Yang Janet Liu

Georgetown University; 刘洋

Also published as: Yang Liu

Other people with similar names: Yang Liu (May refer to several people), Yang Liu (3M Health Information Systems), Yang Liu (University of Helsinki), Yang Liu (Beijing Language and Culture University), Yang Liu (National University of Defense Technology), Yang Liu (Edinburgh Ph.D., Microsoft), Yang Liu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)), Yang Liu (刘扬; Ph.D Purdue; ICSI, Dallas, Facebook, Liulishuo, Amazon), Yang Liu (刘洋; ICT, Tsinghua, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence), Yang Liu (Microsoft Cognitive Services Research), Yang Liu (Peking University), Yang Liu (Samsung Research Center Beijing), Yang Liu (Tianjin University, China), Yang Liu (Univ. of Michigan, UC Santa Cruz), Yang Liu (Wilfrid Laurier University)


2024

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DISRPT: A Multilingual, Multi-domain, Cross-framework Benchmark for Discourse Processing
Chloé Braud | Amir Zeldes | Laura Rivière | Yang Janet Liu | Philippe Muller | Damien Sileo | Tatsuya Aoyama
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

This paper presents DISRPT, a multilingual, multi-domain, and cross-framework benchmark dataset for discourse processing, covering the tasks of discourse unit segmentation, connective identification, and relation classification. DISRPT includes 13 languages, with data from 24 corpora covering about 4 millions tokens and around 250,000 discourse relation instances from 4 discourse frameworks: RST, SDRT, PDTB, and Discourse Dependencies. We present an overview of the data, its development across three NLP shared tasks on discourse processing carried out in the past five years, and the latest modifications and added extensions. We also carry out an evaluation of state-of-the-art multilingual systems trained on the data for each task, showing plateau performance on segmentation, but important room for improvement for connective identification and relation classification. The DISRPT benchmark employs a unified format that we make available on GitHub and HuggingFace in order to encourage future work on discourse processing across languages, domains, and frameworks.

2023

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What’s Hard in English RST Parsing? Predictive Models for Error Analysis
Yang Janet Liu | Tatsuya Aoyama | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Despite recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), hierarchical discourse parsing in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory remains challenging, and our understanding of the reasons for this are as yet limited. In this paper, we examine and model some of the factors associated with parsing difficulties in previous work: the existence of implicit discourse relations, challenges in identifying long-distance relations, out-of-vocabulary items, and more. In order to assess the relative importance of these variables, we also release two annotated English test-sets with explicit correct and distracting discourse markers associated with gold standard RST relations. Our results show that as in shallow discourse parsing, the explicit/implicit distinction plays a role, but that long-distance dependencies are the main challenge, while lack of lexical overlap is less of a problem, at least for in-domain parsing. Our final model is able to predict where errors will occur with an accuracy of 76.3% for the bottom-up parser and 76.6% for the top-down parser.

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GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation
Tatsuya Aoyama | Shabnam Behzad | Luke Gessler | Lauren Levine | Jessica Lin | Yang Janet Liu | Siyao Peng | Yilun Zhu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)

We present GENTLE, a new mixed-genre English challenge corpus totaling 17K tokens and consisting of 8 unusual text types for out-of-domain evaluation: dictionary entries, esports commentaries, legal documents, medical notes, poetry, mathematical proofs, syllabuses, and threat letters. GENTLE is manually annotated for a variety of popular NLP tasks, including syntactic dependency parsing, entity recognition, coreference resolution, and discourse parsing. We evaluate state-of-the-art NLP systems on GENTLE and find severe degradation for at least some genres in their performance on all tasks, which indicates GENTLE’s utility as an evaluation dataset for NLP systems.

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Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023)
Chloé Braud | Yang Janet Liu | Eleni Metheniti | Philippe Muller | Laura Rivière | Attapol Rutherford | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023)

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The DISRPT 2023 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification
Chloé Braud | Yang Janet Liu | Eleni Metheniti | Philippe Muller | Laura Rivière | Attapol Rutherford | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023)

In 2023, the third iteration of the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking) was held, dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms. Following the success of the 2019and 2021 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification, this iteration has added 10 new corpora, including 2 new languages (Thai and Italian) and 3 discourse treebanks annotated in the discourse dependency representation in addition to the previously included frameworks: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper, we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers 26 datasets across 13 languages, survey and compare submitted systems, and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.

