Yan Wang


2024

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A Comparative Study of Explicit and Implicit Gender Biases in Large Language Models via Self-evaluation
Yachao Zhao | Bo Wang | Yan Wang | Dongming Zhao | Xiaojia Jin | Jijun Zhang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

While extensive work has examined the explicit and implicit biases in large language models (LLMs), little research explores the relation between these two types of biases. This paper presents a comparative study of the explicit and implicit biases in LLMs grounded in social psychology. Social psychology distinguishes between explicit and implicit biases by whether the bias can be self-recognized by individuals. Aligning with this conceptualization, we propose a self-evaluation-based two-stage measurement of explicit and implicit biases within LLMs. First, the LLM is prompted to automatically fill templates with social targets to measure implicit bias toward these targets, where the bias is less likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. Then, the LLM is prompted to self-evaluate the templates filled by itself to measure explicit bias toward the same targets, where the bias is more likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. Experiments conducted on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal human-like inconsistency between explicit and implicit occupational gender biases. This work bridges a critical gap where prior studies concentrate solely on either explicit or implicit bias. We advocate that future work highlight the relation between explicit and implicit biases in LLMs.

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Emotion Recognition in Conversation via Dynamic Personality
Yan Wang | Bo Wang | Yachao Zhao | Dongming Zhao | Xiaojia Jin | Jijun Zhang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a field that aims to classify the emotion of each utterance within conversational contexts. This presents significant challenges, particularly in handling emotional ambiguity across various speakers and contextual factors. Existing ERC approaches have primarily focused on modeling conversational contexts while incorporating only superficial speaker attributes such as names, memories, and interactions. Recent works introduce personality as an essential deep speaker factor for emotion recognition, but relies on static personality, overlooking dynamic variability during conversations. Advances in personality psychology conceptualize personality as dynamic, proposing that personality states can change across situations. In this paper, we introduce ERC-DP, a novel model considering the dynamic personality of speakers during conversations. ERC-DP accounts for past utterances from the same speaker as situation impacting dynamic personality. It combines personality modeling with prompt design and fine-grained classification modules. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, ERC-DP demonstrates superior performance on three benchmark conversational datasets.

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VideoCoT: A Video Chain-of-Thought Dataset with Active Annotation Tool
Yan Wang | Yawen Zeng | Jingsheng Zheng | Xiaofen Xing | Jin Xu | Xiangmin Xu
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are flourishing, but mainly focus on images with less attention than videos, especially in sub-fields such as prompt engineering, video chain-of-though (CoT), and instruction tuning on videos. Therefore, we try to explore the collection of CoT datasets in videos to lead to video OpenQA and improve the reasoning ability of MLLMs. Unfortunately, making such video CoT datasets is not an easy task. Given that human annotation is too cumbersome and expensive, while machine-generated is not reliable due to the hallucination issue, we develop an automatic annotation tool that combines machine and human experts, under the active learning paradigm. Active learning is an interactive strategy between the model and human experts, in this way, the workload of human labeling can be reduced and the quality of the dataset can be guaranteed. With the help of the automatic annotation tool, we strive to contribute three datasets, namely VideoCoT, TopicQA, TopicCoT. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective benchmark based on the collected datasets, which exploits CoT to maximize the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness our solution, and we will release our source codes and datasets to facilitate the research community.

2023

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PandaGPT: One Model To Instruction-Follow Them All
Yixuan Su | Tian Lan | Huayang Li | Jialu Xu | Yan Wang | Deng Cai
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Taming Large Language Models: Controllability in the era of Interactive Assistants!

We present PandaGPT, an approach to emPower large lANguage moDels with visual and Auditory instruction-following capabilities. Our pilot experiments show that PandaGPT can perform complex tasks such as detailed image description generation, writing stories inspired by videos, and answering questions about audios. More interestingly, PandaGPT can take multimodal inputs simultaneously and compose their semantics naturally. For example, PandaGPT can connect how objects look in an image/video and how they sound in an audio. To do so, PandaGPT combines the multimodal encoders from ImageBind and the large language models from Vicuna. Notably, only aligned image-text pairs are required for the training of PandaGPT. Thanks to the strong capability of ImageBind in embedding data from different modalities into the same space, PandaGPT displays emergent, i.e. zero-shot, cross-modal behaviors for data other than image and text (e.g., video, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU). We hope that PandaGPT serves as an initial step toward building AGI that can perceive and understand inputs in different modalities holistically, as we humans do.

