Wei Zhou


2022

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Multi-Granularity Semantic Aware Graph Model for Reducing Position Bias in Emotion Cause Pair Extraction
Yinan Bao | Qianwen Ma | Lingwei Wei | Wei Zhou | Songlin Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

The emotion cause pair extraction (ECPE) task aims to extract emotions and causes as pairs from documents. We observe that the relative distance distribution of emotions and causes is extremely imbalanced in the typical ECPE dataset. Existing methods have set a fixed size window to capture relations between neighboring clauses. However, they neglect the effective semantic connections between distant clauses, leading to poor generalization ability towards position-insensitive data. To alleviate the problem, we propose a novel Multi-Granularity Semantic Aware Graph model (MGSAG) to incorporate fine-grained and coarse-grained semantic features jointly, without regard to distance limitation. In particular, we first explore semantic dependencies between clauses and keywords extracted from the document that convey fine-grained semantic features, obtaining keywords enhanced clause representations. Besides, a clause graph is also established to model coarse-grained semantic relations between clauses. Experimental results indicate that MGSAG surpasses the existing state-of-the-art ECPE models. Especially, MGSAG outperforms other models significantly in the condition of position-insensitive data.

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Uncertainty-aware Propagation Structure Reconstruction for Fake News Detection
Lingwei Wei | Dou Hu | Wei Zhou | Songlin Hu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The widespread of fake news has detrimental societal effects. Recent works model information propagation as graph structure and aggregate structural features from user interactions for fake news detection. However, they usually neglect a broader propagation uncertainty issue, caused by some missing and unreliable interactions during actual spreading, and suffer from learning accurate and diverse structural properties. In this paper, we propose a novel dual graph-based model, Uncertainty-aware Propagation Structure Reconstruction (UPSR) for improving fake news detection. Specifically, after the original propagation modeling, we introduce propagation structure reconstruction to fully explore latent interactions in the actual propagation. We design a novel Gaussian Propagation Estimation to refine the original deterministic node representation by multiple Gaussian distributions and arise latent interactions with KL divergence between distributions in a multi-facet manner. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

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A Unified Propagation Forest-based Framework for Fake News Detection
Lingwei Wei | Dou Hu | Yantong Lai | Wei Zhou | Songlin Hu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Fake news’s quick propagation on social media brings severe social ramifications and economic damage. Previous fake news detection usually learn semantic and structural patterns within a single target propagation tree. However, they are usually limited in narrow signals since they do not consider latent information cross other propagation trees. Motivated by a common phenomenon that most fake news is published around a specific hot event/topic, this paper develops a new concept of propagation forest to naturally combine propagation trees in a semantic-aware clustering. We propose a novel Unified Propagation Forest-based framework (UniPF) to fully explore latent correlations between propagation trees to improve fake news detection. Besides, we design a root-induced training strategy, which encourages representations of propagation trees to be closer to their prototypical root nodes. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks consistently suggest the effectiveness and scalability of UniPF.

2021

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Comparing Contextual and Static Word Embeddings with Small Data
Wei Zhou | Jelke Bloem
Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2021)

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Towards Propagation Uncertainty: Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Networks for Rumor Detection
Lingwei Wei | Dou Hu | Wei Zhou | Zhaojuan Yue | Songlin Hu
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)

Detecting rumors on social media is a very critical task with significant implications to the economy, public health, etc. Previous works generally capture effective features from texts and the propagation structure. However, the uncertainty caused by unreliable relations in the propagation structure is common and inevitable due to wily rumor producers and the limited collection of spread data. Most approaches neglect it and may seriously limit the learning of features. Towards this issue, this paper makes the first attempt to explore propagation uncertainty for rumor detection. Specifically, we propose a novel Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Network (EBGCN) to capture robust structural features. The model adaptively rethinks the reliability of latent relations by adopting a Bayesian approach. Besides, we design a new edge-wise consistency training framework to optimize the model by enforcing consistency on relations. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than baseline methods on both rumor detection and early rumor detection tasks.

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Label-Specific Dual Graph Neural Network for Multi-Label Text Classification
Qianwen Ma | Chunyuan Yuan | Wei Zhou | Songlin Hu
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)

Multi-label text classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing. Previous studies have difficulties to distinguish similar labels well because they learn the same document representations for different labels, that is they do not explicitly extract label-specific semantic components from documents. Moreover, they do not fully explore the high-order interactions among these semantic components, which is very helpful to predict tail labels. In this paper, we propose a novel label-specific dual graph neural network (LDGN), which incorporates category information to learn label-specific components from documents, and employs dual Graph Convolution Network (GCN) to model complete and adaptive interactions among these components based on the statistical label co-occurrence and dynamic reconstruction graph in a joint way. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that LDGN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models, and also achieves better performance with respect to tail labels.

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Challenging distributional models with a conceptual network of philosophical terms
Yvette Oortwijn | Jelke Bloem | Pia Sommerauer | Francois Meyer | Wei Zhou | Antske Fokkens
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Computational linguistic research on language change through distributional semantic (DS) models has inspired researchers from fields such as philosophy and literary studies, who use these methods for the exploration and comparison of comparatively small datasets traditionally analyzed by close reading. Research on methods for small data is still in early stages and it is not clear which methods achieve the best results. We investigate the possibilities and limitations of using distributional semantic models for analyzing philosophical data by means of a realistic use-case. We provide a ground truth for evaluation created by philosophy experts and a blueprint for using DS models in a sound methodological setup. We compare three methods for creating specialized models from small datasets. Though the models do not perform well enough to directly support philosophers yet, we find that models designed for small data yield promising directions for future work.