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GUMSum: Multi-Genre Data and Evaluation for English Abstractive Summarization
Yang Janet Liu | Amir Zeldes
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Automatic summarization with pre-trained language models has led to impressively fluent results, but is prone to ‘hallucinations’, low performance on non-news genres, and outputs which are not exactly summaries. Targeting ACL 2023’s ‘Reality Check’ theme, we present GUMSum, a small but carefully crafted dataset of English summaries in 12 written and spoken genres for evaluation of abstractive summarization. Summaries are highly constrained, focusing on substitutive potential, factuality, and faithfulness. We present guidelines and evaluate human agreement as well as subjective judgments on recent system outputs, comparing general-domain untuned approaches, a fine-tuned one, and a prompt-based approach, to human performance. Results show that while GPT3 achieves impressive scores, it still underperforms humans, with varying quality across genres. Human judgments reveal different types of errors in supervised, prompted, and human-generated summaries, shedding light on the challenges of producing a good summary.

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Why Can’t Discourse Parsing Generalize? A Thorough Investigation of the Impact of Data Diversity
Yang Janet Liu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent advances in discourse parsing performance create the impression that, as in other NLP tasks, performance for high-resource languages such as English is finally becoming reliable. In this paper we demonstrate that this is not the case, and thoroughly investigate the impact of data diversity on RST parsing stability. We show that state-of-the-art architectures trained on the standard English newswire benchmark do not generalize well, even within the news domain. Using the two largest RST corpora of English with text from multiple genres, we quantify the impact of genre diversity in training data for achieving generalization to text types unseen during training. Our results show that a heterogeneous training regime is critical for stable and generalizable models, across parser architectures. We also provide error analyses of model outputs and out-of-domain performance. To our knowledge, this study is the first to fully evaluate cross-corpus RST parsing generalizability on complete trees, examine between-genre degradation within an RST corpus, and investigate the impact of genre diversity in training data composition.

2022

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GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing
Siyao Peng | Yang Janet Liu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A lack of large-scale human-annotated data has hampered the hierarchical discourse parsing of Chinese. In this paper, we present GCDT, the largest hierarchical discourse treebank for Mandarin Chinese in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). GCDT covers over 60K tokens across five genres of freely available text, using the same relation inventory as contemporary RST treebanks for English. We also report on this dataset’s parsing experiments, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores for Chinese RST parsing and RST parsing on the English GUM dataset, using cross-lingual training in Chinese and English with multilingual embeddings.

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Putting Context in SNACS: A 5-Way Classification of Adpositional Pragmatic Markers
Yang Janet Liu | Jena D. Hwang | Nathan Schneider | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022

The SNACS framework provides a network of semantic labels called supersenses for annotating adpositional semantics in corpora. In this work, we consider English prepositions (and prepositional phrases) that are chiefly pragmatic, contributing extra-propositional contextual information such as speaker attitudes and discourse structure. We introduce a preliminary taxonomy of pragmatic meanings to supplement the semantic SNACS supersenses, with guidelines for the annotation of coherence connectives, commentary markers, and topic and focus markers. We also examine annotation disagreements, delve into the trickiest boundary cases, and offer a discussion of future improvements.

2021

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Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)
Amir Zeldes | Yang Janet Liu | Mikel Iruskieta | Philippe Muller | Chloé Braud | Sonia Badene
Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)

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The DISRPT 2021 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification
Amir Zeldes | Yang Janet Liu | Mikel Iruskieta | Philippe Muller | Chloé Braud | Sonia Badene
Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)

In 2021, we organized the second iteration of a shared task dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms: the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking). Adding to the 2019 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection, this iteration of the Shared Task included for the first time a track on discourse relation classification across three formalisms: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers nearly 3 million manually annotated tokens from 16 datasets in 11 languages, survey and compare submitted systems and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.