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Coco at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Explainable Detection of Online Sexism
Kangshuai Guo | Ruipeng Ma | Shichao Luo | Yan Wang
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

Sexism has become a growing concern on social media platforms as it impacts the health of the internet and can have negative impacts on society. This paper describes the coco system that participated in SemEval-2023 Task 10, Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS), which aims at sexism detection in various settings of natural language understanding. We develop a novel neural framework for sexism detection and misogyny that can combine text representations obtained using pre-trained language model models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and using BiLSTM architecture to obtain the local and global semantic information. Further, considering that the EDOS dataset is relatively small and extremely unbalanced, we conducted data augmentation and introduced two datasets in the field of sexism detection. Moreover, we introduced Focal Loss which is a loss function in order to improve the performance of processing imbalanced data classification. Our system achieved an F1 score of 78.95\% on Task A - binary sexism.

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Bridging the Gap between Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning for Commonsense Generation
Haoran Yang | Yan Wang | Piji Li | Wei Bi | Wai Lam | Chen Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Commonsense generation aims to generate a plausible sentence containing all given unordered concept words. Previous methods focusing on this task usually directly concatenate these words as the input of a pre-trained language model (PLM). However, in PLMs’ pre-training process, the inputs are often corrupted sentences with correct word order. This input distribution discrepancy between pre-training and fine-tuning makes the model difficult to fully utilize the knowledge of PLMs. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework to alleviate this issue. Firstly, in pre-training stage, we design a new format of input to endow PLMs the ability to deal with masked sentences with incorrect word order. Secondly, during fine-tuning, we insert the special token [MASK] between two consecutive concept words to make the input distribution more similar to the input distribution in pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments and provide thorough analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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MedNgage: A Dataset for Understanding Engagement in Patient-Nurse Conversations
Yan Wang | Heidi Donovan | Sabit Hassan | Malihe Alikhani
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Patients who effectively manage their symptoms often demonstrate higher levels of engagement in conversations and interventions with healthcare practitioners. This engagement is multifaceted, encompassing cognitive and social dimensions. Consequently, it is crucial for AI systems to understand the engagement in natural conversations between patients and practitioners to better contribute toward patient care. In this paper, we present a novel dataset (MedNgage), which consists of patient-nurse conversations about cancer symptom management. We manually annotate the dataset with a novel framework of categories of patient engagement from two different angles, namely: i) socio-affective engagement (3.1K spans), and ii) cognitive engagement (1.8K spans). Through statistical analysis of the data that is annotated using our framework, we show a positive correlation between patient symptom management outcomes and their engagement in conversations. Additionally, we demonstrate that pre-trained transformer models fine-tuned on our dataset can reliably predict engagement categories in patient-nurse conversations. Lastly, we use LIME (Ribeiro et al., 2016) to analyze the underlying challenges of the tasks that state-of-the-art transformer models encounter. The de-identified data is available for research purposes upon request.

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Large Language Models Meet Harry Potter: A Dataset for Aligning Dialogue Agents with Characters
Nuo Chen | Yan Wang | Haiyun Jiang | Deng Cai | Yuhan Li | Ziyang Chen | Longyue Wang | Jia Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

In recent years, Dialogue-style Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT4 have demonstrated immense potential in constructing open-domain dialogue agents. However, aligning these agents with specific characters or individuals remains a considerable challenge due to the complexities of character representation and the lack of comprehensive annotations. In this paper, we introduce the Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD) dataset, designed to advance the study of dialogue agents and character alignment. The dataset encompasses all dialogue sessions (in both English and Chinese) from the Harry Potter series and is annotated with vital background information, including dialogue scenes, speakers, character relationships, and attributes. These extensive annotations may empower LLMs to unlock character-driven dialogue capabilities. Furthermore, it can serve as a universal benchmark for evaluating how well can a LLM aligning with a specific character. We benchmark LLMs on HPD using both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. Evaluation results reveal that although there is substantial room for improvement in generating high-quality, character-aligned responses, the proposed dataset is valuable in guiding models toward responses that better align with the character of Harry Potter.

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Effidit: An Assistant for Improving Writing Efficiency
Shuming Shi | Enbo Zhao | Wei Bi | Deng Cai | Leyang Cui | Xinting Huang | Haiyun Jiang | Duyu Tang | Kaiqiang Song | Longyue Wang | Chenyan Huang | Guoping Huang | Yan Wang | Piji Li
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Writing assistants are valuable tools that can help writers improve their writing skills. We introduce Effidit (Efficient and Intelligent Editing), a digital writing assistant that facilitates users to write higher-quality text more efficiently through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. We significantly expand the capacities of a writing assistantby providing functions in three modules: text completion, hint recommendation, and writing refinement. Based on the above efforts, Effidit can efficiently assist users in creating their own text. Effidit has been deployed to several Tencent products and publicly released at https://effidit.qq.com/.

2022

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zydhjh4593@SMM4H’22: A Generic Pre-trained BERT-based Framework for Social Media Health Text Classification
Chenghao Huang | Xiaolu Chen | Yuxi Chen | Yutong Wu | Weimin Yuan | Yan Wang | Yanru Zhang
Proceedings of The Seventh Workshop on Social Media Mining for Health Applications, Workshop & Shared Task

This paper describes our proposed framework for the 10 text classification tasks of Task 1a, 2a, 2b, 3a, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, in the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022. According to the pre-trained BERT-based models, various techniques, including regularized dropout, focal loss, exponential moving average, 5-fold cross-validation, ensemble prediction, and pseudo-labeling, are applied for further formulating and improving the generalization performance of our framework. In the evaluation, the proposed framework achieves the 1st place in Task 3a with a 7% higher F1-score than the median, and obtains a 4% higher averaged F1-score than the median in all participating tasks except Task 1a.

2021

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BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data
Haoyu Song | Yan Wang | Kaiyan Zhang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu
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)

Maintaining a consistent persona is essential for dialogue agents. Although tremendous advancements have been brought, the limited-scale of annotated personalized dialogue datasets is still a barrier towards training robust and consistent persona-based dialogue models. This work shows how this challenge can be addressed by disentangling persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks with a novel BERT-over-BERT (BoB) model. Specifically, the model consists of a BERT-based encoder and two BERT-based decoders, where one decoder is for response generation, and another is for consistency understanding. In particular, to learn the ability of consistency understanding from large-scale non-dialogue inference data, we train the second decoder in an unlikelihood manner. Under different limited data settings, both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines in response quality and persona consistency.

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Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning
Yixuan Su | Deng Cai | Qingyu Zhou | Zibo Lin | Simon Baker | Yunbo Cao | Shuming Shi | Nigel Collier | Yan Wang
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 study the learning of a matching model for dialogue response selection. Motivated by the recent finding that models trained with random negative samples are not ideal in real-world scenarios, we propose a hierarchical curriculum learning framework that trains the matching model in an “easy-to-difficult” scheme. Our learning framework consists of two complementary curricula: (1) corpus-level curriculum (CC); and (2) instance-level curriculum (IC). In CC, the model gradually increases its ability in finding the matching clues between the dialogue context and a response candidate. As for IC, it progressively strengthens the model’s ability in identifying the mismatching information between the dialogue context and a response candidate. Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models demonstrate that the proposed learning framework significantly improves the model performance across various evaluation metrics.

