Zhihao Fan


2022

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Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations
Wei Chen | Yeyun Gong | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Bolun Yao | Zhongyu Wei | Zhihao Fan | Xiaowu Hu | Bartuer Zhou | Biao Cheng | Daxin Jiang | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We study the problem of coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The problem is equally important with fine-grained response selection, but is less explored in existing literature. In this paper, we propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. In our CFC model, dense representations of query, candidate contexts and responses is learned based on the multi-tower architecture using contextual matching, and richer knowledge learned from the one-tower architecture (fine-grained) is distilled into the multi-tower architecture (coarse-grained) to enhance the performance of the retriever. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we construct two new datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus. Extensive experimental results on the two datasets show that the proposed method achieves huge improvement over all evaluation metrics compared with traditional baseline methods.

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Logic-Driven Context Extension and Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning of Text
Siyuan Wang | Wanjun Zhong | Duyu Tang | Zhongyu Wei | Zhihao Fan | Daxin Jiang | Ming Zhou | Nan Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Logical reasoning of text requires identifying critical logical structures in the text and performing inference over them. Existing methods for logical reasoning mainly focus on contextual semantics of text while struggling to explicitly model the logical inference process. In this paper, we not only put forward a logic-driven context extension framework but also propose a logic-driven data augmentation algorithm. The former follows a three-step reasoning paradigm, and each step is respectively to extract logical expressions as elementary reasoning units, symbolically infer the implicit expressions following equivalence laws and extend the context to validate the options. The latter augments literally similar but logically different instances and incorporates contrastive learning to better capture logical information, especially logical negative and conditional relationships. We conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets, ReClor and LogiQA. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets, and even surpasses human performance on the ReClor dataset.

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Negative Sample is Negative in Its Own Way: Tailoring Negative Sentences for Image-Text Retrieval
Zhihao Fan | Zhongyu Wei | Zejun Li | Siyuan Wang | Xuanjing Huang | Jianqing Fan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Matching model is essential for Image-Text Retrieval framework. Existing research usually train the model with a triplet loss and explore various strategy to retrieve hard negative sentences in the dataset. We argue that current retrieval-based negative sample construction approach is limited in the scale of the dataset thus fail to identify negative sample of high difficulty for every image. We propose our TAiloring neGative Sentences with Discrimination and Correction (TAGS-DC) to generate synthetic sentences automatically as negative samples. TAGS-DC is composed of masking and refilling to generate synthetic negative sentences with higher difficulty. To keep the difficulty during training, we mutually improve the retrieval and generation through parameter sharing. To further utilize fine-grained semantic of mismatch in the negative sentence, we propose two auxiliary tasks, namely word discrimination and word correction to improve the training. In experiments, we verify the effectiveness of our model on MS-COCO and Flickr30K compared with current state-of-the-art models and demonstrates its robustness and faithfulness in the further analysis.

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Locate Then Ask: Interpretable Stepwise Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering
Siyuan Wang | Zhongyu Wei | Zhihao Fan | Qi Zhang | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Multi-hop reasoning requires aggregating multiple documents to answer a complex question. Existing methods usually decompose the multi-hop question into simpler single-hop questions to solve the problem for illustrating the explainable reasoning process. However, they ignore grounding on the supporting facts of each reasoning step, which tends to generate inaccurate decompositions. In this paper, we propose an interpretable stepwise reasoning framework to incorporate both single-hop supporting sentence identification and single-hop question generation at each intermediate step, and utilize the inference of the current hop for the next until reasoning out the final result. We employ a unified reader model for both intermediate hop reasoning and final hop inference and adopt joint optimization for more accurate and robust multi-hop reasoning. We conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The results show that our method can effectively boost performance and also yields a better interpretable reasoning process without decomposition supervision.

2021

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Mask Attention Networks: Rethinking and Strengthen Transformer
Zhihao Fan | Yeyun Gong | Dayiheng Liu | Zhongyu Wei | Siyuan Wang | Jian Jiao | Nan Duan | Ruofei Zhang | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Transformer is an attention-based neural network, which consists of two sublayers, namely, Self-Attention Network (SAN) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). Existing research explores to enhance the two sublayers separately to improve the capability of Transformer for text representation. In this paper, we present a novel understanding of SAN and FFN as Mask Attention Networks (MANs) and show that they are two special cases of MANs with static mask matrices. However, their static mask matrices limit the capability for localness modeling in text representation learning. We therefore introduce a new layer named dynamic mask attention network (DMAN) with a learnable mask matrix which is able to model localness adaptively. To incorporate advantages of DMAN, SAN, and FFN, we propose a sequential layered structure to combine the three types of layers. Extensive experiments on various tasks, including neural machine translation and text summarization demonstrate that our model outperforms the original Transformer.

