Beichen Zhang


2022

pdf
Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations
Kun Zhou | Beichen Zhang | Xin Zhao | Ji-Rong Wen
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, contrastive learning has been shown to be effective in improving pre-trained language models (PLM) to derive high-quality sentence representations. It aims to pull close positive examples to enhance the alignment while push apart irrelevant negatives for the uniformity of the whole representation space.However, previous works mostly adopt in-batch negatives or sample from training data at random. Such a way may cause the sampling bias that improper negatives (false negatives and anisotropy representations) are used to learn sentence representations, which will hurt the uniformity of the representation space.To address it, we present a new framework DCLR (Debiased Contrastive Learning of unsupervised sentence Representations) to alleviate the influence of these improper negatives.In DCLR, we design an instance weighting method to punish false negatives and generate noise-based negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space.Experiments on seven semantic textual similarity tasks show that our approach is more effective than competitive baselines. Our code and data are publicly available at the link: bluehttps://github.com/RUCAIBox/DCLR.

pdf
Think Beyond Words: Exploring Context-Relevant Visual Commonsense for Diverse Dialogue Generation
Yiting Liu | Liang Li | Beichen Zhang | Qingming Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Commonsense knowledge has been widely considered for building intelligent open-domain dialogue agents, aiming to generate meaningful and diverse responses. Previous works in this field usually lack the ability to effectively obtain and utilize auxiliary commonsense from the external visual world. In this paper, we argue that exploiting logical information in images related to context can be effective to enrich and steer the generation process. In view of this, we propose VICTOR, a context-relevant VIsual Commonsense enhanced dialogue generaTOR for generating coherent and informative responses. To obtain the associated visual commonsense, we devise a novel approach that expands topic words on the knowledge graph and maps them into daily scenarios. During the generation, the model adopts multimodal fusion mechanism to integrate visual and textual information, and adaptively combine their decoding distributions for better response generation. The experimental results on two public datasets show that our proposed method outperforms the latest competitive methods in terms of coherence and diversity.