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Neural Machine Translation with Monolingual Translation Memory
Deng Cai | Yan Wang | Huayang Li | Wai Lam | Lemao Liu
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)

Prior work has proved that Translation Memory (TM) can boost the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT). In contrast to existing work that uses bilingual corpus as TM and employs source-side similarity search for memory retrieval, we propose a new framework that uses monolingual memory and performs learnable memory retrieval in a cross-lingual manner. Our framework has unique advantages. First, the cross-lingual memory retriever allows abundant monolingual data to be TM. Second, the memory retriever and NMT model can be jointly optimized for the ultimate translation goal. Experiments show that the proposed method obtains substantial improvements. Remarkably, it even outperforms strong TM-augmented NMT baselines using bilingual TM. Owning to the ability to leverage monolingual data, our model also demonstrates effectiveness in low-resource and domain adaptation scenarios.

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Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models
Yixuan Su | Deng Cai | Yan Wang | David Vandyke | Simon Baker | Piji Li | Nigel Collier
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Non-autoregressive generation (NAG) has recently attracted great attention due to its fast inference speed. However, the generation quality of existing NAG models still lags behind their autoregressive counterparts. In this work, we show that BERT can be employed as the backbone of a NAG model for a greatly improved performance. Additionally, we devise two mechanisms to alleviate the two common problems of vanilla NAG models: the inflexibility of prefixed output length and the conditional independence of individual token predictions. To further strengthen the speed advantage of the proposed model, we propose a new decoding strategy, ratio-first, for applications where the output lengths can be approximately estimated beforehand. For a comprehensive evaluation, we test the proposed model on three text generation tasks, including text summarization, sentence compression and machine translation. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing non-autoregressive baselines and achieves competitive performance with many strong autoregressive models. In addition, we also conduct extensive analysis experiments to reveal the effect of each proposed component.

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Keep the Primary, Rewrite the Secondary: A Two-Stage Approach for Paraphrase Generation
Yixuan Su | David Vandyke | Simon Baker | Yan Wang | Nigel Collier
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Transductive Learning for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer
Fei Xiao | Liang Pang | Yanyan Lan | Yan Wang | Huawei Shen | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Unsupervised style transfer models are mainly based on an inductive learning approach, which represents the style as embeddings, decoder parameters, or discriminator parameters and directly applies these general rules to the test cases. However, the lacking of parallel corpus hinders the ability of these inductive learning methods on this task. As a result, it is likely to cause severe inconsistent style expressions, like ‘the salad is rude’. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel transductive learning approach in this paper, based on a retrieval-based context-aware style representation. Specifically, an attentional encoder-decoder with a retriever framework is utilized. It involves top-K relevant sentences in the target style in the transfer process. In this way, we can learn a context-aware style embedding to alleviate the above inconsistency problem. In this paper, both sparse (BM25) and dense retrieval functions (MIPS) are used, and two objective functions are designed to facilitate joint learning. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several strong baselines. The proposed transductive learning approach is general and effective to the task of unsupervised style transfer, and we will apply it to the other two typical methods in the future.

2020

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Graph-to-Tree Learning for Solving Math Word Problems
Jipeng Zhang | Lei Wang | Roy Ka-Wei Lee | Yi Bin | Yan Wang | Jie Shao | Ee-Peng Lim
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

While the recent tree-based neural models have demonstrated promising results in generating solution expression for the math word problem (MWP), most of these models do not capture the relationships and order information among the quantities well. This results in poor quantity representations and incorrect solution expressions. In this paper, we propose Graph2Tree, a novel deep learning architecture that combines the merits of the graph-based encoder and tree-based decoder to generate better solution expressions. Included in our Graph2Tree framework are two graphs, namely the Quantity Cell Graph and Quantity Comparison Graph, which are designed to address limitations of existing methods by effectively representing the relationships and order information among the quantities in MWPs. We conduct extensive experiments on two available datasets. Our experiment results show that Graph2Tree outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmark datasets significantly. We also discuss case studies and empirically examine Graph2Tree’s effectiveness in translating the MWP text into solution expressions.

