Zhengyan Li


2021

pdf
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing
Xiao Wang | Qin Liu | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang | Yicheng Zou | Xin Zhou | Jiacheng Ye | Yongxin Zhang | Rui Zheng | Zexiong Pang | Qinzhuo Wu | Zhengyan Li | Chong Zhang | Ruotian Ma | Zichu Fei | Ruijian Cai | Jun Zhao | Xingwu Hu | Zhiheng Yan | Yiding Tan | Yuan Hu | Qiyuan Bian | Zhihua Liu | Shan Qin | Bolin Zhu | Xiaoyu Xing | Jinlan Fu | Yue Zhang | Minlong Peng | Xiaoqing Zheng | Yaqian Zhou | Zhongyu Wei | Xipeng Qiu | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

TextFlint is a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP tasks that incorporates universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. This enables practitioners to automatically evaluate their models from various aspects or to customize their evaluations as desired with just a few lines of code. TextFlint also generates complete analytical reports as well as targeted augmented data to address the shortcomings of the model in terms of its robustness. To guarantee acceptability, all the text transformations are linguistically based and all the transformed data selected (up to 100,000 texts) scored highly under human evaluation. To validate the utility, we performed large-scale empirical evaluations (over 67,000) on state-of-the-art deep learning models, classic supervised methods, and real-world systems. The toolkit is already available at https://github.com/textflint with all the evaluation results demonstrated at textflint.io.

pdf
Learning Implicit Sentiment in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training
Zhengyan Li | Yicheng Zou | Chong Zhang | Qi Zhang | Zhongyu Wei
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to identify the sentiment polarity of a specific aspect in product reviews. We notice that about 30% of reviews do not contain obvious opinion words, but still convey clear human-aware sentiment orientation, which is known as implicit sentiment. However, recent neural network-based approaches paid little attention to implicit sentiment entailed in the reviews. To overcome this issue, we adopt Supervised Contrastive Pre-training on large-scale sentiment-annotated corpora retrieved from in-domain language resources. By aligning the representation of implicit sentiment expressions to those with the same sentiment label, the pre-training process leads to better capture of both implicit and explicit sentiment orientation towards aspects in reviews. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on SemEval2014 benchmarks, and comprehensive analysis validates its effectiveness on learning implicit sentiment.

2020

pdf
Uncertainty-Aware Label Refinement for Sequence Labeling
Tao Gui | Jiacheng Ye | Qi Zhang | Zhengyan Li | Zichu Fei | Yeyun Gong | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Conditional random fields (CRF) for label decoding has become ubiquitous in sequence labeling tasks. However, the local label dependencies and inefficient Viterbi decoding have always been a problem to be solved. In this work, we introduce a novel two-stage label decoding framework to model long-term label dependencies, while being much more computationally efficient. A base model first predicts draft labels, and then a novel two-stream self-attention model makes refinements on these draft predictions based on long-range label dependencies, which can achieve parallel decoding for a faster prediction. In addition, in order to mitigate the side effects of incorrect draft labels, Bayesian neural networks are used to indicate the labels with a high probability of being wrong, which can greatly assist in preventing error propagation. The experimental results on three sequence labeling benchmarks demonstrated that the proposed method not only outperformed the CRF-based methods but also greatly accelerated the inference process.