Feng Nan


2023

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SWING: Balancing Coverage and Faithfulness for Dialogue Summarization
Kung-Hsiang Huang | Siffi Singh | Xiaofei Ma | Wei Xiao | Feng Nan | Nicholas Dingwall | William Yang Wang | Kathleen McKeown
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Missing information is a common issue of dialogue summarization where some information in the reference summaries is not covered in the generated summaries. To address this issue, we propose to utilize natural language inference (NLI) models to improve coverage while avoiding introducing factual inconsistencies. Specifically, we use NLI to compute fine-grained training signals to encourage the model to generate content in the reference summaries that have not been covered, as well as to distinguish between factually consistent and inconsistent generated sentences. Experiments on the DialogSum and SAMSum datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in balancing coverage and faithfulness, validated with automatic metrics and human evaluations. Additionally, we compute the correlation between commonly used automatic metrics with human judgments in terms of three different dimensions regarding coverage and factual consistency to provide insight into the most suitable metric for evaluating dialogue summaries.

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Evaluating the Tradeoff Between Abstractiveness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
Markus Dreyer | Mengwen Liu | Feng Nan | Sandeep Atluri | Sujith Ravi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Neural models for abstractive summarization tend to generate output that is fluent and well-formed but lacks semantic faithfulness, or factuality, with respect to the input documents. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff between abstractiveness and factuality of generated summaries across multiple datasets and models, using extensive human evaluations of factuality. In our analysis, we visualize the rates of change in factuality as we gradually increase abstractiveness using a decoding constraint, and we observe that, while increased abstractiveness generally leads to a drop in factuality, the rate of factuality decay depends on factors such as the data that the system was trained on. We introduce two datasets with human factuality judgements; one containing 10.2k generated summaries with systematically varied degrees of abstractiveness; the other containing 4.2k summaries from five different summarization models. We propose new factuality metrics that adjust for the degree of abstractiveness, and we use them to compare the abstractiveness-adjusted factuality of previous summarization works, providing baselines for future work.

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ContraCLM: Contrastive Learning For Causal Language Model
Nihal Jain | Dejiao Zhang | Wasi Uddin Ahmad | Zijian Wang | Feng Nan | Xiaopeng Li | Ming Tan | Ramesh Nallapati | Baishakhi Ray | Parminder Bhatia | Xiaofei Ma | Bing Xiang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite exciting progress in causal language models, the expressiveness of their representations is largely limited due to poor discrimination ability. To remedy this issue, we present CONTRACLM, a novel contrastive learning framework at both the token-level and the sequence-level. We assess CONTRACLM on a variety of downstream tasks. We show that CONTRACLM enhances the discrimination of representations and bridges the gap with encoder-only models, which makes causal language models better suited for tasks beyond language generation. Specifically, we attain 44% relative improvement on the Semantic Textual Similarity tasks and 34% on Code-to-Code Search tasks. Furthermore, by improving the expressiveness of representations, CONTRACLM also boosts the source code generation capability with 9% relative improvement on execution accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark.

2022

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Using Structured Content Plans for Fine-grained Syntactic Control in Pretrained Language Model Generation
Fei-Tzin Lee | Miguel Ballesteros | Feng Nan | Kathleen McKeown
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Large pretrained language models offer powerful generation capabilities, but cannot be reliably controlled at a sub-sentential level. We propose to make such fine-grained control possible in pretrained LMs by generating text directly from a semantic representation, Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which is augmented at the node level with syntactic control tags. We experiment with English-language generation of three modes of syntax relevant to the framing of a sentence - verb voice, verb tense, and realization of human entities - and demonstrate that they can be reliably controlled, even in settings that diverge drastically from the training distribution. These syntactic aspects contribute to how information is framed in text, something that is important for applications such as summarization which aim to highlight salient information.

2021

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Supporting Clustering with Contrastive Learning
Dejiao Zhang | Feng Nan | Xiaokai Wei | Shang-Wen Li | Henghui Zhu | Kathleen McKeown | Ramesh Nallapati | Andrew O. Arnold | Bing Xiang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Unsupervised clustering aims at discovering the semantic categories of data according to some distance measured in the representation space. However, different categories often overlap with each other in the representation space at the beginning of the learning process, which poses a significant challenge for distance-based clustering in achieving good separation between different categories. To this end, we propose Supporting Clustering with Contrastive Learning (SCCL) – a novel framework to leverage contrastive learning to promote better separation. We assess the performance of SCCL on short text clustering and show that SCCL significantly advances the state-of-the-art results on most benchmark datasets with 3%-11% improvement on Accuracy and 4%-15% improvement on Normalized Mutual Information. Furthermore, our quantitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of SCCL in leveraging the strengths of both bottom-up instance discrimination and top-down clustering to achieve better intra-cluster and inter-cluster distances when evaluated with the ground truth cluster labels.

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Entity-level Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization
Feng Nan | Ramesh Nallapati | Zhiguo Wang | Cicero Nogueira dos Santos | Henghui Zhu | Dejiao Zhang | Kathleen McKeown | Bing Xiang
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

A key challenge for abstractive summarization is ensuring factual consistency of the generated summary with respect to the original document. For example, state-of-the-art models trained on existing datasets exhibit entity hallucination, generating names of entities that are not present in the source document. We propose a set of new metrics to quantify the entity-level factual consistency of generated summaries and we show that the entity hallucination problem can be alleviated by simply filtering the training data. In addition, we propose a summary-worthy entity classification task to the training process as well as a joint entity and summary generation approach, which yield further improvements in entity level metrics.

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Answering Ambiguous Questions through Generative Evidence Fusion and Round-Trip Prediction
Yifan Gao | Henghui Zhu | Patrick Ng | Cicero Nogueira dos Santos | Zhiguo Wang | Feng Nan | Dejiao Zhang | Ramesh Nallapati | Andrew O. Arnold | Bing Xiang
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)

In open-domain question answering, questions are highly likely to be ambiguous because users may not know the scope of relevant topics when formulating them. Therefore, a system needs to find possible interpretations of the question, and predict one or multiple plausible answers. When multiple plausible answers are found, the system should rewrite the question for each answer to resolve the ambiguity. In this paper, we present a model that aggregates and combines evidence from multiple passages to adaptively predict a single answer or a set of question-answer pairs for ambiguous questions. In addition, we propose a novel round-trip prediction approach to iteratively generate additional interpretations that our model fails to find in the first pass, and then verify and filter out the incorrect question-answer pairs to arrive at the final disambiguated output. Our model, named Refuel, achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the AmbigQA dataset, and shows competitive performance on NQ-Open and TriviaQA. The proposed round-trip prediction is a model-agnostic general approach for answering ambiguous open-domain questions, which improves our Refuel as well as several baseline models. We release source code for our models and experiments at https://github.com/amzn/refuel-open-domain-qa.

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Improving Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization via Question Answering
Feng Nan | Cicero Nogueira dos Santos | Henghui Zhu | Patrick Ng | Kathleen McKeown | Ramesh Nallapati | Dejiao Zhang | Zhiguo Wang | Andrew O. Arnold | Bing Xiang
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)

A commonly observed problem with the state-of-the art abstractive summarization models is that the generated summaries can be factually inconsistent with the input documents. The fact that automatic summarization may produce plausible-sounding yet inaccurate summaries is a major concern that limits its wide application. In this paper we present an approach to address factual consistency in summarization. We first propose an efficient automatic evaluation metric to measure factual consistency; next, we propose a novel learning algorithm that maximizes the proposed metric during model training. Through extensive experiments, we confirm that our method is effective in improving factual consistency and even overall quality of the summaries, as judged by both automatic metrics and human evaluation.

2020

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Margin-aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-lingual Text Labeling
Dejiao Zhang | Ramesh Nallapati | Henghui Zhu | Feng Nan | Cicero Nogueira dos Santos | Kathleen McKeown | Bing Xiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Unsupervised domain adaptation addresses the problem of leveraging labeled data in a source domain to learn a well-performing model in a target domain where labels are unavailable. In this paper, we improve upon a recent theoretical work (Zhang et al., 2019b) and adopt the Margin Disparity Discrepancy (MDD) unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm to solve the cross-lingual text labeling problems. Experiments on cross-lingual document classification and NER demonstrate the proposed domain adaptation approach advances the state-of-the-art results by a large margin. Specifically, we improve MDD by efficiently optimizing the margin loss on the source domain via Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT). This bridges the gap between theory and the loss function used in the original work Zhang et al.(2019b), and thereby significantly boosts the performance. Our numerical results also indicate that VAT can remarkably improve the generalization performance of both domains for various domain adaptation approaches.

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End-to-End Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering Systems
Siamak Shakeri | Cicero Nogueira dos Santos | Henghui Zhu | Patrick Ng | Feng Nan | Zhiguo Wang | Ramesh Nallapati | Bing Xiang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We propose an end-to-end approach for synthetic QA data generation. Our model comprises a single transformer-based encoder-decoder network that is trained end-to-end to generate both answers and questions. In a nutshell, we feed a passage to the encoder and ask the decoder to generate a question and an answer token-by-token. The likelihood produced in the generation process is used as a filtering score, which avoids the need for a separate filtering model. Our generator is trained by fine-tuning a pretrained LM using maximum likelihood estimation. The experimental results indicate significant improvements in the domain adaptation of QA models outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.

2019

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Topic Modeling with Wasserstein Autoencoders
Feng Nan | Ran Ding | Ramesh Nallapati | Bing Xiang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose a novel neural topic model in the Wasserstein autoencoders (WAE) framework. Unlike existing variational autoencoder based models, we directly enforce Dirichlet prior on the latent document-topic vectors. We exploit the structure of the latent space and apply a suitable kernel in minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to perform distribution matching. We discover that MMD performs much better than the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in matching high dimensional Dirichlet distribution. We further discover that incorporating randomness in the encoder output during training leads to significantly more coherent topics. To measure the diversity of the produced topics, we propose a simple topic uniqueness metric. Together with the widely used coherence measure NPMI, we offer a more wholistic evaluation of topic quality. Experiments on several real datasets show that our model produces significantly better topics than existing topic models.