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Generate, Delete and Rewrite: A Three-Stage Framework for Improving Persona Consistency of Dialogue Generation
Haoyu Song | Yan Wang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Xiaojiang Liu | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Maintaining a consistent personality in conversations is quite natural for human beings, but is still a non-trivial task for machines. The persona-based dialogue generation task is thus introduced to tackle the personality-inconsistent problem by incorporating explicit persona text into dialogue generation models. Despite the success of existing persona-based models on generating human-like responses, their one-stage decoding framework can hardly avoid the generation of inconsistent persona words. In this work, we introduce a three-stage framework that employs a generate-delete-rewrite mechanism to delete inconsistent words from a generated response prototype and further rewrite it to a personality-consistent one. We carry out evaluations by both human and automatic metrics. Experiments on the Persona-Chat dataset show that our approach achieves good performance.

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Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents
Haoyu Song | Yan Wang | Wei-Nan Zhang | Zhengyu Zhao | Ting Liu | Xiaojiang Liu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Maintaining a consistent attribute profile is crucial for dialogue agents to naturally converse with humans. Existing studies on improving attribute consistency mainly explored how to incorporate attribute information in the responses, but few efforts have been made to identify the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. To facilitate the study of profile consistency identification, we create a large-scale human-annotated dataset with over 110K single-turn conversations and their key-value attribute profiles. Explicit relation between response and profile is manually labeled. We also propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency, and it gained improvements over strong baselines. Further evaluations on downstream tasks demonstrate that the profile consistency identification model is conducive for improving dialogue consistency.

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The World is Not Binary: Learning to Rank with Grayscale Data for Dialogue Response Selection
Zibo Lin | Deng Cai | Yan Wang | Xiaojiang Liu | Haitao Zheng | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Response selection plays a vital role in building retrieval-based conversation systems. Despite that response selection is naturally a learning-to-rank problem, most prior works take a point-wise view and train binary classifiers for this task: each response candidate is labeled either relevant (one) or irrelevant (zero). On the one hand, this formalization can be sub-optimal due to its ignorance of the diversity of response quality. On the other hand, annotating grayscale data for learning-to-rank can be prohibitively expensive and challenging. In this work, we show that grayscale data can be automatically constructed without human effort. Our method employs off-the-shelf response retrieval models and response generation models as automatic grayscale data generators. With the constructed grayscale data, we propose multi-level ranking objectives for training, which can (1) teach a matching model to capture more fine-grained context-response relevance difference and (2) reduce the train-test discrepancy in terms of distractor strength. Our method is simple, effective, and universal. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and four state-of-the-art matching models show that the proposed approach brings significant and consistent performance improvements.

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Contextualized Emotion Recognition in Conversation as Sequence Tagging
Yan Wang | Jiayu Zhang | Jun Ma | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is an important topic for developing empathetic machines in a variety of areas including social opinion mining, health-care and so on. In this paper, we propose a method to model ERC task as sequence tagging where a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer is leveraged to learn the emotional consistency in the conversation. We employ LSTM-based encoders that capture self and inter-speaker dependency of interlocutors to generate contextualized utterance representations which are fed into the CRF layer. For capturing long-range global context, we use a multi-layer Transformer encoder to enhance the LSTM-based encoder. Experiments show that our method benefits from modeling the emotional consistency and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on multiple emotion classification datasets.

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Ferryman at SemEval-2020 Task 3: Bert with TFIDF-Weighting for Predicting the Effect of Context in Word Similarity
Weilong Chen | Xin Yuan | Sai Zhang | Jiehui Wu | Yanru Zhang | Yan Wang
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Word similarity is widely used in machine learning applications like searching engine and recommendation. Measuring the changing meaning of the same word between two different sentences is not only a way to handle complex features in word usage (such as sentence syntax and semantics), but also an important method for different word polysemy modeling. In this paper, we present the methodology proposed by team Ferryman. Our system is based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model combined with term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), applying the method on the provided datasets called CoSimLex, which covers four different languages including English, Croatian, Slovene, and Finnish. Our team Ferryman wins the the first position for English task and the second position for Finnish in the subtask 1.