2020

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Early Detection of Fake News by Utilizing the Credibility of News, Publishers, and Users based on Weakly Supervised Learning
Chunyuan Yuan | Qianwen Ma | Wei Zhou | Jizhong Han | Songlin Hu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The dissemination of fake news significantly affects personal reputation and public trust. Recently, fake news detection has attracted tremendous attention, and previous studies mainly focused on finding clues from news content or diffusion path. However, the required features of previous models are often unavailable or insufficient in early detection scenarios, resulting in poor performance. Thus, early fake news detection remains a tough challenge. Intuitively, the news from trusted and authoritative sources or shared by many users with a good reputation is more reliable than other news. Using the credibility of publishers and users as prior weakly supervised information, we can quickly locate fake news in massive news and detect them in the early stages of dissemination. In this paper, we propose a novel structure-aware multi-head attention network (SMAN), which combines the news content, publishing, and reposting relations of publishers and users, to jointly optimize the fake news detection and credibility prediction tasks. In this way, we can explicitly exploit the credibility of publishers and users for early fake news detection. We conducted experiments on three real-world datasets, and the results show that SMAN can detect fake news in 4 hours with an accuracy of over 91%, which is much faster than the state-of-the-art models.

2019

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An Intelligent Testing Strategy for Vocabulary Assessment of Chinese Second Language Learners
Wei Zhou | Renfen Hu | Feipeng Sun | Ronghuai Huang
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Vocabulary is one of the most important parts of language competence. Testing of vocabulary knowledge is central to research on reading and language. However, it usually costs a large amount of time and human labor to build an item bank and to test large number of students. In this paper, we propose a novel testing strategy by combining automatic item generation (AIG) and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) in vocabulary assessment for Chinese L2 learners. Firstly, we generate three types of vocabulary questions by modeling both the vocabulary knowledge and learners’ writing error data. After evaluation and calibration, we construct a balanced item pool with automatically generated items, and implement a three-parameter computerized adaptive test. We conduct manual item evaluation and online student tests in the experiments. The results show that the combination of AIG and CAT can construct test items efficiently and reduce test cost significantly. Also, the test result of CAT can provide valuable feedback to AIG algorithms.

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Multi-hop Selector Network for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots
Chunyuan Yuan | Wei Zhou | Mingming Li | Shangwen Lv | Fuqing Zhu | Jizhong Han | Songlin Hu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Multi-turn retrieval-based conversation is an important task for building intelligent dialogue systems. Existing works mainly focus on matching candidate responses with every context utterance on multiple levels of granularity, which ignore the side effect of using excessive context information. Context utterances provide abundant information for extracting more matching features, but it also brings noise signals and unnecessary information. In this paper, we will analyze the side effect of using too many context utterances and propose a multi-hop selector network (MSN) to alleviate the problem. Specifically, MSN firstly utilizes a multi-hop selector to select the relevant utterances as context. Then, the model matches the filtered context with the candidate response and obtains a matching score. Experimental results show that MSN outperforms some state-of-the-art methods on three public multi-turn dialogue datasets.

2018

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A Deep Relevance Model for Zero-Shot Document Filtering
Chenliang Li | Wei Zhou | Feng Ji | Yu Duan | Haiqing Chen
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In the era of big data, focused analysis for diverse topics with a short response time becomes an urgent demand. As a fundamental task, information filtering therefore becomes a critical necessity. In this paper, we propose a novel deep relevance model for zero-shot document filtering, named DAZER. DAZER estimates the relevance between a document and a category by taking a small set of seed words relevant to the category. With pre-trained word embeddings from a large external corpus, DAZER is devised to extract the relevance signals by modeling the hidden feature interactions in the word embedding space. The relevance signals are extracted through a gated convolutional process. The gate mechanism controls which convolution filters output the relevance signals in a category dependent manner. Experiments on two document collections of two different tasks (i.e., topic categorization and sentiment analysis) demonstrate that DAZER significantly outperforms the existing alternative solutions, including the state-of-the-art deep relevance ranking models.

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Transfer Learning for Context-Aware Question Matching in Information-seeking Conversations in E-commerce
Minghui Qiu | Liu Yang | Feng Ji | Wei Zhou | Jun Huang | Haiqing Chen | Bruce Croft | Wei Lin
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Building multi-turn information-seeking conversation systems is an important and challenging research topic. Although several advanced neural text matching models have been proposed for this task, they are generally not efficient for industrial applications. Furthermore, they rely on a large amount of labeled data, which may not be available in real-world applications. To alleviate these problems, we study transfer learning for multi-turn information seeking conversations in this paper. We first propose an efficient and effective multi-turn conversation model based on convolutional neural networks. After that, we extend our model to adapt the knowledge learned from a resource-rich domain to enhance the performance. Finally, we deployed our model in an industrial chatbot called AliMe Assist and observed a significant improvement over the existing online model.