Liqiang Xiao


2021

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End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer
Liqiang Xiao | Jun Ma | Xin Luna Dong | Pascual Martínez-Gómez | Nasser Zalmout | Chenwei Zhang | Tong Zhao | Hao He | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data. In this work we first propose ConvSearch, an end-to-end conversational search system that deeply combines the dialog system with search. It leverages the text profile to retrieve products, which is more robust against imperfect product schema/knowledge compared with using product attributes alone. We then address the lack of data challenges by proposing an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterances by using existing dialog from other domains, and leveraging the search behavior data from e-commerce retailer. With utterance transfer, we introduce a new conversational search dataset for online shopping. Experiments show that our utterance transfer method can significantly improve the availability of training dialogue data without crowd-sourcing, and the conversational search system significantly outperformed the best tested baseline.

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Diagnosing the First-Order Logical Reasoning Ability Through LogicNLI
Jidong Tian | Yitian Li | Wenqing Chen | Liqiang Xiao | Hao He | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recently, language models (LMs) have achieved significant performance on many NLU tasks, which has spurred widespread interest for their possible applications in the scientific and social area. However, LMs have faced much criticism of whether they are truly capable of reasoning in NLU. In this work, we propose a diagnostic method for first-order logic (FOL) reasoning with a new proposed benchmark, LogicNLI. LogicNLI is an NLI-style dataset that effectively disentangles the target FOL reasoning from commonsense inference and can be used to diagnose LMs from four perspectives: accuracy, robustness, generalization, and interpretability. Experiments on BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet, have uncovered the weaknesses of these LMs on FOL reasoning, which motivates future exploration to enhance the reasoning ability.

2020

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A Semantically Consistent and Syntactically Variational Encoder-Decoder Framework for Paraphrase Generation
Wenqing Chen | Jidong Tian | Liqiang Xiao | Hao He | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Paraphrase generation aims to generate semantically consistent sentences with different syntactic realizations. Most of the recent studies rely on the typical encoder-decoder framework where the generation process is deterministic. However, in practice, the ability to generate multiple syntactically different paraphrases is important. Recent work proposed to cooperate variational inference on a target-related latent variable to introduce the diversity. But the latent variable may be contaminated by the semantic information of other unrelated sentences, and in turn, change the conveyed meaning of generated paraphrases. In this paper, we propose a semantically consistent and syntactically variational encoder-decoder framework, which uses adversarial learning to ensure the syntactic latent variable be semantic-free. Moreover, we adopt another discriminator to improve the word-level and sentence-level semantic consistency. So the proposed framework can generate multiple semantically consistent and syntactically different paraphrases. The experiments show that our model outperforms the baseline models on the metrics based on both n-gram matching and semantic similarity, and our model can generate multiple different paraphrases by assembling different syntactic variables.

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Exploring Logically Dependent Multi-task Learning with Causal Inference
Wenqing Chen | Jidong Tian | Liqiang Xiao | Hao He | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Previous studies have shown that hierarchical multi-task learning (MTL) can utilize task dependencies by stacking encoders and outperform democratic MTL. However, stacking encoders only considers the dependencies of feature representations and ignores the label dependencies in logically dependent tasks. Furthermore, how to properly utilize the labels remains an issue due to the cascading errors between tasks. In this paper, we view logically dependent MTL from the perspective of causal inference and suggest a mediation assumption instead of the confounding assumption in conventional MTL models. We propose a model including two key mechanisms: label transfer (LT) for each task to utilize the labels of all its lower-level tasks, and Gumbel sampling (GS) to deal with cascading errors. In the field of causal inference, GS in our model is essentially a counterfactual reasoning process, trying to estimate the causal effect between tasks and utilize it to improve MTL. We conduct experiments on two English datasets and one Chinese dataset. Experiment results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art on six out of seven subtasks and improves predictions’ consistency.

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Modeling Content Importance for Summarization with Pre-trained Language Models
Liqiang Xiao | Lu Wang | Hao He | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Modeling content importance is an essential yet challenging task for summarization. Previous work is mostly based on statistical methods that estimate word-level salience, which does not consider semantics and larger context when quantifying importance. It is thus hard for these methods to generalize to semantic units of longer text spans. In this work, we apply information theory on top of pre-trained language models and define the concept of importance from the perspective of information amount. It considers both the semantics and context when evaluating the importance of each semantic unit. With the help of pre-trained language models, it can easily generalize to different kinds of semantic units n-grams or sentences. Experiments on CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets demonstrate that our method can better model the importance of content than prior work based on F1 and ROUGE scores.

2018

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Learning What to Share: Leaky Multi-Task Network for Text Classification
Liqiang Xiao | Honglun Zhang | Wenqing Chen | Yongkun Wang | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Neural network based multi-task learning has achieved great success on many NLP problems, which focuses on sharing knowledge among tasks by linking some layers to enhance the performance. However, most existing approaches suffer from the interference between tasks because they lack of selection mechanism for feature sharing. In this way, the feature spaces of tasks may be easily contaminated by helpless features borrowed from others, which will confuse the models for making correct prediction. In this paper, we propose a multi-task convolutional neural network with the Leaky Unit, which has memory and forgetting mechanism to filter the feature flows between tasks. Experiments on five different datasets for text classification validate the benefits of our approach.

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Multi-Task Label Embedding for Text Classification
Honglun Zhang | Liqiang Xiao | Wenqing Chen | Yongkun Wang | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multi-task learning in text classification leverages implicit correlations among related tasks to extract common features and yield performance gains. However, a large body of previous work treats labels of each task as independent and meaningless one-hot vectors, which cause a loss of potential label information. In this paper, we propose Multi-Task Label Embedding to convert labels in text classification into semantic vectors, thereby turning the original tasks into vector matching tasks. Our model utilizes semantic correlations among tasks and makes it convenient to scale or transfer when new tasks are involved. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets for text classification show that our model can effectively improve the performances of related tasks with semantic representations of labels and additional information from each other.

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MCapsNet: Capsule Network for Text with Multi-Task Learning
Liqiang Xiao | Honglun Zhang | Wenqing Chen | Yongkun Wang | Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multi-task learning has an ability to share the knowledge among related tasks and implicitly increase the training data. However, it has long been frustrated by the interference among tasks. This paper investigates the performance of capsule network for text, and proposes a capsule-based multi-task learning architecture, which is unified, simple and effective. With the advantages of capsules for feature clustering, proposed task routing algorithm can cluster the features for each task in the network, which helps reduce the interference among tasks. Experiments on six text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our models and their characteristics for feature clustering.

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Gated Multi-Task Network for Text Classification
Liqiang Xiao | Honglun Zhang | Wenqing Chen
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Multi-task learning with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has shown great success in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This success can be largely attributed to the feature sharing by fusing some layers among tasks. However, most existing approaches just fully or proportionally share the features without distinguishing the helpfulness of them. By that the network would be confused by the helpless even harmful features, generating undesired interference between tasks. In this paper, we introduce gate mechanism into multi-task CNN and propose a new Gated Sharing Unit, which can filter the feature flows between tasks and greatly reduce the interference. Experiments on 9 text classification datasets shows that our approach can learn selection rules automatically and gain a great improvement over strong baselines.