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Ferryman as SemEval-2020 Task 5: Optimized BERT for Detecting Counterfactuals
Weilong Chen | Yan Zhuang | Peng Wang | Feng Hong | Yan Wang | Yanru Zhang
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

The main purpose of this article is to state the effect of using different methods and models for counterfactual determination and detection of causal knowledge. Nowadays, counterfactual reasoning has been widely used in various fields. In the realm of natural language process(NLP), counterfactual reasoning has huge potential to improve the correctness of a sentence. In the shared Task 5 of detecting counterfactual in SemEval 2020, we pre-process the officially given dataset according to case conversion, extract stem and abbreviation replacement. We use last-5 bidirectional encoder representation from bidirectional encoder representation from transformer (BERT)and term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectorizer for counterfactual detection. Meanwhile, multi-sample dropout and cross validation are used to improve versatility and prevent problems such as poor generosity caused by overfitting. Finally, our team Ferryman ranked the 8th place in the sub-task 1 of this competition.

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Ferryman at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Ensemble Model for Assessing Humor in Edited News Headlines
Weilong Chen | Jipeng Li | Chenghao Huang | Wei Bai | Yanru Zhang | Yan Wang
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Natural language processing (NLP) has been applied to various fields including text classification and sentiment analysis. In the shared task of assessing the funniness of edited news headlines, which is a part of the SemEval 2020 competition, we preprocess datasets by replacing abbreviation, stemming words, then merge three models including Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) by taking the average to perform the best. Our team Ferryman wins the 9th place in Sub-task 1 of Task 7 - Regression.

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Ferryman at SemEval-2020 Task 12: BERT-Based Model with Advanced Improvement Methods for Multilingual Offensive Language Identification
Weilong Chen | Peng Wang | Jipeng Li | Yuanshuai Zheng | Yan Wang | Yanru Zhang
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Indiscriminately posting offensive remarks on social media may promote the occurrence of negative events such as violence, crime, and hatred. This paper examines different approaches and models for solving offensive tweet classification, which is a part of the OffensEval 2020 competition. The dataset is Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), which draws 14,200 annotated English Tweet comments. The main challenge of data preprocessing is the unbalanced class distribution, abbreviation, and emoji. To overcome these issues, methods such as hashtag segmentation, abbreviation replacement, and emoji replacement have been adopted for data preprocessing approaches. The main task can be divided into three sub-tasks, and are solved by Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency(TF-IDF), Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT), and Multi-dropout respectively. Meanwhile, we applied different learning rates for different languages and tasks based on BERT and non-BERTmodels in order to obtain better results. Our team Ferryman ranked the 18th, 8th, and 21st with F1-score of 0.91152 on the English Sub-task A, Sub-task B, and Sub-task C, respectively. Furthermore, our team also ranked in the top 20 on the Sub-task A of other languages.

2019

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Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration
Zhufeng Pan | Kun Bai | Yan Wang | Lianqiang Zhou | Xiaojiang Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

In multi-turn dialogue, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences. These incomplete utterances will greatly reduce the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. Restoring more incomplete utterances from context could potentially help the systems generate more relevant responses. To facilitate the study of incomplete utterance restoration for open-domain dialogue systems, a large-scale multi-turn dataset Restoration-200K is collected and manually labeled with the explicit relation between an utterance and its context. We also propose a “pick-and-combine” model to restore the incomplete utterance from its context. Experimental results demonstrate that the annotated dataset and the proposed approach significantly boost the response quality of both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue systems.

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Retrieval-guided Dialogue Response Generation via a Matching-to-Generation Framework
Deng Cai | Yan Wang | Wei Bi | Zhaopeng Tu | Xiaojiang Liu | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

End-to-end sequence generation is a popular technique for developing open domain dialogue systems, though they suffer from the safe response problem. Researchers have attempted to tackle this problem by incorporating generative models with the returns of retrieval systems. Recently, a skeleton-then-response framework has been shown promising results for this task. Nevertheless, how to precisely extract a skeleton and how to effectively train a retrieval-guided response generator are still challenging. This paper presents a novel framework in which the skeleton extraction is made by an interpretable matching model and the following skeleton-guided response generation is accomplished by a separately trained generator. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model designs.

