Yuanmeng Yan


2023

pdf
Rethinking the Word-level Quality Estimation for Machine Translation from Human Judgement
Zhen Yang | Fandong Meng | Yuanmeng Yan | Jie Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Word-level Quality Estimation (QE) of Machine Translation (MT) aims to detect potential translation errors in the translated sentence without reference. Typically, conventional works on word-level QE are usually designed to predict the quality of translated words in terms of the post-editing effort, where the word labels in the dataset, i.e., OK or BAD, are automatically generated by comparing words between MT sentences and the post-edited sentences through a Translation Error Rate (TER) toolkit. While the post-editing effort can be used to measure the translation quality to some extent, we find it usually conflicts with human judgment on whether the word is well or poorly translated. To investigate this conflict, we first create a golden benchmark dataset, namely HJQE (Human Judgement on Quality Estimation), where the source and MT sentences are identical to the original TER-based dataset and the expert translators directly annotate the poorly translated words on their judgments. Based on our analysis, we further propose two tag-correcting strategies which can make the TER-based artificial QE corpus closer to HJQE. We conduct substantial experiments based on the publicly available WMT En-De and En-Zh corpora. The results not only show our proposed dataset is more consistent with human judgment but also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed tag-correcting strategies.For reviewers, the corpora and codes can be found in the attached files.

2022

pdf
Disentangling Confidence Score Distribution for Out-of-Domain Intent Detection with Energy-Based Learning
Yanan Wu | Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yutao Mou | Pei Wang | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a taskoriented dialog system. Traditional softmaxbased confidence scores are susceptible to the overconfidence issue. In this paper, we propose a simple but strong energy-based score function to detect OOD where the energy scores of OOD samples are higher than IND samples. Further, given a small set of labeled OOD samples, we introduce an energy-based margin objective for supervised OOD detection to explicitly distinguish OOD samples from INDs. Comprehensive experiments and analysis prove our method helps disentangle confidence score distributions of IND and OOD data.

pdf
Revisit Overconfidence for OOD Detection: Reassigned Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Class-dependent Threshold
Yanan Wu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | QiXiang Gao | Zhiyuan Zeng | Fujia Zheng | Lulu Zhao | Huixing Jiang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is the overconfidence of neural models. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze overconfidence and classify it into two perspectives: over-confident OOD and in-domain (IND). Then according to intrinsic reasons, we respectively propose a novel reassigned contrastive learning (RCL) to discriminate IND intents for over-confident OOD and an adaptive class-dependent local threshold mechanism to separate similar IND and OOD intents for over-confident IND. Experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of our proposed method for both aspects of overconfidence issues.

2021

pdf
Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System
Yanan Wu | Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Hong Xu | Yuanmeng Yan | Huixing Jiang | Weiran Xu
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)

Existing slot filling models can only recognize pre-defined in-domain slot types from a limited slot set. In the practical application, a reliable dialogue system should know what it does not know. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Novel Slot Detection (NSD), in the task-oriented dialogue system. NSD aims to discover unknown or out-of-domain slot types to strengthen the capability of a dialogue system based on in-domain training data. Besides, we construct two public NSD datasets, propose several strong NSD baselines, and establish a benchmark for future work. Finally, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future directions.

pdf
ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer
Yuanmeng Yan | Rumei Li | Sirui Wang | Fuzheng Zhang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
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)

Learning high-quality sentence representations benefits a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Though BERT-based pre-trained language models achieve high performance on many downstream tasks, the native derived sentence representations are proved to be collapsed and thus produce a poor performance on the semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. In this paper, we present ConSERT, a Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised SEntence Representation Transfer, that adopts contrastive learning to fine-tune BERT in an unsupervised and effective way. By making use of unlabeled texts, ConSERT solves the collapse issue of BERT-derived sentence representations and make them more applicable for downstream tasks. Experiments on STS datasets demonstrate that ConSERT achieves an 8% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art, even comparable to the supervised SBERT-NLI. And when further incorporating NLI supervision, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on STS tasks. Moreover, ConSERT obtains comparable results with only 1000 samples available, showing its robustness in data scarcity scenarios.

pdf
Modeling Discriminative Representations for Out-of-Domain Detection with Supervised Contrastive Learning
Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Zijun Liu | Yanan Wu | Hong Xu | Huixing Jiang | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is to learn discriminative semantic features. Traditional cross-entropy loss only focuses on whether a sample is correctly classified, and does not explicitly distinguish the margins between categories. In this paper, we propose a supervised contrastive learning objective to minimize intra-class variance by pulling together in-domain intents belonging to the same class and maximize inter-class variance by pushing apart samples from different classes. Besides, we employ an adversarial augmentation mechanism to obtain pseudo diverse views of a sample in the latent space. Experiments on two public datasets prove the effectiveness of our method capturing discriminative representations for OOD detection.

pdf
A Finer-grain Universal Dialogue Semantic Structures based Model For Abstractive Dialogue Summarization
Yuejie Lei | Fujia Zheng | Yuanmeng Yan | Keqing He | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Although abstractive summarization models have achieved impressive results on document summarization tasks, their performance on dialogue modeling is much less satisfactory due to the crude and straight methods for dialogue encoding. To address this question, we propose a novel end-to-end Transformer-based model FinDS for abstractive dialogue summarization that leverages Finer-grain universal Dialogue semantic Structures to model dialogue and generates better summaries. Experiments on the SAMsum dataset show that FinDS outperforms various dialogue summarization approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) ROUGE results. Finally, we apply FinDS to a more complex scenario, showing the robustness of our model. We also release our source code.

