Junfan Chen


2022

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An Unsupervised Multiple-Task and Multiple-Teacher Model for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition
Zhuoran Li | Chunming Hu | Xiaohui Guo | Junfan Chen | Wenyi Qin | Richong Zhang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Cross-lingual named entity recognition task is one of the critical problems for evaluating the potential transfer learning techniques on low resource languages. Knowledge distillation using pre-trained multilingual language models between source and target languages have shown their superiority in transfer. However, existing cross-lingual distillation models merely consider the potential transferability between two identical single tasks across both domains. Other possible auxiliary tasks to improve the learning performance have not been fully investigated. In this study, based on the knowledge distillation framework and multi-task learning, we introduce the similarity metric model as an auxiliary task to improve the cross-lingual NER performance on the target domain. Specifically, an entity recognizer and a similarity evaluator are first trained in parallel as two teachers from the source domain. Then, two tasks in the student model are supervised by these teachers simultaneously. Empirical studies on the three datasets across 7 different languages confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model.

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A Hierarchical N-Gram Framework for Zero-Shot Link Prediction
Mingchen Li | Junfan Chen | Samuel Mensah | Nikolaos Aletras | Xiulong Yang | Yang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Knowledge graphs typically contain a large number of entities but often cover only a fraction of all relations between them (i.e., incompleteness). Zero-shot link prediction (ZSLP) is a popular way to tackle the problem by automatically identifying unobserved relations between entities. Most recent approaches use textual features of relations (e.g., surface name or textual descriptions) as auxiliary information to improve the encoded representation. These methods lack robustness as they are bound to support only tokens from a fixed vocabulary and unable to model out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Subword units such as character n-grams have the capability of generating more expressive representations for OOV words. Hence, in this paper, we propose a Hierarchical N-gram framework for Zero-Shot Link Prediction (HNZSLP) that leverages character n-gram information for ZSLP. Our approach works by first constructing a hierarchical n-gram graph from the surface name of relations. Subsequently, a new Transformer-based network models the hierarchical n-gram graph to learn a relation embedding for ZSLP. Experimental results show that our proposed HNZSLP method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two standard ZSLP datasets.

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Parameter-free Automatically Prompting: A Latent Pseudo Label Mapping Model for Prompt-based Learning
Jirui Qi | Richong Zhang | Junfan Chen | Jaein Kim | Yongyi Mao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Prompt-based learning has achieved excellent performance in few-shot learning by mapping the outputs of the pre-trained language model to the labels with the help of a label mapping component. Existing manual label mapping (MLM) methods achieve good results but heavily rely on expensive human knowledge. Automatic label mapping (ALM) methods that learn the mapping functions with extra parameters have shown their potentiality. However, no effective ALM model comparable to MLM methods is developed yet due to the limited data. In this paper, we propose a Latent Pseudo Label Mapping (LPLM) method that optimizes the label mapping without human knowledge and extra parameters. LPLM is built upon a probabilistic latent model and is iteratively self-improved with the EM-style algorithm. The empirical results demonstrate that our LPLM method is superior to the mainstream ALM methods and significantly outperforms the SOTA method in few-shot classification tasks. Moreover, LPLM also shows impressively better performance than the vanilla MLM method which requires extra task-specific prior knowledge.

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Text Style Transferring via Adversarial Masking and Styled Filling
Jiarui Wang | Richong Zhang | Junfan Chen | Jaein Kim | Yongyi Mao
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Text style transfer is an important task in natural language processing with broad applications. Existing models following the masking and filling scheme suffer two challenges: the word masking procedure may mistakenly remove unexpected words and the selected words in the word filling procedure may lack diversity and semantic consistency. To tackle both challenges, in this study, we propose a style transfer model, with an adversarial masking approach and a styled filling technique (AMSF). Specifically, AMSF first trains a mask predictor by adversarial training without manual configuration. Then two additional losses, i.e. an entropy maximization loss and a consistency regularization loss, are introduced in training the word filling module to guarantee the diversity and semantic consistency of the transferred texts. Experimental results and analysis on two benchmark text style transfer data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

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E-VarM: Enhanced Variational Word Masks to Improve the Interpretability of Text Classification Models
Ling Ge | ChunMing Hu | Guanghui Ma | Junshuang Wu | Junfan Chen | JiHong Liu | Hong Zhang | Wenyi Qin | Richong Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Enhancing the interpretability of text classification models can help increase the reliability of these models in real-world applications. Currently, most researchers focus on extracting task-specific words from inputs to improve the interpretability of the model. The competitive approaches exploit the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to improve the performance of word masking at the word embedding layer to obtain task-specific words. However, these approaches ignore the multi-level semantics of the text, which can impair the interpretability of the model, and do not consider the risk of representation overlap caused by the VIB, which can impair the classification performance. In this paper, we propose an enhanced variational word masks approach, named E-VarM, to solve these two issues effectively. The E-VarM combines multi-level semantics from all hidden layers of the model to mask out task-irrelevant words and uses contrastive learning to readjust the distances between representations. Empirical studies on ten benchmark text classification datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the SOTA methods in simultaneously improving the interpretability and accuracy of the model.

2021

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Hypernym Discovery via a Recurrent Mapping Model
Yuhang Bai | Richong Zhang | Fanshuang Kong | Junfan Chen | Yongyi Mao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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Neural Dialogue State Tracking with Temporally Expressive Networks
Junfan Chen | Richong Zhang | Yongyi Mao | Jie Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is an important part of a spoken dialogue system. Existing DST models either ignore temporal feature dependencies across dialogue turns or fail to explicitly model temporal state dependencies in a dialogue. In this work, we propose Temporally Expressive Networks (TEN) to jointly model the two types of temporal dependencies in DST. The TEN model utilizes the power of recurrent networks and probabilistic graphical models. Evaluating on standard datasets, TEN is demonstrated to improve the accuracy of turn-level-state prediction and the state aggregation.

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Parallel Interactive Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Generation
Junfan Chen | Richong Zhang | Yongyi Mao | Jie Xu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The dependencies between system and user utterances in the same turn and across different turns are not fully considered in existing multidomain dialogue state tracking (MDST) models. In this study, we argue that the incorporation of these dependencies is crucial for the design of MDST and propose Parallel Interactive Networks (PIN) to model these dependencies. Specifically, we integrate an interactive encoder to jointly model the in-turn dependencies and cross-turn dependencies. The slot-level context is introduced to extract more expressive features for different slots. And a distributed copy mechanism is utilized to selectively copy words from historical system utterances or historical user utterances. Empirical studies demonstrated the superiority of the proposed PIN model.

2019

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Uncover the Ground-Truth Relations in Distant Supervision: A Neural Expectation-Maximization Framework
Junfan Chen | Richong Zhang | Yongyi Mao | Hongyu Guo | Jie Xu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Distant supervision for relation extraction enables one to effectively acquire structured relations out of very large text corpora with less human efforts. Nevertheless, most of the prior-art models for such tasks assume that the given text can be noisy, but their corresponding labels are clean. Such unrealistic assumption is contradictory with the fact that the given labels are often noisy as well, thus leading to significant performance degradation of those models on real-world data. To cope with this challenge, we propose a novel label-denoising framework that combines neural network with probabilistic modelling, which naturally takes into account the noisy labels during learning. We empirically demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the current art in uncovering the ground-truth relation labels.