Yang Liu

Microsoft Cognitive Services Research

Other people with similar names: Yang Janet Liu (Georgetown University; 刘洋), Yang Liu (May refer to several people), Yang Liu (3M Health Information Systems), Yang Liu (University of Helsinki), Yang Liu (Beijing Language and Culture University), Yang Liu (National University of Defense Technology), Yang Liu (Edinburgh Ph.D., Microsoft), Yang Liu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)), Yang Liu (刘扬; Ph.D Purdue; ICSI, Dallas, Facebook, Liulishuo, Amazon), Yang Liu (刘洋; ICT, Tsinghua, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence), Yang Liu (Peking University), Yang Liu (Samsung Research Center Beijing), Yang Liu (Tianjin University, China), Yang Liu (Univ. of Michigan, UC Santa Cruz), Yang Liu (Wilfrid Laurier University)


2023

pdf
PREME: Preference-based Meeting Exploration through an Interactive Questionnaire
Negar Arabzadeh | Ali Ahmadvand | Julia Kiseleva | Yang Liu | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Ming Zhong | Milad Shokouhi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

The recent increase in the volume of online meetings necessitates automated tools for organizing the material, especially when an attendee has missed the discussion and needs assistance in quickly exploring it. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for generating interactive questionnaires for preference-based meeting exploration. As a result, users are supplied with a list of suggested questions reflecting their preferences. Since the task is new, we introduce an automatic evaluation strategy by measuring how much the generated questions via questionnaire are answerable to ensure factual correctness and covers the source meeting for the depth of possible exploration.

2022

pdf
Training Data is More Valuable than You Think: A Simple and Effective Method by Retrieving from Training Data
Shuohang Wang | Yichong Xu | Yuwei Fang | Yang Liu | Siqi Sun | Ruochen Xu | Chenguang Zhu | Michael Zeng
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Retrieval-based methods have been shown to be effective in NLP tasks via introducing external knowledge. However, the indexing and retrieving of large-scale corpora bring considerable computational cost. Surprisingly, we found that REtrieving from the traINing datA (REINA) only can lead to significant gains on multiple NLG and NLU tasks. We retrieve the labeled training instances most similar to the input text and then concatenate them with the input to feed into the model to generate the output. Experimental results show that this simple method can achieve significantly better performance on a variety of NLU and NLG tasks, including summarization, machine translation, language modeling, and question answering tasks. For instance, our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on XSum, BigPatent, and CommonsenseQA. Our code is released, https://github.com/microsoft/REINA .

pdf
End-to-End Segmentation-based News Summarization
Yang Liu | Chenguang Zhu | Michael Zeng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

In this paper, we bring a new way of digesting news content by introducing the task of segmenting a news article into multiple sections and generating the corresponding summary to each section. We make two contributions towards this new task. First, we create and make available a dataset, SegNews, consisting of 27k news articles with sections and aligned heading-style section summaries. Second, we propose a novel segmentation-based language generation model adapted from pre-trained language models that can jointly segment a document and produce the summary for each section. Experimental results on SegNews demonstrate that our model can outperform several state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence generation models for this new task.

2021

pdf
Modeling Entity Knowledge for Fact Verification
Yang Liu | Chenguang Zhu | Michael Zeng
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

Fact verification is a challenging task of identifying the truthfulness of given claims based on the retrieval of relevant evidence texts. Many claims require understanding and reasoning over external entity information for precise verification. In this paper, we propose a novel fact verification model using entity knowledge to enhance its performance. We retrieve descriptive text from Wikipedia for each entity, and then encode these descriptions by a smaller lightweight network to be fed into the main verification model. Furthermore, we boost model performance by adopting and predicting the relatedness between the claim and each evidence as additional signals. We demonstrate experimentally on a large-scale benchmark dataset FEVER that our framework achieves competitive results with a FEVER score of 72.89% on the test set.

pdf
Want To Reduce Labeling Cost? GPT-3 Can Help
Shuohang Wang | Yang Liu | Yichong Xu | Chenguang Zhu | Michael Zeng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Data annotation is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process for many NLP tasks. Although there exist various methods to produce pseudo data labels, they are often task-specific and require a decent amount of labeled data to start with. Recently, the immense language model GPT-3 with 170 billion parameters has achieved tremendous improvement across many few-shot learning tasks. In this paper, we explore ways to leverage GPT-3 as a low-cost data labeler to train other models. We find that to make the downstream model achieve the same performance on a variety of NLU and NLG tasks, it costs 50% to 96% less to use labels from GPT-3 than using labels from humans. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework of combining pseudo labels from GPT-3 with human labels, which leads to even better performance. These results present a cost-effective data labeling methodology that is generalizable to many practical applications.