Hao Li


2023

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Not all quantifiers are equal: Probing Transformer-based language models’ understanding of generalised quantifiers
Tharindu Madusanka | Iqra Zahid | Hao Li | Ian Pratt-Hartmann | Riza Batista-Navarro
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

How do different generalised quantifiers affect the behaviour of transformer-based language models (TLMs)? The recent popularity of TLMs and the central role generalised quantifiers have traditionally played in linguistics and logic bring this question into particular focus. The current research investigating this subject has not utilised a task defined purely in a logical sense, and thus, has not captured the underlying logical significance of generalised quantifiers. Consequently, they have not answered the aforementioned question faithfully or adequately. Therefore, we investigate how different generalised quantifiers affect TLMs by employing a textual entailment problem defined in a purely logical sense, namely, model-checking with natural language. Our approach permits the automatic construction of datasets with respect to which we can assess the ability of TLMs to learn the meanings of generalised quantifiers. Our investigation reveals that TLMs generally can comprehend the logical semantics of the most common generalised quantifiers, but that distinct quantifiers influence TLMs in varying ways.

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Do You Hear The People Sing? Key Point Analysis via Iterative Clustering and Abstractive Summarisation
Hao Li | Viktor Schlegel | Riza Batista-Navarro | Goran Nenadic
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Argument summarisation is a promising but currently under-explored field. Recent work has aimed to provide textual summaries in the form of concise and salient short texts, i.e., key points (KPs), in a task known as Key Point Analysis (KPA). One of the main challenges in KPA is finding high-quality key point candidates from dozens of arguments even in a small corpus. Furthermore, evaluating key points is crucial in ensuring that the automatically generated summaries are useful. Although automatic methods for evaluating summarisation have considerably advanced over the years, they mainly focus on sentence-level comparison, making it difficult to measure the quality of a summary (a set of KPs) as a whole. Aggravating this problem is the fact that human evaluation is costly and unreproducible. To address the above issues, we propose a two-step abstractive summarisation framework based on neural topic modelling with an iterative clustering procedure, to generate key points which are aligned with how humans identify key points. Our experiments show that our framework advances the state of the art in KPA, with performance improvement of up to 14 (absolute) percentage points, in terms of both ROUGE and our own proposed evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we evaluate the generated summaries using a novel set-based evaluation toolkit. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed evaluation metrics in assessing the quality of generated KPs. Human evaluation further demonstrates the advantages of our approach and validates that our proposed evaluation metric is more consistent with human judgment than ROUGE scores.

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Intra-Event and Inter-Event Dependency-Aware Graph Network for Event Argument Extraction
Hao Li | Yanan Cao | Yubing Ren | Fang Fang | Lanxue Zhang | Yingjie Li | Shi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Event argument extraction is critical to various natural language processing tasks for providing structured information. Existing works usually extract the event arguments one by one, and mostly neglect to build dependency information among event argument roles, especially from the perspective of event structure. Such an approach hinders the model from learning the interactions between different roles. In this paper, we raise our research question: How to adequately model dependencies between different roles for better performance? To this end, we propose an intra-event and inter-event dependency-aware graph network, which uses the event structure as the fundamental unit to construct dependencies between roles. Specifically, we first utilize the dense intra-event graph to construct role dependencies within events, and then construct dependencies between events by retrieving similar events of the current event through the retrieval module. To further optimize dependency information and event representation, we propose a dependency interaction module and two auxiliary tasks to improve the extraction ability of the model in different scenarios. Experimental results on the ACE05, RAMS, and WikiEvents datasets show the great advantages of our proposed approach.

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Team:PULSAR at ProbSum 2023:PULSAR: Pre-training with Extracted Healthcare Terms for Summarising Patients’ Problems and Data Augmentation with Black-box Large Language Models
Hao Li | Yuping Wu | Viktor Schlegel | Riza Batista-Navarro | Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap | Xiao-Jun Zeng | Daniel Beck | Stefan Winkler | Goran Nenadic
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks

Medical progress notes play a crucial role in documenting a patient’s hospital journey, including his or her condition, treatment plan, and any updates for healthcare providers. Automatic summarisation of a patient’s problems in the form of a “problem list” can aid stakeholders in understanding a patient’s condition, reducing workload and cognitive bias. BioNLP 2023 Shared Task 1A focusses on generating a list of diagnoses and problems from the provider’s progress notes during hospitalisation. In this paper, we introduce our proposed approach to this task, which integrates two complementary components. One component employs large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation; the other is an abstractive summarisation LLM with a novel pre-training objective for generating the patients’ problems summarised as a list. Our approach was ranked second among all submissions to the shared task. The performance of our model on the development and test datasets shows that our approach is more robust on unknown data, with an improvement of up to 3.1 points over the same size of the larger model.

