Mingming Sun


2022

pdf
OIE@OIA: an Adaptable and Efficient Open Information Extraction Framework
Xin Wang | Minlong Peng | Mingming Sun | Ping Li
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Different Open Information Extraction (OIE) tasks require different types of information, so the OIE field requires strong adaptability of OIE algorithms to meet different task requirements. This paper discusses the adaptability problem in existing OIE systems and designs a new adaptable and efficient OIE system - OIE@OIA as a solution. OIE@OIA follows the methodology of Open Information eXpression (OIX): parsing a sentence to an Open Information Annotation (OIA) Graph and then adapting the OIA graph to different OIE tasks with simple rules. As the core of our OIE@OIA system, we implement an end-to-end OIA generator by annotating a dataset (we make it open available) and designing an efficient learning algorithm for the complex OIA graph. We easily adapt the OIE@OIA system to accomplish three popular OIE tasks. The experimental show that our OIE@OIA achieves new SOTA performances on these tasks, showing the great adaptability of our OIE@OIA system. Furthermore, compared to other end-to-end OIE baselines that need millions of samples for training, our OIE@OIA needs much fewer training samples (12K), showing a significant advantage in terms of efficiency.

pdf
Multi-Hop Open-Domain Question Answering over Structured and Unstructured Knowledge
Yue Feng | Zhen Han | Mingming Sun | Ping Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Open-domain question answering systems need to answer question of our interests with structured and unstructured information. However, existing approaches only select one source to generate answer or only conduct reasoning on structured information. In this paper, we pro- pose a Document-Entity Heterogeneous Graph Network, referred to as DEHG, to effectively integrate different sources of information, and conduct reasoning on heterogeneous information. DEHG employs a graph constructor to integrate structured and unstructured information, a context encoder to represent nodes and question, a heterogeneous information reasoning layer to conduct multi-hop reasoning on both information sources, and an answer decoder to generate answers for the question. Experimental results on HybirdQA dataset show that DEHG outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

pdf
Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Consolidation for Effective Multilingual Video Corpus Moment Retrieval
Jiaheng Liu | Tan Yu | Hanyu Peng | Mingming Sun | Ping Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Existing multilingual video corpus moment retrieval (mVCMR) methods are mainly based on a two-stream structure. The visual stream utilizes the visual content in the video to estimate the query-visual similarity, and the subtitle stream exploits the query-subtitle similarity. The final query-video similarity ensembles similarities from two streams. In our work, we pro- pose a simple and effective strategy termed as Cross-lingual Cross-modal Consolidation (C3 ) to improve mVCMR accuracy. We adopt the ensemble similarity as the teacher to guide the training of each stream, leading to a more powerful ensemble similarity. Meanwhile, we use the teacher for a specific language to guide the student for another language to exploit the complementary knowledge across languages. Ex- tensive experiments on mTVR dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our C3 method.

2020

pdf
Learning Interpretable Relationships between Entities, Relations and Concepts via Bayesian Structure Learning on Open Domain Facts
Jingyuan Zhang | Mingming Sun | Yue Feng | Ping Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Concept graphs are created as universal taxonomies for text understanding in the open-domain knowledge. The nodes in concept graphs include both entities and concepts. The edges are from entities to concepts, showing that an entity is an instance of a concept. In this paper, we propose the task of learning interpretable relationships from open-domain facts to enrich and refine concept graphs. The Bayesian network structures are learned from open-domain facts as the interpretable relationships between relations of facts and concepts of entities. We conduct extensive experiments on public English and Chinese datasets. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the learned network structures help improving the identification of concepts for entities based on the relations of entities on both datasets.

pdf
A Predicate-Function-Argument Annotation of Natural Language for Open-Domain Information eXpression
Mingming Sun | Wenyue Hua | Zoey Liu | Xin Wang | Kangjie Zheng | Ping Li
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Existing OIE (Open Information Extraction) algorithms are independent of each other such that there exist lots of redundant works; the featured strategies are not reusable and not adaptive to new tasks. This paper proposes a new pipeline to build OIE systems, where an Open-domain Information eXpression (OIX) task is proposed to provide a platform for all OIE strategies. The OIX is an OIE friendly expression of a sentence without information loss. The generation procedure of OIX contains shared works of OIE algorithms so that OIE strategies can be developed on the platform of OIX as inference operations focusing on more critical problems. Based on the same platform of OIX, the OIE strategies are reusable, and people can select a set of strategies to assemble their algorithm for a specific task so that the adaptability may be significantly increased. This paper focuses on the task of OIX and propose a solution – Open Information Annotation (OIA). OIA is a predicate-function-argument annotation for sentences. We label a data set of sentence-OIA pairs and propose a dependency-based rule system to generate OIA annotations from sentences. The evaluation results reveal that learning the OIA from a sentence is a challenge owing to the complexity of natural language sentences, and it is worthy of attracting more attention from the research community.

2019

pdf
Reinforced Product Metadata Selection for Helpfulness Assessment of Customer Reviews
Miao Fan | Chao Feng | Mingming Sun | Ping Li
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

To automatically assess the helpfulness of a customer review online, conventional approaches generally acquire various linguistic and neural embedding features solely from the textual content of the review itself as the evidence. We, however, find out that a helpful review is largely concerned with the metadata (such as the name, the brand, the category, etc.) of its target product. It leaves us with a challenge of how to choose the correct key-value product metadata to help appraise the helpfulness of free-text reviews more precisely. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework composed of two mutual-benefit modules. Given a product, a selector (agent) learns from both the keys in the product metadata and one of its reviews to take an action that selects the correct value, and a successive predictor (network) makes the free-text review attend to this value to obtain better neural representations for helpfulness assessment. The predictor is directly optimized by SGD with the loss of helpfulness prediction, and the selector could be updated via policy gradient rewarded with the performance of the predictor. We use two real-world datasets from Amazon.com and Yelp.com, respectively, to compare the performance of our framework with other mainstream methods under two application scenarios: helpfulness identification and regression of customer reviews. Extensive results demonstrate that our framework can achieve state-of-the-art performance with substantial improvements.

2018

pdf
Logician and Orator: Learning from the Duality between Language and Knowledge in Open Domain
Mingming Sun | Xu Li | Ping Li
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We propose the task of Open-Domain Information Narration (OIN) as the reverse task of Open Information Extraction (OIE), to implement the dual structure between language and knowledge in the open domain. Then, we develop an agent, called Orator, to accomplish the OIN task, and assemble the Orator and the recently proposed OIE agent — Logician into a dual system to utilize the duality structure with a reinforcement learning paradigm. Experimental results reveal the dual structure between OIE and OIN tasks helps to build better both OIE agents and OIN agents.