pdf
Dynamically Disentangling Social Bias from Task-Oriented Representations with Adversarial Attack
Liwen Wang | Yuanmeng Yan | Keqing He | Yanan Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Representation learning is widely used in NLP for a vast range of tasks. However, representations derived from text corpora often reflect social biases. This phenomenon is pervasive and consistent across different neural models, causing serious concern. Previous methods mostly rely on a pre-specified, user-provided direction or suffer from unstable training. In this paper, we propose an adversarial disentangled debiasing model to dynamically decouple social bias attributes from the intermediate representations trained on the main task. We aim to denoise bias information while training on the downstream task, rather than completely remove social bias and pursue static unbiased representations. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method, both on the effect of debiasing and the main task performance.

pdf
Adversarial Self-Supervised Learning for Out-of-Domain Detection
Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Hong Xu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents is crucial for the deployed task-oriented dialogue system. Previous unsupervised OOD detection methods only extract discriminative features of different in-domain intents while supervised counterparts can directly distinguish OOD and in-domain intents but require extensive labeled OOD data. To combine the benefits of both types, we propose a self-supervised contrastive learning framework to model discriminative semantic features of both in-domain intents and OOD intents from unlabeled data. Besides, we introduce an adversarial augmentation neural module to improve the efficiency and robustness of contrastive learning. Experiments on two public benchmark datasets show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines with a statistically significant margin.

pdf
Large-Scale Relation Learning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases with Pre-trained Language Models
Yuanmeng Yan | Rumei Li | Sirui Wang | Hongzhi Zhang | Zan Daoguang | Fuzheng Zhang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The key challenge of question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) is the inconsistency between the natural language questions and the reasoning paths in the knowledge base (KB). Recent graph-based KBQA methods are good at grasping the topological structure of the graph but often ignore the textual information carried by the nodes and edges. Meanwhile, pre-trained language models learn massive open-world knowledge from the large corpus, but it is in the natural language form and not structured. To bridge the gap between the natural language and the structured KB, we propose three relation learning tasks for BERT-based KBQA, including relation extraction, relation matching, and relation reasoning. By relation-augmented training, the model learns to align the natural language expressions to the relations in the KB as well as reason over the missing connections in the KB. Experiments on WebQSP show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, especially when the KB is incomplete.

pdf
Bridge to Target Domain by Prototypical Contrastive Learning and Label Confusion: Re-explore Zero-Shot Learning for Slot Filling
Liwen Wang | Xuefeng Li | Jiachi Liu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling alleviates the data dependence in the case of data scarcity in the target domain, which has aroused extensive research. However, as most of the existing methods do not achieve effective knowledge transfer to the target domain, they just fit the distribution of the seen slot and show poor performance on unseen slot in the target domain. To solve this, we propose a novel approach based on prototypical contrastive learning with a dynamic label confusion strategy for zero-shot slot filling. The prototypical contrastive learning aims to reconstruct the semantic constraints of labels, and we introduce the label confusion strategy to establish the label dependence between the source domains and the target domain on-the-fly. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvement on the unseen slots, while also set new state-of-the-arts on slot filling task.

2020

pdf
Learning to Tag OOV Tokens by Integrating Contextual Representation and Background Knowledge
Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Neural-based context-aware models for slot tagging have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, the presence of OOV(out-of-vocab) words significantly degrades the performance of neural-based models, especially in a few-shot scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced slot tagging model to integrate contextual representation of input text and the large-scale lexical background knowledge. Besides, we use multi-level graph attention to explicitly model lexical relations. The experiments show that our proposed knowledge integration mechanism achieves consistent improvements across settings with different sizes of training data on two public benchmark datasets.

pdf
Adversarial Semantic Decoupling for Recognizing Open-Vocabulary Slots
Yuanmeng Yan | Keqing He | Hong Xu | Sihong Liu | Fanyu Meng | Min Hu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Open-vocabulary slots, such as file name, album name, or schedule title, significantly degrade the performance of neural-based slot filling models since these slots can take on values from a virtually unlimited set and have no semantic restriction nor a length limit. In this paper, we propose a robust adversarial model-agnostic slot filling method that explicitly decouples local semantics inherent in open-vocabulary slot words from the global context. We aim to depart entangled contextual semantics and focus more on the holistic context at the level of the whole sentence. Experiments on two public datasets show that our method consistently outperforms other methods with a statistically significant margin on all the open-vocabulary slots without deteriorating the performance of normal slots.

pdf
A Deep Generative Distance-Based Classifier for Out-of-Domain Detection with Mahalanobis Space
Hong Xu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Sihong Liu | Zijun Liu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) input intents is critical in the task-oriented dialog system. Different from most existing methods that rely heavily on manually labeled OOD samples, we focus on the unsupervised OOD detection scenario where there are no labeled OOD samples except for labeled in-domain data. In this paper, we propose a simple but strong generative distance-based classifier to detect OOD samples. We estimate the class-conditional distribution on feature spaces of DNNs via Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA) to avoid over-confidence problems. And we use two distance functions, Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances, to measure the confidence score of whether a test sample belongs to OOD. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines.

pdf
Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Adversarial Attack
Keqing He | Jinchao Zhang | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu | Cheng Niu | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Zero-shot slot filling has widely arisen to cope with data scarcity in target domains. However, previous approaches often ignore constraints between slot value representation and related slot description representation in the latent space and lack enough model robustness. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning with Adversarial Attack (CZSL-Adv) method for the cross-domain slot filling. The contrastive loss aims to map slot value contextual representations to the corresponding slot description representations. And we introduce an adversarial attack training strategy to improve model robustness. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both zero-shot and few-shot settings.