Chinese Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a widely used technology in various applications. While recent studies have focused on utilizing additional information of the Chinese language and characters to enhance CNER performance, this paper focuses on a specific aspect of CNER known as fine-grained CNER (FG-CNER). FG-CNER involves the use of hierarchical, fine-grained categories (e.g. Person-MovieStar) to label named entities. To promote research in this area, we introduce the FiNE dataset, a dataset for FG-CNER consisting of 30,000 sentences from various domains and containing 67,651 entities in 54 fine-grained flattened hierarchical categories. Additionally, we propose SoftFiNE, a novel approach for FG-CNER that utilizes a custom-designed relevance scoring function based on label structures to learn the potential relevance between different flattened hierarchical labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SoftFiNE method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on the FiNE dataset. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on three other datasets, including OntoNotes 4.0, Weibo, and Resume, where SoftFiNE achieved state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis leverages multimodal signals to detect the sentiment of a speaker. Previous approaches concentrate on performing multimodal fusion and representation learning based on general knowledge obtained from pretrained models, which neglects the effect of domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose Contrastive Knowledge Injection (ConKI) for multimodal sentiment analysis, where specific-knowledge representations for each modality can be learned together with general knowledge representations via knowledge injection based on an adapter architecture. In addition, ConKI uses a hierarchical contrastive learning procedure performed between knowledge types within every single modality, across modalities within each sample, and across samples to facilitate the effective learning of the proposed representations, hence improving multimodal sentiment predictions. The experiments on three popular multimodal sentiment analysis benchmarks show that ConKI outperforms all prior methods on a variety of performance metrics.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis aims to predict the sentiment of video content. Recent research suggests that multimodal sentiment analysis critically depends on learning a good representation of multimodal information, which should contain both modality-invariant representations that are consistent across modalities as well as modality-specific representations. In this paper, we propose ConFEDE, a unified learning framework that jointly performs contrastive representation learning and contrastive feature decomposition to enhance the representation of multimodal information. It decomposes each of the three modalities of a video sample, including text, video frames, and audio, into a similarity feature and a dissimilarity feature, which are learned by a contrastive relation centered around the text. We conducted extensive experiments on CH-SIMS, MOSI and MOSEI to evaluate various state-of-the-art multimodal sentiment analysis methods. Experimental results show that ConFEDE outperforms all baselines on these datasets on a range of metrics.

Text ranking plays a key role in providing content that best answers user queries. It is usually divided into two sub-tasks to perform efficient information retrieval given a query: text retrieval and text re-ranking. Recent research on pretrained language models (PLM) has demonstrated efficiency and gain on both sub-tasks. However, while existing methods have benefited from pre-trained language models and achieved high recall rates on passage retrieval, the ranking performance still demands further improvement. In this paper, we propose MatRank, which learns to re-rank the text retrieved for a given query by learning to predict the most relevant passage based on a latent preference matrix. Specifically, MatRank uses a PLM to generate an asymmetric latent matrix of relative preference scores between all pairs of retrieved passages. Then, the latent matrix is aggregated row-wise and column-wise to obtain global preferences and predictions of the most relevant passage in two of these directions, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on MS MACRO, WikiAQ, and SemEval datasets. Experimental results show that MatRank has achieved new state-of-the-art results on these datasets, outperforming all prior methods on ranking performance metrics.

Headline generation is a task of generating an appropriate headline for a given article, which can be further used for machine-aided writing or enhancing the click-through ratio. Current works only use the article itself in the generation, but have not taken the writing style of headlines into consideration. In this paper, we propose a novel Seq2Seq model called CLH3G (Contrastive Learning enhanced Historical Headlines based Headline Generation) which can use the historical headlines of the articles that the author wrote in the past to improve the headline generation of current articles. By taking historical headlines into account, we can integrate the stylistic features of the author into our model, and generate a headline not only appropriate for the article, but also consistent with the author’s style. In order to efficiently learn the stylistic features of the author, we further introduce a contrastive learning based auxiliary task for the encoder of our model. Besides, we propose two methods to use the learned stylistic features to guide both the pointer and the decoder during the generation. Experimental results show that historical headlines of the same user can improve the headline generation significantly, and both the contrastive learning module and the two style features fusion methods can further boost the performance.