Hongxia Yang


2021

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Sketch and Refine: Towards Faithful and Informative Table-to-Text Generation
Peng Wang | Junyang Lin | An Yang | Chang Zhou | Yichang Zhang | Jingren Zhou | Hongxia Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval
Shuhuai Ren | Junyang Lin | Guangxiang Zhao | Rui Men | An Yang | Jingren Zhou | Xu Sun | Hongxia Yang
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)

Despite the achievements of large-scale multimodal pre-training approaches, cross-modal retrieval, e.g., image-text retrieval, remains a challenging task. To bridge the semantic gap between the two modalities, previous studies mainly focus on word-region alignment at the object level, lacking the matching between the linguistic relation among the words and the visual relation among the regions. The neglect of such relation consistency impairs the contextualized representation of image-text pairs and hinders the model performance and the interpretability. In this paper, we first propose a novel metric, Intra-modal Self-attention Distance (ISD), to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. In response, we present Inter-modal Alignment on Intra-modal Self-attentions (IAIS), a regularized training method to optimize the ISD and calibrate intra-modal self-attentions from the two modalities mutually via inter-modal alignment. The IAIS regularizer boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach.

2019

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Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System
Qibin Chen | Junyang Lin | Yichang Zhang | Ming Ding | Yukuo Cen | Hongxia Yang | Jie Tang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework called KBRD, which stands for Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System. It integrates the recommender system and the dialog generation system. The dialog generation system can enhance the performance of the recommendation system by introducing information about users’ preferences, and the recommender system can improve that of the dialog generation system by providing recommendation-aware vocabulary bias. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model has significant advantages over the baselines in both the evaluation of dialog generation and recommendation. A series of analyses show that the two systems can bring mutual benefits to each other, and the introduced knowledge contributes to both their performances.

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Cognitive Graph for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension at Scale
Ming Ding | Chang Zhou | Qibin Chen | Hongxia Yang | Jie Tang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose a new CogQA framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering in web-scale documents. Founded on the dual process theory in cognitive science, the framework gradually builds a cognitive graph in an iterative process by coordinating an implicit extraction module (System 1) and an explicit reasoning module (System 2). While giving accurate answers, our framework further provides explainable reasoning paths. Specifically, our implementation based on BERT and graph neural network efficiently handles millions of documents for multi-hop reasoning questions in the HotpotQA fullwiki dataset, achieving a winning joint F1 score of 34.9 on the leaderboard, compared to 23.1 of the best competitor.