Ruofei Zhang


2022

pdf
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps
Jiangang Bai | Yujing Wang | Hong Sun | Ruonan Wu | Tianmeng Yang | Pengfei Tang | Defu Cao | Mingliang Zhang1 | Yunhai Tong | Yaming Yang | Jing Bai | Ruofei Zhang | Hao Sun | Wei Shen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Large-scale pre-trained language models have attracted extensive attentions in the research community and shown promising results on various tasks of natural language processing. However, the attention maps, which record the attention scores between tokens in self-attention mechanism, are sometimes ineffective as they are learned implicitly without the guidance of explicit semantic knowledge. Thus, we aim to infuse explicit external knowledge into pre-trained language models to further boost their performance. Existing works of knowledge infusion largely depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale re-training when new knowledge is considered. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic solution, KAM-BERT, which directly incorporates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism. It requires only a few extra parameters and supports efficient fine-tuning once new knowledge is added. KAM-BERT achieves consistent improvements on various academic datasets for natural language understanding. It also outperforms other state-of-the-art methods which conduct knowledge infusion into transformer-based architectures. Moreover, we apply our model to an industry-scale ad relevance application and show its advantages in the real-world scenario.

pdf
CULG: Commercial Universal Language Generation
Haonan Li | Yameng Huang | Yeyun Gong | Jian Jiao | Ruofei Zhang | Timothy Baldwin | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Track

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have dramatically improved performance for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in domains such as finance and healthcare. However, the application of PLMs in the domain of commerce, especially marketing and advertising, remains less studied. In this work, we adapt pre-training methods to the domain of commerce, by proposing CULG, a large-scale commercial universal language generation model which is pre-trained on a corpus drawn from 10 markets across 7 languages. We propose 4 commercial generation tasks and a two-stage training strategy for pre-training, and demonstrate that the proposed strategy yields performance improvements on three generation tasks as compared to single-stage pre-training. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms other models by a large margin on commercial generation tasks, and we conclude with a discussion on additional applications over other markets, languages, and tasks.

2021

pdf
Mask Attention Networks: Rethinking and Strengthen Transformer
Zhihao Fan | Yeyun Gong | Dayiheng Liu | Zhongyu Wei | Siyuan Wang | Jian Jiao | Nan Duan | Ruofei Zhang | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Transformer is an attention-based neural network, which consists of two sublayers, namely, Self-Attention Network (SAN) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). Existing research explores to enhance the two sublayers separately to improve the capability of Transformer for text representation. In this paper, we present a novel understanding of SAN and FFN as Mask Attention Networks (MANs) and show that they are two special cases of MANs with static mask matrices. However, their static mask matrices limit the capability for localness modeling in text representation learning. We therefore introduce a new layer named dynamic mask attention network (DMAN) with a learnable mask matrix which is able to model localness adaptively. To incorporate advantages of DMAN, SAN, and FFN, we propose a sequential layered structure to combine the three types of layers. Extensive experiments on various tasks, including neural machine translation and text summarization demonstrate that our model outperforms the original Transformer.

pdf
HittER: Hierarchical Transformers for Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Sanxing Chen | Xiaodong Liu | Jianfeng Gao | Jian Jiao | Ruofei Zhang | Yangfeng Ji
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper examines the challenging problem of learning representations of entities and relations in a complex multi-relational knowledge graph. We propose HittER, a Hierarchical Transformer model to jointly learn Entity-relation composition and Relational contextualization based on a source entity’s neighborhood. Our proposed model consists of two different Transformer blocks: the bottom block extracts features of each entity-relation pair in the local neighborhood of the source entity and the top block aggregates the relational information from outputs of the bottom block. We further design a masked entity prediction task to balance information from the relational context and the source entity itself. Experimental results show that HittER achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple link prediction datasets. We additionally propose a simple approach to integrate HittER into BERT and demonstrate its effectiveness on two Freebase factoid question answering datasets.

pdf
FastSeq: Make Sequence Generation Faster
Yu Yan | Fei Hu | Jiusheng Chen | Nikhil Bhendawade | Ting Ye | Yeyun Gong | Nan Duan | Desheng Cui | Bingyu Chi | Ruofei Zhang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Transformer-based models have made tremendous impacts in natural language generation. However the inference speed is a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process. We develop FastSeq framework to accelerate sequence generation without accuracy loss. The proposed optimization techniques include an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O. These optimizations are general enough to be applicable to Transformer-based models (e.g., T5, GPT2, and UniLM). Our benchmark results on a set of widely used and diverse models demonstrate 4-9x inference speed gain. Additionally, FastSeq is easy to use with a simple one-line code change. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/fastseq.

pdf
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation
Weizhen Qi | Yeyun Gong | Yu Yan | Can Xu | Bolun Yao | Bartuer Zhou | Biao Cheng | Daxin Jiang | Jiusheng Chen | Ruofei Zhang | Houqiang Li | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Now, the pre-training technique is ubiquitous in natural language processing field. ProphetNet is a pre-training based natural language generation method which shows powerful performance on English text summarization and question generation tasks. In this paper, we extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages, and present the ProphetNet family pre-training models, named ProphetNet-X, where X can be English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, and so on. We pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi, a Chinese generation model ProphetNet-Zh, two open-domain dialog generation models ProphetNet-Dialog-En and ProphetNet-Dialog-Zh. And also, we provide a PLG (Programming Language Generation) model ProphetNet-Code to show the generation performance besides NLG (Natural Language Generation) tasks. In our experiments, ProphetNet-X models achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 10 benchmarks. All the models of ProphetNet-X share the same model structure, which allows users to easily switch between different models. We make the code and models publicly available, and we will keep updating more pre-training models and finetuning scripts.

pdf
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark
Dayiheng Liu | Yu Yan | Yeyun Gong | Weizhen Qi | Hang Zhang | Jian Jiao | Weizhu Chen | Jie Fu | Linjun Shou | Ming Gong | Pengcheng Wang | Jiusheng Chen | Daxin Jiang | Jiancheng Lv | Ruofei Zhang | Winnie Wu | Ming Zhou | Nan Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

pdf
KFCNet: Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive Learning for Generative Commonsense Reasoning
Haonan Li | Yeyun Gong | Jian Jiao | Ruofei Zhang | Timothy Baldwin | Nan Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Pre-trained language models have led to substantial gains over a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but have been shown to have limitations for natural language generation tasks with high-quality requirements on the output, such as commonsense generation and ad keyword generation. In this work, we present a novel Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive learning Network (KFCNet) which references external knowledge and achieves better generation performance. Specifically, we propose a BERT-based filter model to remove low-quality candidates, and apply contrastive learning separately to each of the encoder and decoder, within a general encoder–decoder architecture. The encoder contrastive module helps to capture global target semantics during encoding, and the decoder contrastive module enhances the utility of retrieved prototypes while learning general features. Extensive experiments on the CommonGen benchmark show that our model outperforms the previous state of the art by a large margin: +6.6 points (42.5 vs. 35.9) for BLEU-4, +3.7 points (33.3 vs. 29.6) for SPICE, and +1.3 points (18.3 vs. 17.0) for CIDEr. We further verify the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive module on ad keyword generation, and show that our model has potential commercial value.

2020

pdf
ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training
Weizhen Qi | Yu Yan | Yeyun Gong | Dayiheng Liu | Nan Duan | Jiusheng Chen | Ruofei Zhang | Ming Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

This paper presents a new sequence-to-sequence pre-training model called ProphetNet, which introduces a novel self-supervised objective named future n-gram prediction and the proposed n-stream self-attention mechanism. Instead of optimizing one-step-ahead prediction in the traditional sequence-to-sequence model, the ProphetNet is optimized by n-step ahead prediction that predicts the next n tokens simultaneously based on previous context tokens at each time step. The future n-gram prediction explicitly encourages the model to plan for the future tokens and prevent overfitting on strong local correlations. We pre-train ProphetNet using a base scale dataset (16GB) and a large-scale dataset (160GB), respectively. Then we conduct experiments on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks for abstractive summarization and question generation tasks. Experimental results show that ProphetNet achieves new state-of-the-art results on all these datasets compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus.

pdf
An Enhanced Knowledge Injection Model for Commonsense Generation
Zhihao Fan | Yeyun Gong | Zhongyu Wei | Siyuan Wang | Yameng Huang | Jian Jiao | Xuanjing Huang | Nan Duan | Ruofei Zhang
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Commonsense generation aims at generating plausible everyday scenario description based on a set of provided concepts. Digging the relationship of concepts from scratch is non-trivial, therefore, we retrieve prototypes from external knowledge to assist the understanding of the scenario for better description generation. We integrate two additional modules into the pretrained encoder-decoder model for prototype modeling to enhance the knowledge injection procedure. We conduct experiment on CommonGen benchmark, experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance on all the metrics.

pdf
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation
Yaobo Liang | Nan Duan | Yeyun Gong | Ning Wu | Fenfei Guo | Weizhen Qi | Ming Gong | Linjun Shou | Daxin Jiang | Guihong Cao | Xiaodong Fan | Ruofei Zhang | Rahul Agrawal | Edward Cui | Sining Wei | Taroon Bharti | Ying Qiao | Jiun-Hung Chen | Winnie Wu | Shuguang Liu | Fan Yang | Daniel Campos | Rangan Majumder | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In this paper, we introduce XGLUE, a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora, and evaluate their performance across a diverse set of cross-lingual tasks. Comparing to GLUE (Wang et al.,2019), which is labeled in English and includes natural language understanding tasks only, XGLUE has three main advantages: (1) it provides two corpora with different sizes for cross-lingual pre-training; (2) it provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both natural language understanding and generation scenarios; (3) for each task, it provides labeled data in multiple languages. We extend a recent cross-lingual pre-trained model Unicoder (Huang et al., 2019) to cover both understanding and generation tasks, which is evaluated on XGLUE as a strong baseline. We also evaluate the base versions (12-layer) of Multilingual BERT, XLM and XLM-R for comparison.