Liqiang Nie


2023

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Self-adaptive Context and Modal-interaction Modeling For Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Haozhe Yang | Xianqiang Gao | Jianlong Wu | Tian Gan | Ning Ding | Feijun Jiang | Liqiang Nie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

The multimodal emotion recognition in conversation task aims to predict the emotion label for a given utterance with its context and multiple modalities. Existing approaches achieve good results but also suffer from the following two limitations: 1) lacking modeling of diverse dependency ranges, i.e., long, short, and independent context-specific representations and without consideration of the different recognition difficulty for each utterance; 2) consistent treatment of the contribution for various modalities. To address the above challenges, we propose the Self-adaptive Context and Modal-interaction Modeling (SCMM) framework. We first design the context representation module, which consists of three submodules to model multiple contextual representations. Thereafter, we propose the modal-interaction module, including three interaction submodules to make full use of each modality. Finally, we come up with a self-adaptive path selection module to select an appropriate path in each module and integrate the features to obtain the final representation. Extensive experiments under four settings on three multimodal datasets, including IEMOCAP, MELD, and MOSEI, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

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An Empirical Study of Frame Selection for Text-to-Video Retrieval
Mengxia Wu | Min Cao | Yang Bai | Ziyin Zeng | Chen Chen | Liqiang Nie | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Text-to-video retrieval (TVR) aims to find the most relevant video in a large video gallery given a query text. The intricate and abundant context of the video challenges the performance and efficiency of TVR. To handle the serialized video contexts, existing methods typically select a subset of frames within a video to represent the video content for TVR. How to select the most representative frames is a crucial issue, whereby the selected frames are required to not only retain the semantic information of the video but also promote retrieval efficiency by excluding temporally redundant frames. In this paper, we make the first empirical study of frame selection for TVR. We systemically classify existing frame selection methods into text-free and text-guided ones, under which we detailedly analyze six different frame selections in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Among them, two frame selections are first developed in this paper. According to the comprehensive analysis on multiple TVR benchmarks, we empirically conclude that the TVR with proper frame selections can significantly improve the retrieval efficiency without sacrificing the retrieval performance.

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Aspect-to-Scope Oriented Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Heyan Chai | Ziyi Yao | Siyu Tang | Ye Wang | Liqiang Nie | Binxing Fang | Qing Liao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to align aspects and corresponding sentiment expressions, so as to identify the sentiment polarities of specific aspects. Most existing ABSA methods focus on mining syntactic or semantic information, which still suffers from noisy interference introduced by the attention mechanism and dependency tree when multiple aspects exist in a sentence. To address these issues, in this paper, we revisit ABSA from a novel perspective by proposing a novel scope-assisted multi-view graph contrastive learning framework. It not only mitigates noisy interference for better locating aspect and its corresponding sentiment opinion with aspect-specific scope, but also captures the correlation and difference between sentiment polarities and syntactic/semantic information. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods and verifies the effectiveness and robustness of our model.

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Causal Intervention and Counterfactual Reasoning for Multi-modal Fake News Detection
Ziwei Chen | Linmei Hu | Weixin Li | Yingxia Shao | Liqiang Nie
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Due to the rapid upgrade of social platforms, most of today’s fake news is published and spread in a multi-modal form. Most existing multi-modal fake news detection methods neglect the fact that some label-specific features learned from the training set cannot generalize well to the testing set, thus inevitably suffering from the harm caused by the latent data bias. In this paper, we analyze and identify the psycholinguistic bias in the text and the bias of inferring news label based on only image features. We mitigate these biases from a causality perspective and propose a Causal intervention and Counterfactual reasoning based Debiasing framework (CCD) for multi-modal fake news detection. To achieve our goal, we first utilize causal intervention to remove the psycholinguistic bias which introduces the spurious correlations between text features and news label. And then, we apply counterfactual reasoning by imagining a counterfactual world where each news has only image features for estimating the direct effect of the image. Therefore we can eliminate the image-only bias by deducting the direct effect of the image from the total effect on labels. Extensive experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for improving multi-modal fake news detection.

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Multi-source Semantic Graph-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation
Liqiang Jing | Xuemeng Song | Kun Ouyang | Mengzhao Jia | Liqiang Nie
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) is a new yet challenging task, which aims to generate a natural language sentence for a multimodal social post (an image as well as its caption) to explain why it contains sarcasm. Although the existing pioneer study has achieved great success with the BART backbone, it overlooks the gap between the visual feature space and the decoder semantic space, the object-level metadata of the image, as well as the potential external knowledge. To solve these limitations, in this work, we propose a novel mulTi-source sEmantic grAph-based Multimodal sarcasm explanation scheme, named TEAM. In particular, TEAM extracts the object-level semantic meta-data instead of the traditional global visual features from the input image. Meanwhile, TEAM resorts to ConceptNet to obtain the external related knowledge concepts for the input text and the extracted object meta-data. Thereafter, TEAM introduces a multi-source semantic graph that comprehensively characterize the multi-source (i.e., caption, object meta-data, external knowledge) semantic relations to facilitate the sarcasm reasoning. Extensive experiments on a public released dataset MORE verify the superiority of our model over cutting-edge methods.

2022

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MMCoQA: Conversational Question Answering over Text, Tables, and Images
Yongqi Li | Wenjie Li | Liqiang Nie
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The rapid development of conversational assistants accelerates the study on conversational question answering (QA). However, the existing conversational QA systems usually answer users’ questions with a single knowledge source, e.g., paragraphs or a knowledge graph, but overlook the important visual cues, let alone multiple knowledge sources of different modalities. In this paper, we hence define a novel research task, i.e., multimodal conversational question answering (MMCoQA), aiming to answer users’ questions with multimodal knowledge sources via multi-turn conversations. This new task brings a series of research challenges, including but not limited to priority, consistency, and complementarity of multimodal knowledge. To facilitate the data-driven approaches in this area, we construct the first multimodal conversational QA dataset, named MMConvQA. Questions are fully annotated with not only natural language answers but also the corresponding evidence and valuable decontextualized self-contained questions. Meanwhile, we introduce an end-to-end baseline model, which divides this complex research task into question understanding, multi-modal evidence retrieval, and answer extraction. Moreover, we report a set of benchmarking results, and the results indicate that there is ample room for improvement.

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MERIt: Meta-Path Guided Contrastive Learning for Logical Reasoning
Fangkai Jiao | Yangyang Guo | Xuemeng Song | Liqiang Nie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Logical reasoning is of vital importance to natural language understanding. Previous studies either employ graph-based models to incorporate prior knowledge about logical relations, or introduce symbolic logic into neural models through data augmentation. These methods, however, heavily depend on annotated training data, and thus suffer from over-fitting and poor generalization problems due to the dataset sparsity. To address these two problems, in this paper, we propose MERIt, a MEta-path guided contrastive learning method for logical ReasonIng of text, to perform self-supervised pre-training on abundant unlabeled text data. Two novel strategies serve as indispensable components of our method. In particular, a strategy based on meta-path is devised to discover the logical structure in natural texts, followed by a counterfactual data augmentation strategy to eliminate the information shortcut induced by pre-training. The experimental results on two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks, i.e., ReClor and LogiQA, demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA baselines with significant improvements.

2021

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REPT: Bridging Language Models and Machine Reading Comprehension via Retrieval-Based Pre-training
Fangkai Jiao | Yangyang Guo | Yilin Niu | Feng Ji | Feng-Lin Li | Liqiang Nie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2019

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Improving Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction with Joint Label Embedding
Linmei Hu | Luhao Zhang | Chuan Shi | Liqiang Nie | Weili Guan | Cheng Yang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Distantly-supervised relation extraction has proven to be effective to find relational facts from texts. However, the existing approaches treat labels as independent and meaningless one-hot vectors, which cause a loss of potential label information for selecting valid instances. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-layer attention-based model to improve relation extraction with joint label embedding. The model makes full use of both structural information from Knowledge Graphs and textual information from entity descriptions to learn label embeddings through gating integration while avoiding the imposed noise with an attention mechanism. Then the learned label embeddings are used as another atten- tion over the instances (whose embeddings are also enhanced with the entity descriptions) for improving relation extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

2018

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Learning to Ask Questions in Open-domain Conversational Systems with Typed Decoders
Yansen Wang | Chenyi Liu | Minlie Huang | Liqiang Nie
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Asking good questions in open-domain conversational systems is quite significant but rather untouched. This task, substantially different from traditional question generation, requires to question not only with various patterns but also on diverse and relevant topics. We observe that a good question is a natural composition of interrogatives, topic words, and ordinary words. Interrogatives lexicalize the pattern of questioning, topic words address the key information for topic transition in dialogue, and ordinary words play syntactical and grammatical roles in making a natural sentence. We devise two typed decoders (soft typed decoder and hard typed decoder) in which a type distribution over the three types is estimated and the type distribution is used to modulate the final generation distribution. Extensive experiments show that the typed decoders outperform state-of-the-art baselines and can generate more meaningful questions.

2012

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A Semi-Supervised Bayesian Network Model for Microblog Topic Classification
Yan Chen | Zhoujun Li | Liqiang Nie | Xia Hu | Xiangyu Wang | Tat-Seng Chua | Xiaoming Zhang
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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The Use of Dependency Relation Graph to Enhance the Term Weighting in Question Retrieval
Weinan Zhang | Zhaoyan Ming | Yu Zhang | Liqiang Nie | Ting Liu | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of COLING 2012