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Modeling Intra-Relation in Math Word Problems with Different Functional Multi-Head Attentions
Jierui Li | Lei Wang | Jipeng Zhang | Yan Wang | Bing Tian Dai | Dongxiang Zhang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Several deep learning models have been proposed for solving math word problems (MWPs) automatically. Although these models have the ability to capture features without manual efforts, their approaches to capturing features are not specifically designed for MWPs. To utilize the merits of deep learning models with simultaneous consideration of MWPs’ specific features, we propose a group attention mechanism to extract global features, quantity-related features, quantity-pair features and question-related features in MWPs respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed approach performs significantly better than previous state-of-the-art methods, and boost performance from 66.9% to 69.5% on Math23K with training-test split, from 65.8% to 66.9% on Math23K with 5-fold cross-validation and from 69.2% to 76.1% on MAWPS.

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Skeleton-to-Response: Dialogue Generation Guided by Retrieval Memory
Deng Cai | Yan Wang | Wei Bi | Zhaopeng Tu | Xiaojiang Liu | Wai Lam | Shuming Shi
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)

Traditional generative dialogue models generate responses solely from input queries. Such information is insufficient for generating a specific response since a certain query could be answered in multiple ways. Recently, researchers have attempted to fill the information gap by exploiting information retrieval techniques. For a given query, similar dialogues are retrieved from the entire training data and considered as an additional knowledge source. While the use of retrieval may harvest extensive information, the generative models could be overwhelmed, leading to unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a new framework which exploits retrieval results via a skeleton-to-response paradigm. At first, a skeleton is extracted from the retrieved dialogues. Then, both the generated skeleton and the original query are used for response generation via a novel response generator. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the informativeness of the generated responses

2018

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Translating a Math Word Problem to a Expression Tree
Lei Wang | Yan Wang | Deng Cai | Dongxiang Zhang | Xiaojiang Liu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Sequence-to-sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models have been successfully applied to automatic math word problem solving. Despite its simplicity, a drawback still remains: a math word problem can be correctly solved by more than one equations. This non-deterministic transduction harms the performance of maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, by considering the uniqueness of expression tree, we propose an equation normalization method to normalize the duplicated equations. Moreover, we analyze the performance of three popular SEQ2SEQ models on the math word problem solving. We find that each model has its own specialty in solving problems, consequently an ensemble model is then proposed to combine their advantages. Experiments on dataset Math23K show that the ensemble model with equation normalization significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.

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Automatic Article Commenting: the Task and Dataset
Lianhui Qin | Lemao Liu | Wei Bi | Yan Wang | Xiaojiang Liu | Zhiting Hu | Hai Zhao | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Comments of online articles provide extended views and improve user engagement. Automatically making comments thus become a valuable functionality for online forums, intelligent chatbots, etc. This paper proposes the new task of automatic article commenting, and introduces a large-scale Chinese dataset with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments’ varying quality. Incorporating the human bias of comment quality, we further develop automatic metrics that generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics and exhibit greatly improved correlations with human evaluations.

2017

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Deep Neural Solver for Math Word Problems
Yan Wang | Xiaojiang Liu | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper presents a deep neural solver to automatically solve math word problems. In contrast to previous statistical learning approaches, we directly translate math word problems to equation templates using a recurrent neural network (RNN) model, without sophisticated feature engineering. We further design a hybrid model that combines the RNN model and a similarity-based retrieval model to achieve additional performance improvement. Experiments conducted on a large dataset show that the RNN model and the hybrid model significantly outperform state-of-the-art statistical learning methods for math word problem solving.

2010

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CMDMC: A Diachronic Digital Museum of Chinese Mandarin
Min Hou | Yu Zou | Yonglin Teng | Wei He | Yan Wang | Jun Liu | Jiyuan Wu
CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing

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The SAU Report for the 1st CIPS-SIGHAN-ParsEval-2010
Qiaoli Zhou | Wenjing Lang | Yingying Wang | Yan Wang | Dongfeng Cai
CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing