With the explosive growth of short-video data on industrial video-sharing platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, text-video retrieval techniques have become increasingly important. Most existing works for text-video retrieval focus on designing informative representation learning methods and delicate matching mechanisms, which leverage the content information of queries and videos themselves (i.e., textual information of queries and multimodal information of videos). However, real-world scenarios often involve brief, ambiguous queries and low-quality videos, making content-based retrieval less effective. In order to accommodate various search requirements and enhance user satisfaction, this study introduces a novel Text-video Retrieval method via Watch-time-aware Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning (termed ORANGE). This approach aims to learn informative embeddings for queries and videos by leveraging both content information and the abundant relational information present in video-search scenarios. Specifically, we first construct a heterogeneous information graph where nodes represent domain objects (e.g., query, video, tag) and edges represent rich relations among these objects. Afterwards, a meta-path-guided heterogeneous graph attention encoder with the awareness of video watch time is devised to encode various semantic aspects of query and video nodes. To train our model, we introduce a meta-path-wise contrastive learning paradigm that facilitates capturing dependencies across multiple semantic relations, thereby enhancing the obtained embeddings. Finally, when deployed online, for new queries non-existent in the constructed graph, a bert-based query encoder distilled from our ORANGE is employed. Offline experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our ORANGE. Moreover, it has been implemented in the matching stage of an industrial online video-search service, where it exhibited statistically significant improvements over the online baseline in an A/B test.

Relevance ranking system plays a crucial role in video search on streaming platforms. Most relevance ranking methods focus on text modality, incapable of fully exploiting cross-modal cues present in video. Recent multi-modal models have demonstrated promise in various vision-language tasks but provide limited help for downstream query-video relevance tasks due to the discrepency between relevance ranking-agnostic pre-training objectives and the real video search scenarios that demand comprehensive relevance modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a QUery-Aware pre-training model with multi-modaLITY (QUALITY) that incorporates hard-mined query information as alignment targets and utilizes video tag information for guidance. QUALITY is integrated into our relevance ranking model, which leverages multi-modal knowledge and improves ranking optimization method based on ordinal regression. Extensive experiments show our proposed model significantly enhances video search performance.

Extracting spatial relations from texts is a fundamental task for natural language understanding and previous studies only regard it as a classification task, ignoring those spatial relations with null roles due to their poor information. To address the above issue, we first view spatial relation extraction as a generation task and propose a novel hybrid model HMCGR for this task. HMCGR contains a generation and a classification model, while the former can generate those null-role relations and the latter can extract those non-null-role relations to complement each other. Moreover, a reflexivity evaluation mechanism is applied to further improve the accuracy based on the reflexivity principle of spatial relation. Experimental results on SpaceEval show that HMCGR outperforms the SOTA baselines significantly.

The title generation task that summarizes article content in recapitulatory words relies heavily on utilizing the corresponding key context. To generate a title with appropriate information in the content and avoid repetition, we propose a title generation framework with two complementary components in this paper. First, we propose a Timestep aware Sentence Embedding (TSE) mechanism, which updates the sentences’ representations by re-locating the critical words in the corresponding sentence for each decoding step. Then, we present an Acme Coverage (AC) mechanism to solve the repetition problem and preserve the remaining valuable keywords after each decoding step according to the final vocabulary distribution. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various title generation tasks with different backbones, the evaluation scores of ROUGE and METEOR in varying degrees are significantly outperforming most of the existing state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our novel generation framework TSE-AC.

Contrastive learning has achieved impressive success in generation tasks to militate the “exposure bias” problem and discriminatively exploit the different quality of references. Existing works mostly focus on contrastive learning on the instance-level without discriminating the contribution of each word, while keywords are the gist of the text and dominant the constrained mapping relationships. Hence, in this work, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism, which can unify hybrid granularities semantic meaning in the input text. Concretely, we first propose a keyword graph via contrastive correlations of positive-negative pairs to iteratively polish the keyword representations. Then, we construct intra-contrasts within instance-level and keyword-level, where we assume words are sampled nodes from a sentence distribution. Finally, to bridge the gap between independent contrast levels and tackle the common contrast vanishing problem, we propose an inter-contrast mechanism that measures the discrepancy between contrastive keyword nodes respectively to the instance distribution. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms competitive baselines on paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks.

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a task to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese natural language. Existing methods have made attempts to incorporate the similarity knowledge between Chinese characters. However, they take the similarity knowledge as either an external input resource or just heuristic rules. This paper proposes to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into language models for CSC via a specialized graph convolutional network (SpellGCN). The model builds a graph over the characters, and SpellGCN is learned to map this graph into a set of inter-dependent character classifiers. These classifiers are applied to the representations extracted by another network, such as BERT, enabling the whole network to be end-to-end trainable. Experiments are conducted on three human-annotated datasets. Our method achieves superior performance against previous models by a large margin.

Zero-shot learning has been a tough problem since no labeled data is available for unseen classes during training, especially for classes with low similarity. In this situation, transferring from seen classes to unseen classes is extremely hard. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose a self-training based method to efficiently leverage unlabeled data. Traditional self-training methods use fixed heuristics to select instances from unlabeled data, whose performance varies among different datasets. We propose a reinforcement learning framework to learn data selection strategy automatically and provide more reliable selection. Experimental results on both benchmarks and a real-world e-commerce dataset show that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in zero-shot text classification

This paper describes the Kingsoft AI Lab’s submission to the WMT2019 news translation shared task. We participated in two language directions: English-Chinese and Chinese-English. For both language directions, we trained several variants of Transformer models using the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data. The best translation result was obtained with ensemble and reranking techniques. According to automatic metrics (BLEU) our Chinese-English system reached the second highest score, and our English-Chinese system reached the second highest score for this subtask.

Visual reasoning is a special visual question answering problem that is multi-step and compositional by nature, and also requires intensive text-vision interactions. We propose CMM: Cascaded Mutual Modulation as a novel end-to-end visual reasoning model. CMM includes a multi-step comprehension process for both question and image. In each step, we use a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) technique to enable textual/visual pipeline to mutually control each other. Experiments show that CMM significantly outperforms most related models, and reach state-of-the-arts on two visual reasoning benchmarks: CLEVR and NLVR, collected from both synthetic and natural languages. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of CMM to comprehend natural language logics under the guidence of images. Our code is available at https://github.com/FlamingHorizon/CMM-VR.

This paper proposes an approach for applying GANs to NMT. We build a conditional sequence generative adversarial net which comprises of two adversarial sub models, a generator and a discriminator. The generator aims to generate sentences which are hard to be discriminated from human-translated sentences ( i.e., the golden target sentences); And the discriminator makes efforts to discriminate the machine-generated sentences from human-translated ones. The two sub models play a mini-max game and achieve the win-win situation when they reach a Nash Equilibrium. Additionally, the static sentence-level BLEU is utilized as the reinforced objective for the generator, which biases the generation towards high BLEU points. During training, both the dynamic discriminator and the static BLEU objective are employed to evaluate the generated sentences and feedback the evaluations to guide the learning of the generator. Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the traditional RNNSearch and the newly emerged state-of-the-art Transformer on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks.

Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) is a recently proposed approach for machine translation which aims to train the model without using any labeled data. The models proposed for unsupervised NMT often use only one shared encoder to map the pairs of sentences from different languages to a shared-latent space, which is weak in keeping the unique and internal characteristics of each language, such as the style, terminology, and sentence structure. To address this issue, we introduce an extension by utilizing two independent encoders but sharing some partial weights which are responsible for extracting high-level representations of the input sentences. Besides, two different generative adversarial networks (GANs), namely the local GAN and global GAN, are proposed to enhance the cross-language translation. With this new approach, we achieve significant improvements on English-German, English-French and Chinese-to-English translation tasks.

While the disfluency detection has achieved notable success in the past years, it still severely suffers from the data scarcity. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach which can utilize large amounts of unlabelled data. In this work, a light-weight neural net is proposed to extract the hidden features based solely on self-attention without any Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In addition, we use the unlabelled corpus to enhance the performance. Besides, the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) training is applied to enforce the similar distribution between the labelled and unlabelled data. The experimental results show that our approach achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) lays intensive burden on computation and memory cost. It is a challenge to deploy NMT models on the devices with limited computation and memory budgets. This paper presents a four stage pipeline to compress model and speed up the decoding for NMT. Our method first introduces a compact architecture based on convolutional encoder and weight shared embeddings. Then weight pruning is applied to obtain a sparse model. Next, we propose a fast sequence interpolation approach which enables the greedy decoding to achieve performance on par with the beam search. Hence, the time-consuming beam search can be replaced by simple greedy decoding. Finally, vocabulary selection is used to reduce the computation of softmax layer. Our final model achieves 10 times speedup, 17 times parameters reduction, less than 35MB storage size and comparable performance compared to the baseline model.

Joint extraction of entities and relations is an important task in information extraction. To tackle this problem, we firstly propose a novel tagging scheme that can convert the joint extraction task to a tagging problem.. Then, based on our tagging scheme, we study different end-to-end models to extract entities and their relations directly, without identifying entities and relations separately. We conduct experiments on a public dataset produced by distant supervision method and the experimental results show that the tagging based methods are better than most of the existing pipelined and joint learning methods. What’s more, the end-to-end model proposed in this paper, achieves the best results on the public dataset.

This article proposes a novel character-aware neural machine translation (NMT) model that views the input sequences as sequences of characters rather than words. On the use of row convolution (Amodei et al., 2015), the encoder of the proposed model composes word-level information from the input sequences of characters automatically. Since our model doesn’t rely on the boundaries between each word (as the whitespace boundaries in English), it is also applied to languages without explicit word segmentations (like Chinese). Experimental results on Chinese-English translation tasks show that the proposed character-aware NMT model can achieve comparable translation performance with the traditional word based NMT models. Despite the target side is still word based, the proposed model is able to generate much less unknown words.