphasis on question representation, and the question is converted into a fixed vector regardless of its candidate answers. This simple representation strategy is not easy to express the proper information in the question. Hence, we present an end-to-end neural network model to represent the questions and their corresponding scores dynamically according to the various candidate answer aspects via cross-attention mechanism. In addition, we leverage the global knowledge inside the underlying KB, aiming at integrating the rich KB information into the representation of the answers. As a result, it could alleviates the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem, which helps the cross-attention model to represent the question more precisely. The experimental results on WebQuestions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.