Wentao Deng


2023

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Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis
Wentao Deng | Jiahuan Pei | Keyi Kong | Zhe Chen | Furu Wei | Yujun Li | Zhaochun Ren | Zhumin Chen | Pengjie Ren
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models (LLMs). However, people can hardly trust the results generated by a model without reliable analysis of legal judgement. For legal practitioners, it is common practice to utilize syllogistic reasoning to select and evaluate the arguments of the parties as part of the legal decision-making process. But the development of syllogistic reasoning for legal judgment analysis is hindered by the lack of resources: (1) there is no large-scale syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis, and (2) there is no set of established benchmarks for legal judgment analysis. In this paper, we construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis. The dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases which cover 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. We also select a set of large language models as benchmarks, and conduct a in-depth analysis of the capacity of their legal judgment analysis.

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CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction
Xinnan Guo | Wentao Deng | Yongrui Chen | Yang Li | Mengdi Zhou | Guilin Qi | Tianxing Wu | Dong Yang | Liubin Wang | Yong Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) aims to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. Despite the progressive performance of existing approaches in e-commerce platforms, they still suffer from two challenges: 1) difficulty in identifying values at different scales simultaneously; 2) easy confusion by some highly similar fine-grained attributes. This paper proposes a pre-training technique for AVE to address these issues. In particular, we first improve the conventional token-level masking strategy, guiding the language model to understand multi-scale values by recovering spans at the phrase and sentence level. Second, we apply clustering to build a challenging negative set for each example and design a pre-training objective based on contrastive learning to force the model to discriminate similar attributes. Comprehensive experiments show that our solution provides a significant improvement over traditional pre-trained models in the AVE task, and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks.

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Intent-calibrated Self-training for Answer Selection in Open-domain Dialogues
Wentao Deng | Jiahuan Pei | Zhaochun Ren | Zhumin Chen | Pengjie Ren
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

Answer selection in open-domain dialogues aims to select an accurate answer from candidates. The recent success of answer selection models hinges on training with large amounts of labeled data. However, collecting large-scale labeled data is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce the predicted intent labels to calibrate answer labels in a self-training paradigm. Specifically, we propose intent-calibrated self-training (ICAST) to improve the quality of pseudo answer labels through the intent-calibrated answer selection paradigm, in which we employ pseudo intent labels to help improve pseudo answer labels. We carry out extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets with open-domain dialogues. The experimental results show that ICAST outperforms baselines consistently with 1%, 5%, and 10% labeled data. Specifically, it improves 2.06% and 1.00% of F1 score on the two datasets, compared with the strongest baseline with only 5% labeled data.

2022

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Improving Multi-label Malevolence Detection in Dialogues through Multi-faceted Label Correlation Enhancement
Yangjun Zhang | Pengjie Ren | Wentao Deng | Zhumin Chen | Maarten Rijke
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

A dialogue response is malevolent if it is grounded in negative emotions, inappropriate behavior, or an unethical value basis in terms of content and dialogue acts. The detection of malevolent dialogue responses is attracting growing interest. Current research on detecting dialogue malevolence has limitations in terms of datasets and methods. First, available dialogue datasets related to malevolence are labeled with a single category, but in practice assigning a single category to each utterance may not be appropriate as some malevolent utterances belong to multiple labels. Second, current methods for detecting dialogue malevolence neglect label correlation. Therefore, we propose the task of multi-label dialogue malevolence detection and crowdsource a multi-label dataset, multi-label dialogue malevolence detection (MDMD) for evaluation. We also propose a multi-label malevolence detection model, multi-faceted label correlation enhanced CRF (MCRF), with two label correlation mechanisms, label correlation in taxonomy (LCT) and label correlation in context (LCC). Experiments on MDMD show that our method outperforms the best performing baseline by a large margin, i.e., 16.1%, 11.9%, 12.0%, and 6.1% on precision, recall, F1, and Jaccard score, respectively.