2020

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An Enhanced Knowledge Injection Model for Commonsense Generation
Zhihao Fan | Yeyun Gong | Zhongyu Wei | Siyuan Wang | Yameng Huang | Jian Jiao | Xuanjing Huang | Nan Duan | Ruofei Zhang
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Commonsense generation aims at generating plausible everyday scenario description based on a set of provided concepts. Digging the relationship of concepts from scratch is non-trivial, therefore, we retrieve prototypes from external knowledge to assist the understanding of the scenario for better description generation. We integrate two additional modules into the pretrained encoder-decoder model for prototype modeling to enhance the knowledge injection procedure. We conduct experiment on CommonGen benchmark, experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance on all the metrics.

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PathQG: Neural Question Generation from Facts
Siyuan Wang | Zhongyu Wei | Zhihao Fan | Zengfeng Huang | Weijian Sun | Qi Zhang | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Existing research for question generation encodes the input text as a sequence of tokens without explicitly modeling fact information. These models tend to generate irrelevant and uninformative questions. In this paper, we explore to incorporate facts in the text for question generation in a comprehensive way. We present a novel task of question generation given a query path in the knowledge graph constructed from the input text. We divide the task into two steps, namely, query representation learning and query-based question generation. We formulate query representation learning as a sequence labeling problem for identifying the involved facts to form a query and employ an RNN-based generator for question generation. We first train the two modules jointly in an end-to-end fashion, and further enforce the interaction between these two modules in a variational framework. We construct the experimental datasets on top of SQuAD and results show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, and the performance margin is larger when target questions are complex. Human evaluation also proves that our model is able to generate relevant and informative questions.

2019

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Bridging by Word: Image Grounded Vocabulary Construction for Visual Captioning
Zhihao Fan | Zhongyu Wei | Siyuan Wang | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Image Captioning aims at generating a short description for an image. Existing research usually employs the architecture of CNN-RNN that views the generation as a sequential decision-making process and the entire dataset vocabulary is used as decoding space. They suffer from generating high frequent n-gram with irrelevant words. To tackle this problem, we propose to construct an image-grounded vocabulary, based on which, captions are generated with limitation and guidance. In specific, a novel hierarchical structure is proposed to construct the vocabulary incorporating both visual information and relations among words. For generation, we propose a word-aware RNN cell incorporating vocabulary information into the decoding process directly. Reinforce algorithm is employed to train the generator using constraint vocabulary as action space. Experimental results on MS COCO and Flickr30k show the effectiveness of our framework compared to some state-of-the-art models.

2018

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ISCLAB at SemEval-2018 Task 1: UIR-Miner for Affect in Tweets
Meng Li | Zhenyuan Dong | Zhihao Fan | Kongming Meng | Jinghua Cao | Guanqi Ding | Yuhan Liu | Jiawei Shan | Binyang Li
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper presents a UIR-Miner system for emotion and sentiment analysis evaluation in Twitter in SemEval 2018. Our system consists of three main modules: preprocessing module, stacking module to solve the intensity prediction of emotion and sentiment, LSTM network module to solve multi-label classification, and the hierarchical attention network module for solving emotion and sentiment classification problem. According to the metrics of SemEval 2018, our system gets the final scores of 0.636, 0.531, 0.731, 0.708, and 0.408 on 5 subtasks, respectively.

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A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Natural Question Generation using Bi-discriminators
Zhihao Fan | Zhongyu Wei | Siyuan Wang | Yang Liu | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Visual Question Generation (VQG) aims to ask natural questions about an image automatically. Existing research focus on training model to fit the annotated data set that makes it indifferent from other language generation tasks. We argue that natural questions need to have two specific attributes from the perspectives of content and linguistic respectively, namely, natural and human-written. Inspired by the setting of discriminator in adversarial learning, we propose two discriminators, one for each attribute, to enhance the training. We then use the reinforcement learning framework to incorporate scores from the two discriminators as the reward to guide the training of the question generator. Experimental results on a benchmark VQG dataset show the effectiveness and robustness of our model compared to some state-of-the-art models in terms of both automatic and human evaluation metrics.