Zhao Yan


2022

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CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers
Dongling Xiao | LinZheng Chai | Qian-Wen Zhang | Zhao Yan | Zhoujun Li | Yunbo Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Context-dependent text-to-SQL is the task of translating multi-turn questions into database-related SQL queries. Existing methods typically focus on making full use of history context or previously predicted SQL for currently SQL parsing, while neglecting to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency, such as co-reference, ellipsis and user focus change. In this paper, we propose CQR-SQL, which uses auxiliary Conversational Question Reformulation (CQR) learning to explicitly exploit schema and decouple contextual dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. Specifically, we first present a schema enhanced recursive CQR method to produce domain-relevant self-contained questions. Secondly, we train CQR-SQL models to map the semantics of multi-turn questions and auxiliary self-contained questions into the same latent space through schema grounding consistency task and tree-structured SQL parsing consistency task, which enhances the abilities of SQL parsing by adequately contextual understanding. At the time of writing, our CQR-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art results on two context-dependent text-to-SQL benchmarks SParC and CoSQL.

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G4: Grounding-guided Goal-oriented Dialogues Generation with Multiple Documents
Shiwei Zhang | Yiyang Du | Guanzhong Liu | Zhao Yan | Yunbo Cao
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

Goal-oriented dialogues generation grounded in multiple documents(MultiDoc2Dial) is a challenging and realistic task. Unlike previous works which treat document-grounded dialogue modeling as a machine reading comprehension task from single document, MultiDoc2Dial task faces challenges of both seeking information from multiple documents and generating conversation response simultaneously. This paper summarizes our entries to agent response generation subtask in MultiDoc2Dial dataset. We propose a three-stage solution, Grounding-guided goal-oriented dialogues generation(G4), which predicts groundings from retrieved passages to guide the generation of the final response. Our experiments show that G4 achieves SacreBLEU score of 31.24 and F1 score of 44.6 which is 60.7% higher than the baseline model.

2021

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Enhancing Label Correlation Feedback in Multi-Label Text Classification via Multi-Task Learning
Ximing Zhang | Qian-Wen Zhang | Zhao Yan | Ruifang Liu | Yunbo Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Enhancing Dialogue-based Relation Extraction by Speaker and Trigger Words Prediction
Tianyang Zhao | Zhao Yan | Yunbo Cao | Zhoujun Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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Entity Relative Position Representation based Multi-head Selection for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction
Tianyang Zhao | Zhao Yan | Yunbo Cao | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

Joint entity and relation extraction has received increasing interests recently, due to the capability of utilizing the interactions between both steps. Among existing studies, the Multi-Head Selection (MHS) framework is efficient in extracting entities and relations simultaneously. However, the method is weak for its limited performance. In this paper, we propose several effective insights to address this problem. First, we propose an entity-specific Relative Position Representation (eRPR) to allow the model to fully leverage the distance information between entities and context tokens. Second, we introduce an auxiliary Global Relation Classification (GRC) to enhance the learning of local contextual features. Moreover, we improve the semantic representation by adopting a pre-trained language model BERT as the feature encoder. Finally, these new keypoints are closely integrated with the multi-head selection framework and optimized jointly. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach overwhelmingly outperforms previous works in terms of all evaluation metrics, achieving significant improvements for relation F1 by +2.40% on CoNLL04 and +1.90% on ACE05, respectively.

2018

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Keyphrase Generation with Correlation Constraints
Jun Chen | Xiaoming Zhang | Yu Wu | Zhao Yan | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we study automatic keyphrase generation. Although conventional approaches to this task show promising results, they neglect correlation among keyphrases, resulting in duplication and coverage issues. To solve these problems, we propose a new sequence-to-sequence architecture for keyphrase generation named CorrRNN, which captures correlation among multiple keyphrases in two ways. First, we employ a coverage vector to indicate whether the word in the source document has been summarized by previous phrases to improve the coverage for keyphrases. Second, preceding phrases are taken into account to eliminate duplicate phrases and improve result coherence. Experiment results show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method on benchmark datasets in terms of both accuracy and diversity.

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Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking
Duyu Tang | Nan Duan | Zhao Yan | Zhirui Zhang | Yibo Sun | Shujie Liu | Yuanhua Lv | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) are closely related tasks that could improve each other; however, the connection of these two tasks is not well explored in literature. In this paper, we give a systematic study that seeks to leverage the connection to improve both QA and QG. We present a training algorithm that generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generative Domain-Adaptive Nets (GDAN) under the question answering scenario. The two key ideas are improving the QG model with QA through incorporating additional QA-specific signal as the loss function, and improving the QA model with QG through adding artificially generated training instances. We conduct experiments on both document based and knowledge based question answering tasks. We have two main findings. Firstly, the performance of a QG model (e.g in terms of BLEU score) could be easily improved by a QA model via policy gradient. Secondly, directly applying GAN that regards all the generated questions as negative instances could not improve the accuracy of the QA model. Learning when to regard generated questions as positive instances could bring performance boost.

2016

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DocChat: An Information Retrieval Approach for Chatbot Engines Using Unstructured Documents
Zhao Yan | Nan Duan | Junwei Bao | Peng Chen | Ming Zhou | Zhoujun Li | Jianshe Zhou
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Constraint-Based Question Answering with Knowledge Graph
Junwei Bao | Nan Duan | Zhao Yan | Ming Zhou | Tiejun Zhao
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

WebQuestions and SimpleQuestions are two benchmark data-sets commonly used in recent knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) work. Most questions in them are ‘simple’ questions which can be answered based on a single relation in the knowledge base. Such data-sets lack the capability of evaluating KBQA systems on complicated questions. Motivated by this issue, we release a new data-set, namely ComplexQuestions, aiming to measure the quality of KBQA systems on ‘multi-constraint’ questions which require multiple knowledge base relations to get the answer. Beside, we propose a novel systematic KBQA approach to solve multi-constraint questions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach not only obtains comparable results on the two existing benchmark data-sets, but also achieves significant improvements on the ComplexQuestions.