Jiachen Liu


2022

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PLANET: Dynamic Content Planning in Autoregressive Transformers for Long-form Text Generation
Zhe Hu | Hou Pong Chan | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Hua Wu | Lifu Huang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite recent progress of pre-trained language models on generating fluent text, existing methods still suffer from incoherence problems in long-form text generation tasks that require proper content control and planning to form a coherent high-level logical flow. In this work, we propose PLANET, a novel generation framework leveraging autoregressive self-attention mechanism to conduct content planning and surface realization dynamically. To guide the generation of output sentences, our framework enriches the Transformer decoder with latent representations to maintain sentence-level semantic plans grounded by bag-of-words. Moreover, we introduce a new coherence-based contrastive learning objective to further improve the coherence of output. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging long-form text generation tasks including counterargument generation and opinion article generation. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines and generates more coherent texts with richer contents.

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DU-VLG: Unifying Vision-and-Language Generation via Dual Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training
Luyang Huang | Guocheng Niu | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Hua Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Due to the limitations of the model structure and pre-training objectives, existing vision-and-language generation models cannot utilize pair-wise images and text through bi-directional generation. In this paper, we propose DU-VLG, a framework which unifies vision-and-language generation as sequence generation problems. DU-VLG is trained with novel dual pre-training tasks: multi-modal denoising autoencoder tasks and modality translation tasks. To bridge the gap between image understanding and generation, we further design a novel commitment loss. We compare pre-training objectives on image captioning and text-to-image generation datasets. Results show that DU-VLG yields better performance than variants trained with uni-directional generation objectives or the variant without the commitment loss. We also obtain higher scores compared to previous state-of-the-art systems on three vision-and-language generation tasks. In addition, human judges further confirm that our model generates real and relevant images as well as faithful and informative captions.

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UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning
Wei Li | Can Gao | Guocheng Niu | Xinyan Xiao | Hao Liu | Jiachen Liu | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on various cross-modal downstream tasks. However, most existing methods can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features, which greatly limits their scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework, namely UNIMO-2, for joint learning on both aligned image-caption data and unaligned image-only and text-only corpus. We build a unified Transformer model to jointly learn visual representations, textual representations and semantic alignment between images and texts. In particular, we propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space, which helps bridge unaligned images and texts, and align the visual and textual semantic spaces on different types of corpora. The experiments show that our grounded learning method can improve textual and visual semantic alignment for improving performance on various cross-modal tasks. Moreover, benefiting from effective joint modeling of different types of corpora, our model also achieves impressive performance on single-modal visual and textual tasks. Our code and models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/.

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FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness
Wenhao Wu | Wei Li | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Ziqiang Cao | Sujian Li | Hua Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Despite being able to generate fluent and grammatical text, current Seq2Seq summarization models still suffering from the unfaithful generation problem.In this paper, we study the faithfulness of existing systems from a new perspective of factual robustness which is the ability to correctly generate factual information over adversarial unfaithful information.We first measure a model’sfactual robustness by its success rate to defend against adversarial attacks when generating factual information.The factual robustness analysis on a wide range of current systems shows its good consistency with human judgments on faithfulness.Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of a model by enhancing its factual robustness.Specifically, we propose a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarial perturbations.Extensive automatic and human evaluation results show that FRSUM consistently improves the faithfulness of various Seq2Seq models, such as T5, BART.

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Precisely the Point: Adversarial Augmentations for Faithful and Informative Text Generation
Wenhao Wu | Wei Li | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Sujian Li | Yajuan Lyu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Though model robustness has been extensively studied in language understanding, the robustness of Seq2Seq generation remains understudied.In this paper, we conduct the first quantitative analysis on the robustness of pre-trained Seq2Seq models. We find that even current SOTA pre-trained Seq2Seq model (BART) is still vulnerable, which leads to significant degeneration in faithfulness and informativeness for text generation tasks.This motivated us to further propose a novel adversarial augmentation framework, namely AdvSeq, for generally improving faithfulness and informativeness of Seq2Seq models via enhancing their robustness. AdvSeq automatically constructs two types of adversarial augmentations during training, including implicit adversarial samples by perturbing word representations and explicit adversarial samples by word swapping, both of which effectively improve Seq2Seq robustness.Extensive experiments on three popular text generation tasks demonstrate that AdvSeq significantly improves both the faithfulness and informativeness of Seq2Seq generation under both automatic and human evaluation settings.

2021

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SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection
Moye Chen | Wei Li | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Most of existing extractive multi-document summarization (MDS) methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one to compose a summary, which have two main drawbacks: (1) neglecting both the intra and cross-document relations between sentences; (2) neglecting the coherence and conciseness of the whole summary. In this paper, we propose a novel MDS framework (SgSum) to formulate the MDS task as a sub-graph selection problem, in which source documents are regarded as a relation graph of sentences (e.g., similarity graph or discourse graph) and the candidate summaries are its sub-graphs. Instead of selecting salient sentences, SgSum selects a salient sub-graph from the relation graph as the summary. Comparing with traditional methods, our method has two main advantages: (1) the relations between sentences are captured by modeling both the graph structure of the whole document set and the candidate sub-graphs; (2) directly outputs an integrate summary in the form of sub-graph which is more informative and coherent. Extensive experiments on MultiNews and DUC datasets show that our proposed method brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. Human evaluation results also demonstrate that our model can produce significantly more coherent and informative summaries compared with traditional MDS methods. Moreover, the proposed architecture has strong transfer ability from single to multi-document input, which can reduce the resource bottleneck in MDS tasks.

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UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning
Wei Li | Can Gao | Guocheng Niu | Xinyan Xiao | Hao Liu | Jiachen Liu | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang
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)

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e., text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e., image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections are utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space, over a corpus of image-text pairs augmented with related images and texts. With the help of rich non-paired single-modal data, our model is able to learn more generalizable representations, by allowing textual knowledge and visual knowledge to enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO greatly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/UNIMO.

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BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph
Wenhao Wu | Wei Li | Xinyan Xiao | Jiachen Liu | Ziqiang Cao | Sujian Li | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang
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)

Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for the Seq2Seq architecture, as Seq2Seq is not good at analyzing long-distance relations in text. In this paper, we present BASS, a novel framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph, which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. Further, a graph-based encoder-decoder model is proposed to improve both the document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. Specifically, several graph augmentation methods are designed to encode both the explicit and implicit relations in the text while the graph-propagation attention mechanism is developed in the decoder to select salient content into the summary. Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements for both long-document and multi-document summarization tasks.

2020

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Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization
Wei Li | Xinyan Xiao | Jiachen Liu | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Junping Du
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Graphs that capture relations between textual units have great benefits for detecting salient information from multiple documents and generating overall coherent summaries. In this paper, we develop a neural abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS) model which can leverage well-known graph representations of documents such as similarity graph and discourse graph, to more effectively process multiple input documents and produce abstractive summaries. Our model utilizes graphs to encode documents in order to capture cross-document relations, which is crucial to summarizing long documents. Our model can also take advantage of graphs to guide the summary generation process, which is beneficial for generating coherent and concise summaries. Furthermore, pre-trained language models can be easily combined with our model, which further improve the summarization performance significantly. Empirical results on the WikiSum and MultiNews dataset show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines.

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Exploring Contextual Word-level Style Relevance for Unsupervised Style Transfer
Chulun Zhou | Liangyu Chen | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Jinsong Su | Sheng Guo | Hua Wu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Unsupervised style transfer aims to change the style of an input sentence while preserving its original content without using parallel training data. In current dominant approaches, owing to the lack of fine-grained control on the influence from the target style, they are unable to yield desirable output sentences. In this paper, we propose a novel attentional sequence-to-sequence (Seq2seq) model that dynamically exploits the relevance of each output word to the target style for unsupervised style transfer. Specifically, we first pretrain a style classifier, where the relevance of each input word to the original style can be quantified via layer-wise relevance propagation. In a denoising auto-encoding manner, we train an attentional Seq2seq model to reconstruct input sentences and repredict word-level previously-quantified style relevance simultaneously. In this way, this model is endowed with the ability to automatically predict the style relevance of each output word. Then, we equip the decoder of this model with a neural style component to exploit the predicted wordlevel style relevance for better style transfer. Particularly, we fine-tune this model using a carefully-designed objective function involving style transfer, style relevance consistency, content preservation and fluency modeling loss terms. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both transfer accuracy and content preservation.

2018

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Joint Training of Candidate Extraction and Answer Selection for Reading Comprehension
Zhen Wang | Jiachen Liu | Xinyan Xiao | Yajuan Lyu | Tian Wu
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

While sophisticated neural-based techniques have been developed in reading comprehension, most approaches model the answer in an independent manner, ignoring its relations with other answer candidates. This problem can be even worse in open-domain scenarios, where candidates from multiple passages should be combined to answer a single question. In this paper, we formulate reading comprehension as an extract-then-select two-stage procedure. We first extract answer candidates from passages, then select the final answer by combining information from all the candidates. Furthermore, we regard candidate extraction as a latent variable and train the two-stage process jointly with reinforcement learning. As a result, our approach has improved the state-of-the-art performance significantly on two challenging open-domain reading comprehension datasets. Further analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our model components, especially the information fusion of all the candidates and the joint training of the extract-then-select procedure.