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DisCoDisCo at the DISRPT2021 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Segmentation, Classification, and Connective Detection
Luke Gessler | Shabnam Behzad | Yang Janet Liu | Siyao Peng | Yilun Zhu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)

This paper describes our submission to the DISRPT2021 Shared Task on Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification. Our system, called DisCoDisCo, is a Transformer-based neural classifier which enhances contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) with hand-crafted features, relying on tokenwise sequence tagging for discourse segmentation and connective detection, and a feature-rich, encoder-less sentence pair classifier for relation classification. Our results for the first two tasks outperform SOTA scores from the previous 2019 shared task, and results on relation classification suggest strong performance on the new 2021 benchmark. Ablation tests show that including features beyond CWEs are helpful for both tasks, and a partial evaluation of multiple pretrained Transformer-based language models indicates that models pre-trained on the Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) task are optimal for relation classification.

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Overview of AMALGUM – Large Silver Quality Annotations across English Genres
Luke Gessler | Siyao Peng | Yang Liu | Yilun Zhu | Shabnam Behzad | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021

2020

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AMALGUM – A Free, Balanced, Multilayer English Web Corpus
Luke Gessler | Siyao Peng | Yang Liu | Yilun Zhu | Shabnam Behzad | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present a freely available, genre-balanced English web corpus totaling 4M tokens and featuring a large number of high-quality automatic annotation layers, including dependency trees, non-named entity annotations, coreference resolution, and discourse trees in Rhetorical Structure Theory. By tapping open online data sources the corpus is meant to offer a more sizable alternative to smaller manually created annotated data sets, while avoiding pitfalls such as imbalanced or unknown composition, licensing problems, and low-quality natural language processing. We harness knowledge from multiple annotation layers in order to achieve a “better than NLP” benchmark and evaluate the accuracy of the resulting resource.

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A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese
Siyao Peng | Yang Liu | Yilun Zhu | Austin Blodgett | Yushi Zhao | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Adpositions are frequent markers of semantic relations, but they are highly ambiguous and vary significantly from language to language. Moreover, there is a dearth of annotated corpora for investigating the cross-linguistic variation of adposition semantics, or for building multilingual disambiguation systems. This paper presents a corpus in which all adpositions have been semantically annotated in Mandarin Chinese; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese corpus to be broadly annotated with adposition semantics. Our approach adapts a framework that defined a general set of supersenses according to ostensibly language-independent semantic criteria, though its development focused primarily on English prepositions (Schneider et al., 2018). We find that the supersense categories are well-suited to Chinese adpositions despite syntactic differences from English. On a Mandarin translation of The Little Prince, we achieve high inter-annotator agreement and analyze semantic correspondences of adposition tokens in bitext.

2019

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A Discourse Signal Annotation System for RST Trees
Luke Gessler | Yang Liu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

This paper presents a new system for open-ended discourse relation signal annotation in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), implemented on top of an online tool for RST annotation. We discuss existing projects annotating textual signals of discourse relations, which have so far not allowed simultaneously structuring and annotating words signaling hierarchical discourse trees, and demonstrate the design and applications of our interface by extending existing RST annotations in the freely available GUM corpus.

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Beyond The Wall Street Journal: Anchoring and Comparing Discourse Signals across Genres
Yang Liu
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

Recent research on discourse relations has found that they are cued not only by discourse markers (DMs) but also by other textual signals and that signaling information is indicative of genres. While several corpora exist with discourse relation signaling information such as the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, Prasad et al. 2008) and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Signalling Corpus (RST-SC, Das and Taboada 2018), they both annotate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the Penn Treebank (PTB, Marcus et al. 1993), which is limited to the news domain. Thus, this paper adapts the signal identification and anchoring scheme (Liu and Zeldes, 2019) to three more genres, examines the distribution of signaling devices across relations and genres, and provides a taxonomy of indicative signals found in this dataset.

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GumDrop at the DISRPT2019 Shared Task: A Model Stacking Approach to Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection
Yue Yu | Yilun Zhu | Yang Liu | Yan Liu | Siyao Peng | Mackenzie Gong | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University’s entry at the DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.