Wei Fan


2022

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TranSHER: Translating Knowledge Graph Embedding with Hyper-Ellipsoidal Restriction
Yizhi Li | Wei Fan | Chao Liu | Chenghua Lin | Jiang Qian
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge graph embedding methods are important for the knowledge graph completion (or link prediction) task.One state-of-the-art method, PairRE, leverages two separate vectors to model complex relations (i.e., 1-to-N, N-to-1, and N-to-N) in knowledge graphs. However, such a method strictly restricts entities on the hyper-ellipsoid surfaces which limits the optimization of entity distribution, leading to suboptimal performance of knowledge graph completion. To address this issue, we propose a novel score function TranSHER, which leverages relation-specific translations between head and tail entities to relax the constraint of hyper-ellipsoid restrictions. By introducing an intuitive and simple relation-specific translation, TranSHER can provide more direct guidance on optimization and capture more semantic characteristics of entities with complex relations. Experimental results show that TranSHER achieves state-of-the-art performance on link prediction and generalizes well to datasets in different domains and scales. Our codes are public available athttps://github.com/yizhilll/TranSHER.

2021

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Multiplex Graph Neural Network for Extractive Text Summarization
Baoyu Jing | Zeyu You | Tao Yang | Wei Fan | Hanghang Tong
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Extractive text summarization aims at extracting the most representative sentences from a given document as its summary. To extract a good summary from a long text document, sentence embedding plays an important role. Recent studies have leveraged graph neural networks to capture the inter-sentential relationship (e.g., the discourse graph) within the documents to learn contextual sentence embedding. However, those approaches neither consider multiple types of inter-sentential relationships (e.g., semantic similarity and natural connection relationships), nor model intra-sentential relationships (e.g, semantic similarity and syntactic relationship among words). To address these problems, we propose a novel Multiplex Graph Convolutional Network (Multi-GCN) to jointly model different types of relationships among sentences and words. Based on Multi-GCN, we propose a Multiplex Graph Summarization (Multi-GraS) model for extractive text summarization. Finally, we evaluate the proposed models on the CNN/DailyMail benchmark dataset to demonstrate effectiveness of our method.

2020

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Commonsense Evidence Generation and Injection in Reading Comprehension
Ye Liu | Tao Yang | Zeyu You | Wei Fan | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Human tackle reading comprehension not only based on the given context itself but often rely on the commonsense beyond. To empower the machine with commonsense reasoning, in this paper, we propose a Commonsense Evidence Generation and Injection framework in reading comprehension, named CEGI. The framework injects two kinds of auxiliary commonsense evidence into comprehensive reading to equip the machine with the ability of rational thinking. Specifically, we build two evidence generators: one aims to generate textual evidence via a language model; the other aims to extract factual evidence (automatically aligned text-triples) from a commonsense knowledge graph after graph completion. Those evidences incorporate contextual commonsense and serve as the additional inputs to the reasoning model. Thereafter, we propose a deep contextual encoder to extract semantic relationships among the paragraph, question, option, and evidence. Finally, we employ a capsule network to extract different linguistic units (word and phrase) from the relations, and dynamically predict the optimal option based on the extracted units. Experiments on the CosmosQA dataset demonstrate that the proposed CEGI model outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches and achieves the highest accuracy (83.6%) on the leaderboard.

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Automatic Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions in Standard Tests
Zhaopeng Qiu | Xian Wu | Wei Fan
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

To assess knowledge proficiency of a learner, multiple choice question is an efficient and widespread form in standard tests. However, the composition of the multiple choice question, especially the construction of distractors is quite challenging. The distractors are required to both incorrect and plausible enough to confuse the learners who did not master the knowledge. Currently, the distractors are generated by domain experts which are both expensive and time-consuming. This urges the emergence of automatic distractor generation, which can benefit various standard tests in a wide range of domains. In this paper, we propose a question and answer guided distractor generation (EDGE) framework to automate distractor generation. EDGE consists of three major modules: (1) the Reforming Question Module and the Reforming Passage Module apply gate layers to guarantee the inherent incorrectness of the generated distractors; (2) the Distractor Generator Module applies attention mechanism to control the level of plausibility. Experimental results on a large-scale public dataset demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing models and achieves a new state-of-the-art.

2019

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Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition
Congying Xia | Chenwei Zhang | Tao Yang | Yaliang Li | Nan Du | Xian Wu | Wei Fan | Fenglong Ma | Philip Yu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper presents a novel framework, MGNER, for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. Different from traditional approaches regarding NER as a sequential labeling task and annotate entities consecutively, MGNER detects and recognizes entities on multiple granularities: it is able to recognize named entities without explicitly assuming non-overlapping or totally nested structures. MGNER consists of a Detector that examines all possible word segments and a Classifier that categorizes entities. In addition, contextual information and a self-attention mechanism are utilized throughout the framework to improve the NER performance. Experimental results show that MGNER outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines up to 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks.

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Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks
Chenwei Zhang | Yaliang Li | Nan Du | Wei Fan | Philip Yu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Being able to recognize words as slots and detect the intent of an utterance has been a keen issue in natural language understanding. The existing works either treat slot filling and intent detection separately in a pipeline manner, or adopt joint models which sequentially label slots while summarizing the utterance-level intent without explicitly preserving the hierarchical relationship among words, slots, and intents. To exploit the semantic hierarchy for effective modeling, we propose a capsule-based neural network model which accomplishes slot filling and intent detection via a dynamic routing-by-agreement schema. A re-routing schema is proposed to further synergize the slot filling performance using the inferred intent representation. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our model when compared with other alternative model architectures, as well as existing natural language understanding services.

2018

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Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction
Kai Lei | Daoyuan Chen | Yaliang Li | Nan Du | Min Yang | Wei Fan | Ying Shen
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Distantly supervised relation extraction greatly reduces human efforts in extracting relational facts from unstructured texts. However, it suffers from noisy labeling problem, which can degrade its performance. Meanwhile, the useful information expressed in knowledge graph is still underutilized in the state-of-the-art methods for distantly supervised relation extraction. In the light of these challenges, we propose CORD, a novelCOopeRativeDenoising framework, which consists two base networks leveraging text corpus and knowledge graph respectively, and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning by the adaptive bi-directional knowledge distillation and dynamic ensemble with noisy-varying instances. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.

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Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge
Yang Deng | Ying Shen | Min Yang | Yaliang Li | Nan Du | Wei Fan | Kai Lei
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Answer selection is an important but challenging task. Significant progresses have been made in domains where a large amount of labeled training data is available. However, obtaining rich annotated data is a time-consuming and expensive process, creating a substantial barrier for applying answer selection models to a new domain which has limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose Knowledge-aware Attentive Network (KAN), a transfer learning framework for cross-domain answer selection, which uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domains. Specifically, we design a knowledge module to integrate the knowledge-based representational learning into answer selection models. The learned knowledge-based representations are shared by source and target domains, which not only leverages large amounts of cross-domain data, but also benefits from a regularization effect that leads to more general representations to help tasks in new domains. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we use SQuAD-T dataset as the source domain and three other datasets (i.e., Yahoo QA, TREC QA and InsuranceQA) as the target domains. The experimental results demonstrate that KAN has remarkable applicability and generality, and consistently outperforms the strong competitors by a noticeable margin for cross-domain answer selection.