Fei Li


2022

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Effective Token Graph Modeling using a Novel Labeling Strategy for Structured Sentiment Analysis
Wenxuan Shi | Fei Li | Jingye Li | Hao Fei | Donghong Ji
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The state-of-the-art model for structured sentiment analysis casts the task as a dependency parsing problem, which has some limitations: (1) The label proportions for span prediction and span relation prediction are imbalanced. (2) The span lengths of sentiment tuple components may be very large in this task, which will further exacerbates the imbalance problem. (3) Two nodes in a dependency graph cannot have multiple arcs, therefore some overlapped sentiment tuples cannot be recognized. In this work, we propose nichetargeting solutions for these issues. First, we introduce a novel labeling strategy, which contains two sets of token pair labels, namely essential label set and whole label set. The essential label set consists of the basic labels for this task, which are relatively balanced and applied in the prediction layer. The whole label set includes rich labels to help our model capture various token relations, which are applied in the hidden layer to softly influence our model. Moreover, we also propose an effective model to well collaborate with our labeling strategy, which is equipped with the graph attention networks to iteratively refine token representations, and the adaptive multi-label classifier to dynamically predict multiple relations between token pairs. We perform extensive experiments on 5 benchmark datasets in four languages. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous SOTA models by a large margin.

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Entity-centered Cross-document Relation Extraction
Fengqi Wang | Fei Li | Hao Fei | Jingye Li | Shengqiong Wu | Fangfang Su | Wenxuan Shi | Donghong Ji | Bo Cai
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Relation Extraction (RE) is a fundamental task of information extraction, which has attracted a large amount of research attention. Previous studies focus on extracting the relations within a sentence or document, while currently researchers begin to explore cross-document RE. However, current cross-document RE methods directly utilize text snippets surrounding target entities in multiple given documents, which brings considerable noisy and non-relevant sentences. Moreover, they utilize all the text paths in a document bag in a coarse-grained way, without considering the connections between these text paths.In this paper, we aim to address both of these shortages and push the state-of-the-art for cross-document RE. First, we focus on input construction for our RE model and propose an entity-based document-context filter to retain useful information in the given documents by using the bridge entities in the text paths. Second, we propose a cross-document RE model based on cross-path entity relation attention, which allow the entity relations across text paths to interact with each other. We compare our cross-document RE method with the state-of-the-art methods in the dataset CodRED. Our method outperforms them by at least 10% in F1, thus demonstrating its effectiveness.

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OneEE: A One-Stage Framework for Fast Overlapping and Nested Event Extraction
Hu Cao | Jingye Li | Fangfang Su | Fei Li | Hao Fei | Shengqiong Wu | Bobo Li | Liang Zhao | Donghong Ji
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Event extraction (EE) is an essential task of information extraction, which aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. Most prior work focuses on extracting flat events while neglecting overlapped or nested ones. A few models for overlapped and nested EE includes several successive stages to extract event triggers and arguments,which suffer from error propagation. Therefore, we design a simple yet effective tagging scheme and model to formulate EE as word-word relation recognition, called OneEE. The relations between trigger or argument words are simultaneously recognized in one stage with parallel grid tagging, thus yielding a very fast event extraction speed. The model is equipped with an adaptive event fusion module to generate event-aware representations and a distance-aware predictor to integrate relative distance information for word-word relation recognition, which are empirically demonstrated to be effective mechanisms. Experiments on 3 overlapped and nested EE benchmarks, namely FewFC, Genia11, and Genia13, show that OneEE achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Moreover, the inference speed of OneEE is faster than those of baselines in the same condition, and can be further substantially improved since it supports parallel inference.

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Joint Alignment of Multi-Task Feature and Label Spaces for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction
Shunjie Chen | Xiaochuan Shi | Jingye Li | Shengqiong Wu | Hao Fei | Fei Li | Donghong Ji
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Emotion cause pair extraction (ECPE), as one of the derived subtasks of emotion cause analysis (ECA), shares rich inter-related features with emotion extraction (EE) and cause extraction (CE). Therefore EE and CE are frequently utilized as auxiliary tasks for better feature learning, modeled via multi-task learning (MTL) framework by prior works to achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) ECPE results. However, existing MTL-based methods either fail to simultaneously model the specific features and the interactive feature in between, or suffer from the inconsistency of label prediction. In this work, we consider addressing the above challenges for improving ECPE by performing two alignment mechanisms with a novel Aˆ2Net model. We first propose a feature-task alignment to explicitly model the specific emotion-&cause-specific features and the shared interactive feature. Besides, an inter-task alignment is implemented, in which the label distance between the ECPE and the combinations of EE&CE are learned to be narrowed for better label consistency. Evaluations of benchmarks show that our methods outperform current best-performing systems on all ECA subtasks. Further analysis proves the importance of our proposed alignment mechanisms for the task.

2021

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Better Combine Them Together! Integrating Syntactic Constituency and Dependency Representations for Semantic Role Labeling
Hao Fei | Shengqiong Wu | Yafeng Ren | Fei Li | Donghong Ji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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MRN: A Locally and Globally Mention-Based Reasoning Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction
Jingye Li | Kang Xu | Fei Li | Hao Fei | Yafeng Ren | Donghong Ji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Modularized Interaction Network for Named Entity Recognition
Fei Li | Zheng Wang | Siu Cheung Hui | Lejian Liao | Dandan Song | Jing Xu | Guoxiu He | Meihuizi Jia
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)

Although the existing Named Entity Recognition (NER) models have achieved promising performance, they suffer from certain drawbacks. The sequence labeling-based NER models do not perform well in recognizing long entities as they focus only on word-level information, while the segment-based NER models which focus on processing segment instead of single word are unable to capture the word-level dependencies within the segment. Moreover, as boundary detection and type prediction may cooperate with each other for the NER task, it is also important for the two sub-tasks to mutually reinforce each other by sharing their information. In this paper, we propose a novel Modularized Interaction Network (MIN) model which utilizes both segment-level information and word-level dependencies, and incorporates an interaction mechanism to support information sharing between boundary detection and type prediction to enhance the performance for the NER task. We have conducted extensive experiments based on three NER benchmark datasets. The performance results have shown that the proposed MIN model has outperformed the current state-of-the-art models.

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A Span-Based Model for Joint Overlapped and Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition
Fei Li | ZhiChao Lin | Meishan Zhang | Donghong Ji
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)

Research on overlapped and discontinuous named entity recognition (NER) has received increasing attention. The majority of previous work focuses on either overlapped or discontinuous entities. In this paper, we propose a novel span-based model that can recognize both overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. The model includes two major steps. First, entity fragments are recognized by traversing over all possible text spans, thus, overlapped entities can be recognized. Second, we perform relation classification to judge whether a given pair of entity fragments to be overlapping or succession. In this way, we can recognize not only discontinuous entities, and meanwhile doubly check the overlapped entities. As a whole, our model can be regarded as a relation extraction paradigm essentially. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets (i.e., CLEF, GENIA and ACE05) show that our model is highly competitive for overlapped and discontinuous NER.

2020

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BENTO: A Visual Platform for Building Clinical NLP Pipelines Based on CodaLab
Yonghao Jin | Fei Li | Hong Yu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

CodaLab is an open-source web-based platform for collaborative computational research. Although CodaLab has gained popularity in the research community, its interface has limited support for creating reusable tools that can be easily applied to new datasets and composed into pipelines. In clinical domain, natural language processing (NLP) on medical notes generally involves multiple steps, like tokenization, named entity recognition, etc. Since these steps require different tools which are usually scattered in different publications, it is not easy for researchers to use them to process their own datasets. In this paper, we present BENTO, a workflow management platform with a graphic user interface (GUI) that is built on top of CodaLab, to facilitate the process of building clinical NLP pipelines. BENTO comes with a number of clinical NLP tools that have been pre-trained using medical notes and expert annotations and can be readily used for various clinical NLP tasks. It also allows researchers and developers to create their custom tools (e.g., pre-trained NLP models) and use them in a controlled and reproducible way. In addition, the GUI interface enables researchers with limited computer background to compose tools into NLP pipelines and then apply the pipelines on their own datasets in a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) way. Although BENTO is designed for clinical NLP applications, the underlying architecture is flexible to be tailored to any other domains.

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HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations
Jingye Li | Donghong Ji | Fei Li | Meishan Zhang | Yijiang Liu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Emotion detection in conversations (EDC) is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers. Different from the traditional non-conversational emotion detection, the model for EDC should be context-sensitive (e.g., understanding the whole conversation rather than one utterance) and speaker-sensitive (e.g., understanding which utterance belongs to which speaker). In this paper, we propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC, namely HiTrans, which consists of two hierarchical transformers. We utilize BERT as the low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations, and feed them into another high-level transformer so that utterance representations could be sensitive to the global context of the conversation. Moreover, we exploit an auxiliary task to make our model speaker-sensitive, called pairwise utterance speaker verification (PUSV), which aims to classify whether two utterances belong to the same speaker. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets, namely EmoryNLP, MELD and IEMOCAP. Results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

2019

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Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese
Zhichao Yang | Pengshan Cai | Yansong Feng | Fei Li | Weijiang Feng | Elena Suet-Ying Chiu | Hong Yu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Classical Chinese poetry is a jewel in the treasure house of Chinese culture. Previous poem generation models only allow users to employ keywords to interfere the meaning of generated poems, leaving the dominion of generation to the model. In this paper, we propose a novel task of generating classical Chinese poems from vernacular, which allows users to have more control over the semantic of generated poems. We adapt the approach of unsupervised machine translation (UMT) to our task. We use segmentation-based padding and reinforcement learning to address under-translation and over-translation respectively. According to experiments, our approach significantly improve the perplexity and BLEU compared with typical UMT models. Furthermore, we explored guidelines on how to write the input vernacular to generate better poems. Human evaluation showed our approach can generate high-quality poems which are comparable to amateur poems.

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Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs
Wuti Xiong | Fei Li | Ming Cheng | Hong Yu | Donghong Ji
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on BioNLP Open Shared Tasks

abstract In this article, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction (BB-rel) subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019. This task aims to promote the development of text mining systems that extract relationships between Microorganism, Habitat and Phenotype entities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains, so one dependency graph can represent one or multiple sentences. After that, we propose a neural network model which consists of the bidirectional long short-term memories and an attention graph convolution neural network to learn relation extraction features from the graph. Our approach is able to extract both intra- and inter-sentence relations, and meanwhile utilize syntax information. The results show that our approach achieved the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams.

2016

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WHUNlp at SemEval-2016 Task DiMSUM: A Pilot Study in Detecting Minimal Semantic Units and their Meanings using Supervised Models
Xin Tang | Fei Li | Donghong Ji
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)