2020

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Position-Aware Tagging for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Lu Xu | Hao Li | Wei Lu | Lidong Bing
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is the task of extracting the triplets of target entities, their associated sentiment, and opinion spans explaining the reason for the sentiment. Existing research efforts mostly solve this problem using pipeline approaches, which break the triplet extraction process into several stages. Our observation is that the three elements within a triplet are highly related to each other, and this motivates us to build a joint model to extract such triplets using a sequence tagging approach. However, how to effectively design a tagging approach to extract the triplets that can capture the rich interactions among the elements is a challenging research question. In this work, we propose the first end-to-end model with a novel position-aware tagging scheme that is capable of jointly extracting the triplets. Our experimental results on several existing datasets show that jointly capturing elements in the triplet using our approach leads to improved performance over the existing approaches. We also conducted extensive experiments to investigate the model effectiveness and robustness.

2019

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Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning for Conversational Question Generation
Boyuan Pan | Hao Li | Ziyu Yao | Deng Cai | Huan Sun
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper investigates a new task named Conversational Question Generation (CQG) which is to generate a question based on a passage and a conversation history (i.e., previous turns of question-answer pairs). CQG is a crucial task for developing intelligent agents that can drive question-answering style conversations or test user understanding of a given passage. Towards that end, we propose a new approach named Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning network, which is based on the general encoder-decoder framework but incorporates a reasoning procedure in a dynamic manner to better understand what has been asked and what to ask next about the passage into the general encoder-decoder framework. To encourage producing meaningful questions, we leverage a popular question answering (QA) model to provide feedback and fine-tune the question generator using a reinforcement learning mechanism. Empirical results on the recently released CoQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with various baselines and model variants. Moreover, to show the applicability of our method, we also apply it to create multi-turn question-answering conversations for passages in SQuAD.

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Neural Chinese Address Parsing
Hao Li | Wei Lu | Pengjun Xie | Linlin Li
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

This paper introduces a new task – Chinese address parsing – the task of mapping Chinese addresses into semantically meaningful chunks. While it is possible to model this problem using a conventional sequence labelling approach, our observation is that there exist complex dependencies between labels that cannot be readily captured by a simple linear-chain structure. We investigate neural structured prediction models with latent variables to capture such rich structural information within Chinese addresses. We create and publicly release a new dataset consisting of 15K Chinese addresses, and conduct extensive experiments on the dataset to investigate the model effectiveness and robustness. We release our code and data at http://statnlp.org/research/sp.

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Learning Explicit and Implicit Structures for Targeted Sentiment Analysis
Hao Li | Wei Lu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Targeted sentiment analysis is the task of jointly predicting target entities and their associated sentiment information. Existing research efforts mostly regard this joint task as a sequence labeling problem, building models that can capture explicit structures in the output space. However, the importance of capturing implicit global structural information that resides in the input space is largely unexplored. In this work, we argue that both types of information (implicit and explicit structural information) are crucial for building a successful targeted sentiment analysis model. Our experimental results show that properly capturing both information is able to lead to better performance than competitive existing approaches. We also conduct extensive experiments to investigate our model’s effectiveness and robustness.

2018

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Learning with Structured Representations for Negation Scope Extraction
Hao Li | Wei Lu
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We report an empirical study on the task of negation scope extraction given the negation cue. Our key observation is that certain useful information such as features related to negation cue, long-distance dependencies as well as some latent structural information can be exploited for such a task. We design approaches based on conditional random fields (CRF), semi-Markov CRF, as well as latent-variable CRF models to capture such information. Extensive experiments on several standard datasets demonstrate that our approaches are able to achieve better results than existing approaches reported in the literature.

2016

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Cross-genre Event Extraction with Knowledge Enrichment
Hao Li | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2014

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Two-Stage Hashing for Fast Document Retrieval
Hao Li | Wei Liu | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2013

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Linking Tweets to News: A Framework to Enrich Short Text Data in Social Media
Weiwei Guo | Hao Li | Heng Ji | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

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Combining Social Cognitive Theories with Linguistic Features for Multi-genre Sentiment Analysis
Hao Li | Yu Chen | Heng Ji | Smaranda Muresan | Dequan Zheng
Proceedings of the 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation

2011

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Cross-lingual Slot Filling from Comparable Corpora
Matthew Snover | Xiang Li | Wen-Pin Lin | Zheng Chen | Suzanne Tamang | Mingmin Ge | Adam Lee | Qi Li | Hao Li | Sam Anzaroot | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: Comparable Corpora and the Web

2010

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Domain-Independent Novel Event Discovery and Semi-Automatic Event Annotation
Hao Li | Xiang Li | Heng Ji | Yuval Marton
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation