Jing Xiao


2022

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Self-supervised Cross-modal Pretraining for Speech Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis
Iek-Heng Chu | Ziyi Chen | Xinlu Yu | Mei Han | Jing Xiao | Peng Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Multimodal speech emotion recognition (SER) and sentiment analysis (SA) are important techniques for human-computer interaction. Most existing multimodal approaches utilize either shallow cross-modal fusion of pretrained features, or deep cross-modal fusion with raw features. Recently, attempts have been made to fuse pretrained feature representations in a deep fusion manner during fine-tuning stage. However those approaches have not led to improved results, partially due to their relatively simple fusion mechanisms and lack of proper cross-modal pretraining. In this work, leveraging single-modal pretrained models (RoBERTa and HuBERT), we propose a novel deeply-fused audio-text bi-modal transformer with carefully designed cross-modal fusion mechanism and a stage-wise cross-modal pretraining scheme to fully facilitate the cross-modal learning. Our experiment results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the public IEMOCAP emotion and CMU-MOSEI sentiment datasets, exceeding the previous benchmarks by a large margin.

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PINGAN Omini-Sinitic at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Multi-prompt Training for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Ye Wang | Yanmeng Wang | Baishun Ling | Zexiang Liao | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper describes the second-placed system for subtask 2 and the ninth-placed system for subtask 1 in SemEval 2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. We propose an ensemble of prompt training and label attention mechanism for multi-label classification tasks. Transfer learning is introduced to transfer the knowledge from binary classification to multi-label classification. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of our proposed method. The ablation study is also conducted to show the validity of each technique.

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An Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Geometric Question Answering through Dual Parallel Text Encoding
Jie Cao | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Automatic math problem solving has attracted much attention of NLP researchers recently. However, most of the works focus on the solving of Math Word Problems (MWPs). In this paper, we study on the Geometric Problem Solving based on neural networks. Solving geometric problems requires the integration of text and diagram information as well as the knowledge of the relevant theorems. The lack of high-quality datasets and efficient neural geometric solvers impedes the development of automatic geometric problems solving. Based on GeoQA, we newly annotate 2,518 geometric problems with richer types and greater difficulty to form an augmented benchmark dataset GeoQA+, containing 6,027 problems in training set and 7,528 totally. We further perform data augmentation method to expand the training set to 12,054. Besides, we design a Dual Parallel text Encoder DPE to efficiently encode long and medium-length problem text. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of GeoQA+ and DPE module, and the accuracy of automatic geometric problem solving is improved to 66.09%.

2021

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System Description on Automatic Simultaneous Translation Workshop
Linjie Chen | Jianzong Wang | Zhangcheng Huang | Xiongbin Ding | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation

This paper shows our submission on the second automatic simultaneous translation workshop at NAACL2021. We participate in all the two directions of Chinese-to-English translation, Chinese audioEnglish text and Chinese textEnglish text. We do data filtering and model training techniques to get the best BLEU score and reduce the average lagging. We propose a two-stage simultaneous translation pipeline system which is composed of Quartznet and BPE-based transformer. We propose a competitive simultaneous translation system and achieves a BLEU score of 24.39 in the audio input track.

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An Alignment-Agnostic Model for Chinese Text Error Correction
Liying Zheng | Yue Deng | Weishun Song | Liang Xu | Jing Xiao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

This paper investigates how to correct Chinese text errors with types of mistaken, missing and redundant characters, which are common for Chinese native speakers. Most existing models based on detect-correct framework can correct mistaken characters, but cannot handle missing or redundant characters due to inconsistency between model inputs and outputs. Although Seq2Seq-based or sequence tagging methods provide solutions to the three error types and achieved relatively good results in English context, they do not perform well in Chinese context according to our experiments. In our work, we propose a novel alignment-agnostic detect-correct framework that can handle both text aligned and non-aligned situations and can serve as a cold start model when no annotation data are provided. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our method is effective and achieves a better performance than most recent published models.

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Enhancing Dual-Encoders with Question and Answer Cross-Embeddings for Answer Retrieval
Yanmeng Wang | Jun Bai | Ye Wang | Jianfei Zhang | Wenge Rong | Zongcheng Ji | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers proposed to introduce the QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. To keep independent encoding of questions and answers during inference stage, variational auto-encoder is further introduced to reconstruct answers (questions) from question (answer) embeddings as an auxiliary task to enhance QA interaction in representation learning in training stage. However, the needs of text generation and answer retrieval are different, which leads to hardness in training. In this work, we propose a framework to enhance the Dual-Encoders model with question answer cross-embeddings and a novel Geometry Alignment Mechanism (GAM) to align the geometry of embeddings from Dual-Encoders with that from Cross-Encoders. Extensive experimental results show that our framework significantly improves Dual-Encoders model and outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets.

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A Neural Transition-based Joint Model for Disease Named Entity Recognition and Normalization
Zongcheng Ji | Tian Xia | Mei Han | Jing Xiao
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)

Disease is one of the fundamental entities in biomedical research. Recognizing such entities from biomedical text and then normalizing them to a standardized disease vocabulary offer a tremendous opportunity for many downstream applications. Previous studies have demonstrated that joint modeling of the two sub-tasks has superior performance than the pipelined counterpart. Although the neural joint model based on multi-task learning framework has achieved state-of-the-art performance, it suffers from the boundary inconsistency problem due to the separate decoding procedures. Moreover, it ignores the rich information (e.g., the text surface form) of each candidate concept in the vocabulary, which is quite essential for entity normalization. In this work, we propose a neural transition-based joint model to alleviate these two issues. We transform the end-to-end disease recognition and normalization task as an action sequence prediction task, which not only jointly learns the model with shared representations of the input, but also jointly searches the output by state transitions in one search space. Moreover, we introduce attention mechanisms to take advantage of the text surface form of each candidate concept for better normalization performance. Experimental results conducted on two publicly available datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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PHMOSpell: Phonological and Morphological Knowledge Guided Chinese Spelling Check
Li Huang | Junjie Li | Weiwei Jiang | Zhiyu Zhang | Minchuan Chen | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
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)

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a challenging task due to the complex characteristics of Chinese characters. Statistics reveal that most Chinese spelling errors belong to phonological or visual errors. However, previous methods rarely utilize phonological and morphological knowledge of Chinese characters or heavily rely on external resources to model their similarities. To address the above issues, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable model called PHMOSpell, which promotes the performance of CSC with multi-modal information. Specifically, we derive pinyin and glyph representations for Chinese characters from audio and visual modalities respectively, which are integrated into a pre-trained language model by a well-designed adaptive gating mechanism. To verify its effectiveness, we conduct comprehensive experiments and ablation tests. Experimental results on three shared benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

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Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition
Xuan Zhou | Xiao Zhang | Chenyang Tao | Junya Chen | Bing Xu | Wei Wang | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Although pre-trained big models (e.g., BERT, ERNIE, XLNet, GPT3 etc.) have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by the excessive computations and memory demand involved. For many applications, including named entity recognition (NER), matching the state-of-the-art result under budget has attracted considerable attention. Drawing power from the recent advance in knowledge distillation (KD), this work presents a novel distillation scheme to efficiently transfer the knowledge learned from big models to their more affordable counterpart. Our solution highlights the construction of surrogate labels through the k-best Viterbi algorithm to distill knowledge from the teacher model. To maximally assimilate knowledge into the student model, we propose a multi-grained distillation scheme, which integrates cross entropy involved in conditional random field (CRF) and fuzzy learning.To validate the effectiveness of our proposal, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation on five NER benchmarks, reporting cross-the-board performance gains relative to competing prior-arts. We further discuss ablation results to dissect our gains.

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PINGAN Omini-Sinitic at SemEval-2021 Task 4:Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning
Ye Wang | Yanmeng Wang | Haijun Zhu | Bo Zeng | Zhenghong Hao | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)

This paper describes the winning system for subtask 2 and the second-placed system for subtask 1 in SemEval 2021 Task 4: ReadingComprehension of Abstract Meaning. We propose to use pre-trianed Electra discriminator to choose the best abstract word from five candidates. An upper attention and auto denoising mechanism is introduced to process the long sequences. The experiment results demonstrate that this contribution greatly facilitatesthe contextual language modeling in reading comprehension task. The ablation study is also conducted to show the validity of our proposed methods.

2020

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Empirical Studies of Institutional Federated Learning For Natural Language Processing
Xinghua Zhu | Jianzong Wang | Zhenhou Hong | Jing Xiao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Federated learning has sparkled new interests in the deep learning society to make use of isolated data sources from independent institutes. With the development of novel training tools, we have successfully deployed federated natural language processing networks on GPU-enabled server clusters. This paper demonstrates federated training of a popular NLP model, TextCNN, with applications in sentence intent classification. Furthermore, differential privacy is introduced to protect participants in the training process, in a manageable manner. Distinguished from previous client-level privacy protection schemes, the proposed differentially private federated learning procedure is defined in the dataset sample level, inherent with the applications among institutions instead of individual users. Optimal settings of hyper-parameters for the federated TextCNN model are studied through comprehensive experiments. We also evaluated the performance of federated TextCNN model under imbalanced data load configuration. Experiments show that, the sampling ratio has a large impact on the performance of the FL models, causing up to 38.4% decrease in the test accuracy, while they are robust to different noise multiplier levels, with less than 3% variance in the test accuracy. It is also found that the FL models are sensitive to data load balancedness among client datasets. When the data load is imbalanced, model performance dropped by up to 10%.

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Contextualized Emotion Recognition in Conversation as Sequence Tagging
Yan Wang | Jiayu Zhang | Jun Ma | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is an important topic for developing empathetic machines in a variety of areas including social opinion mining, health-care and so on. In this paper, we propose a method to model ERC task as sequence tagging where a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer is leveraged to learn the emotional consistency in the conversation. We employ LSTM-based encoders that capture self and inter-speaker dependency of interlocutors to generate contextualized utterance representations which are fed into the CRF layer. For capturing long-range global context, we use a multi-layer Transformer encoder to enhance the LSTM-based encoder. Experiments show that our method benefits from modeling the emotional consistency and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on multiple emotion classification datasets.

2004

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Cascading Use of Soft and Hard Matching Pattern Rules for Weakly Supervised Information Extraction
Jing Xiao | Tat-Seng Chua | Hang Cui
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

2002

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Extracting Pronunciation-translated Names from Chinese Texts using Bootstrapping Approach
Jing Xiao | Jimin Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
COLING-02: The First SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing