Tao Chen


2023

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Boost Transformer-based Language Models with GPU-Friendly Sparsity and Quantization
Chong Yu | Tao Chen | Zhongxue Gan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Along with the performance improvement in NLP domain, the sizes of transformer-based language models (TLM) are also dramatically increased. Some prior works intend to compress TLM models into more compact forms, but do not fully consider the hardware characters may not support the efficient execution for these forms, leading to the deployment of TLM on hardware with noticeable acceleration is still challenging. This paper thoroughly designs a compression scheme named GPUSQ-TLM to maximally utilize the GPU-friendly 2:4 fine-grained structured sparsity and quantization characters. Especially, a dense TLM model is first pruned to meet the GPU’s acceleration constraint of sparse patterns with FP16 type, then it is further quantized into a fixed-point one by quantization-aware training, to provide an extra speedup for integer tensors on GPU. A mixed-strategy knowledge distillation of labels, logits and feature maps is used for best accuracy compensation during pruning and quantization process. Experiment results show GPUSQ-TLM scheme achieves state-of-the-art compression on TLM model of various encoder and decoder blocks with negligible accuracy degradation on SQuAD, GLUE, CNN-DM & XSum and WikiText benchmarking tasks. Moreover, GPUSQ-TLM can boost actual deployment performance by up to 4.08-4.25x latency and 6.18-6.79x throughput on A100 GPU.

2022

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ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference
Kai Hui | Honglei Zhuang | Tao Chen | Zhen Qin | Jing Lu | Dara Bahri | Ji Ma | Jai Gupta | Cicero Nogueira dos Santos | Yi Tay | Donald Metzler
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. To this end, models generally utilize an encoder-only (like BERT) paradigm or an encoder-decoder (like T5) approach. These paradigms, however, are not without flaws, i.e., running the model on all query-document pairs at inference-time incurs a significant computational cost. This paper proposes a new training and inference paradigm for re-ranking. We propose to finetune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using in the form of document to query generation. Subsequently, we show that this encoder-decoder architecture can be decomposed into a decoder-only language model during inference. This results in significant inference time speedups since the decoder-only architecture only needs to learn to interpret static encoder embeddings during inference. Our experiments show that this new paradigm achieves results that are comparable to the more expensive cross-attention ranking approaches while being up to 6.8X faster. We believe this work paves the way for more efficient neural rankers that leverage large pretrained models.

2021

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UniKeyphrase: A Unified Extraction and Generation Framework for Keyphrase Prediction
Huanqin Wu | Wei Liu | Lei Li | Dan Nie | Tao Chen | Feng Zhang | Di Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Concept-Based Label Embedding via Dynamic Routing for Hierarchical Text Classification
Xuepeng Wang | Li Zhao | Bing Liu | Tao Chen | Feng Zhang | Di Wang
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)

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a challenging task that categorizes a textual description within a taxonomic hierarchy. Most of the existing methods focus on modeling the text. Recently, researchers attempt to model the class representations with some resources (e.g., external dictionaries). However, the concept shared among classes which is a kind of domain-specific and fine-grained information has been ignored in previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel concept-based label embedding method that can explicitly represent the concept and model the sharing mechanism among classes for the hierarchical text classification. Experimental results on two widely used datasets prove that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. We release our complementary resources (concepts and definitions of classes) for these two datasets to benefit the research on HTC.

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CIL: Contrastive Instance Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction
Tao Chen | Haizhou Shi | Siliang Tang | Zhigang Chen | Fei Wu | Yueting Zhuang
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)

The journey of reducing noise from distant supervision (DS) generated training data has been started since the DS was first introduced into the relation extraction (RE) task. For the past decade, researchers apply the multi-instance learning (MIL) framework to find the most reliable feature from a bag of sentences. Although the pattern of MIL bags can greatly reduce DS noise, it fails to represent many other useful sentence features in the datasets. In many cases, these sentence features can only be acquired by extra sentence-level human annotation with heavy costs. Therefore, the performance of distantly supervised RE models is bounded. In this paper, we go beyond typical MIL framework and propose a novel contrastive instance learning (CIL) framework. Specifically, we regard the initial MIL as the relational triple encoder and constraint positive pairs against negative pairs for each instance. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, with significant improvements over the previous methods on NYT10, GDS and KBP.

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TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding
Lemao Liu | Haisong Zhang | Haiyun Jiang | Yangming Li | Enbo Zhao | Kun Xu | Linfeng Song | Suncong Zheng | Botong Zhou | Dick Zhu | Xiao Feng | Tao Chen | Tao Yang | Dong Yu | Feng Zhang | ZhanHui Kang | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

This paper introduces TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. Compared to most previous publicly available text understanding systems and tools, TexSmart holds some unique features. First, the NER function of TexSmart supports over 1,000 entity types, while most other public tools typically support several to (at most) dozens of entity types. Second, TexSmart introduces new semantic analysis functions like semantic expansion and deep semantic representation, that are absent in most previous systems. Third, a spectrum of algorithms (from very fast algorithms to those that are relatively slow but more accurate) are implemented for one function in TexSmart, to fulfill the requirements of different academic and industrial applications. The adoption of unsupervised or weakly-supervised algorithms is especially emphasized, with the goal of easily updating our models to include fresh data with less human annotation efforts.

2019

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CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases
Tao Yu | Rui Zhang | Heyang Er | Suyi Li | Eric Xue | Bo Pang | Xi Victoria Lin | Yi Chern Tan | Tianze Shi | Zihan Li | Youxuan Jiang | Michihiro Yasunaga | Sungrok Shim | Tao Chen | Alexander Fabbri | Zifan Li | Luyao Chen | Yuwen Zhang | Shreya Dixit | Vincent Zhang | Caiming Xiong | Richard Socher | Walter Lasecki | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We present CoSQL, a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database (DB) querying dialogue systems. It consists of 30k+ turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries, obtained from a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) collection of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. Each dialogue simulates a real-world DB query scenario with a crowd worker as a user exploring the DB and a SQL expert retrieving answers with SQL, clarifying ambiguous questions, or otherwise informing of unanswerable questions. When user questions are answerable by SQL, the expert describes the SQL and execution results to the user, hence maintaining a natural interaction flow. CoSQL introduces new challenges compared to existing task-oriented dialogue datasets: (1) the dialogue states are grounded in SQL, a domain-independent executable representation, instead of domain-specific slot value pairs, and (2) because testing is done on unseen databases, success requires generalizing to new domains. CoSQL includes three tasks: SQL-grounded dialogue state tracking, response generation from query results, and user dialogue act prediction. We evaluate a set of strong baselines for each task and show that CoSQL presents significant challenges for future research. The dataset, baselines, and leaderboard will be released at https://yale-lily.github.io/cosql.

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SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context
Tao Yu | Rui Zhang | Michihiro Yasunaga | Yi Chern Tan | Xi Victoria Lin | Suyi Li | Heyang Er | Irene Li | Bo Pang | Tao Chen | Emily Ji | Shreya Dixit | David Proctor | Sungrok Shim | Jonathan Kraft | Vincent Zhang | Caiming Xiong | Richard Socher | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present SParC, a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences (12k+ individual questions annotated with SQL queries). It is obtained from controlled user interactions with 200 complex databases over 138 domains. We provide an in-depth analysis of SParC and show that it introduces new challenges compared to existing datasets. SParC demonstrates complex contextual dependencies, (2) has greater semantic diversity, and (3) requires generalization to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseen databases at test time. We experiment with two state-of-the-art text-to-SQL models adapted to the context-dependent, cross-domain setup. The best model obtains an exact match accuracy of 20.2% over all questions and less than10% over all interaction sequences, indicating that the cross-domain setting and the con-textual phenomena of the dataset present significant challenges for future research. The dataset, baselines, and leaderboard are released at https://yale-lily.github.io/sparc.

2016

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A Comparison of Word Embeddings for English and Cross-Lingual Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation
Hong Jin Kang | Tao Chen | Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA2016)

Word embeddings are now ubiquitous forms of word representation in natural language processing. There have been applications of word embeddings for monolingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) in English, but few comparisons have been done. This paper attempts to bridge that gap by examining popular embeddings for the task of monolingual English WSD. Our simplified method leads to comparable state-of-the-art performance without expensive retraining. Cross-Lingual WSD – where the word senses of a word in a source language come from a separate target translation language – can also assist in language learning; for example, when providing translations of target vocabulary for learners. Thus we have also applied word embeddings to the novel task of cross-lingual WSD for Chinese and provide a public dataset for further benchmarking. We have also experimented with using word embeddings for LSTM networks and found surprisingly that a basic LSTM network does not work well. We discuss the ramifications of this outcome.

2015

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A Joint Model for Chinese Microblog Sentiment Analysis
Yuhui Cao | Zhao Chen | Ruifeng Xu | Tao Chen | Lin Gui
Proceedings of the Eighth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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Interactive Second Language Learning from News Websites
Tao Chen | Naijia Zheng | Yue Zhao | Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

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Improving Distributed Representation of Word Sense via WordNet Gloss Composition and Context Clustering
Tao Chen | Ruifeng Xu | Yulan He | Xuan Wang
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2012

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Re-tweeting from a linguistic perspective
Aobo Wang | Tao Chen | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language in Social Media