Xin Gao


2022

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Unsupervised Mitigating Gender Bias by Character Components: A Case Study of Chinese Word Embedding
Xiuying Chen | Mingzhe Li | Rui Yan | Xin Gao | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)

Word embeddings learned from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases.However, debias on the Chinese language, one of the most spoken languages, has been less explored.Meanwhile, existing literature relies on manually created supplementary data, which is time- and energy-consuming.In this work, we propose the first Chinese Gender-neutral word Embedding model (CGE) based on Word2vec, which learns gender-neutral word embeddings without any labeled data.Concretely, CGE utilizes and emphasizes the rich feminine and masculine information contained in radicals, i.e., a kind of component in Chinese characters, during the training procedure.This consequently alleviates discriminative gender biases.Experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that our unsupervised method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised debiased word embedding models without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

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Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs
Xiuying Chen | Mingzhe Li | Shen Gao | Rui Yan | Xin Gao | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information.In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings.We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task.MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks.Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information.Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework.Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarizationmodel (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available.Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation.Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.

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Language-specific Effects on Automatic Speech Recognition Errors for World Englishes
June Choe | Yiran Chen | May Pik Yu Chan | Aini Li | Xin Gao | Nicole Holliday
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite recent advancements in automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies, reports of unequal performance across speakers of different demographic groups abound. At the same time, the focus on performance metrics such as the Word Error Rate (WER) in prior studies limit the specificity and scope of recommendations that can be offered for system engineering to overcome these challenges. The current study bridges this gap by investigating the performance of Otter’s automatic captioning system on native and non-native English speakers of different language background through a linguistic analysis of segment-level errors. By examining language-specific error profiles for vowels and consonants motivated by linguistic theory, we find that certain categories of errors can be predicted from the phonological structure of a speaker’s native language.

2020

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A Data-Centric Framework for Composable NLP Workflows
Zhengzhong Liu | Guanxiong Ding | Avinash Bukkittu | Mansi Gupta | Pengzhi Gao | Atif Ahmed | Shikun Zhang | Xin Gao | Swapnil Singhavi | Linwei Li | Wei Wei | Zecong Hu | Haoran Shi | Xiaodan Liang | Teruko Mitamura | Eric Xing | Zhiting Hu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems in application domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education) involve interoperation among multiple components, ranging from data ingestion, human annotation, to text retrieval, analysis, generation, and visualization. We establish a unified open-source framework to support fast development of such sophisticated NLP workflows in a composable manner. The framework introduces a uniform data representation to encode heterogeneous results by a wide range of NLP tasks. It offers a large repository of processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, which can be easily assembled with full interoperability under the unified representation. The highly extensible framework allows plugging in custom processors from external off-the-shelf NLP and deep learning libraries. The whole framework is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, namely Forte (for workflow infrastructure and NLP function processors) and Stave (for user interaction, visualization, and annotation).