Jiwei Li


2023

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GNN-SL: Sequence Labeling Based on Nearest Examples via GNN
Shuhe Wang | Yuxian Meng | Rongbin Ouyang | Jiwei Li | Tianwei Zhang | Lingjuan Lyu | Guoyin Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

To better handle long-tail cases in the sequence labeling (SL) task, in this work, we introduce graph neural networks sequence labeling (GNN-SL), which augments the vanilla SL model output with similar tagging examples retrieved from the whole training set. Since not all the retrieved tagging examples benefit the model prediction, we construct a heterogeneous graph, and leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to transfer information between the retrieved tagging examples and the input word sequence. The augmented node which aggregates information from neighbors is used to do prediction. This strategy enables the model to directly acquire similar tagging examples and improves the general quality of predictions. We conduct a variety of experiments on three typical sequence labeling tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part of Speech Tagging (POS), and Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) to show the significant performance of our GNN-SL. Notably, GNN-SL achieves SOTA results of 96.9 (+0.2) on PKU, 98.3 (+0.4) on CITYU, 98.5 (+0.2) on MSR, and 96.9 (+0.2) on AS for the CWS task, and resultscomparable to SOTA performances on NER datasets, and POS datasets.

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Ranking-Enhanced Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning
Yeon Seonwoo | Guoyin Wang | Changmin Seo | Sajal Choudhary | Jiwei Li | Xiang Li | Puyang Xu | Sunghyun Park | Alice Oh
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Unsupervised sentence representation learning has progressed through contrastive learning and data augmentation methods such as dropout masking. Despite this progress, sentence encoders are still limited to using only an input sentence when predicting its semantic vector. In this work, we show that the semantic meaning of a sentence is also determined by nearest-neighbor sentences that are similar to the input sentence. Based on this finding, we propose a novel unsupervised sentence encoder, RankEncoder. RankEncoder predicts the semantic vector of an input sentence by leveraging its relationship with other sentences in an external corpus, as well as the input sentence itself. We evaluate RankEncoder on semantic textual benchmark datasets. From the experimental results, we verify that 1) RankEncoder achieves 80.07% Spearman’s correlation, a 1.1% absolute improvement compared to the previous state-of-the-art performance, 2) RankEncoder is universally applicable to existing unsupervised sentence embedding methods, and 3) RankEncoder is specifically effective for predicting the similarity scores of similar sentence pairs.

2022

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Sentence Similarity Based on Contexts
Xiaofei Sun | Yuxian Meng | Xiang Ao | Fei Wu | Tianwei Zhang | Jiwei Li | Chun Fan
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

Existing methods to measure sentence similarity are faced with two challenges: (1) labeled datasets are usually limited in size, making them insufficient to train supervised neural models; and (2) there is a training-test gap for unsupervised language modeling (LM) based models to compute semantic scores between sentences, since sentence-level semantics are not explicitly modeled at training. This results in inferior performances in this task. In this work, we propose a new framework to address these two issues. The proposed framework is based on the core idea that the meaning of a sentence should be defined by its contexts, and that sentence similarity can be measured by comparing the probabilities of generating two sentences given the same context. The proposed framework is able to generate high-quality, large-scale dataset with semantic similarity scores between two sentences in an unsupervised manner, with which the train-test gap can be largely bridged. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves significant performance boosts over existing baselines under both the supervised and unsupervised settings across different datasets.

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Triggerless Backdoor Attack for NLP Tasks with Clean Labels
Leilei Gan | Jiwei Li | Tianwei Zhang | Xiaoya Li | Yuxian Meng | Fei Wu | Yi Yang | Shangwei Guo | Chun Fan
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Backdoor attacks pose a new threat to NLP models. A standard strategy to construct poisoned data in backdoor attacks is to insert triggers (e.g., rare words) into selected sentences and alter the original label to a target label. This strategy comes with a severe flaw of being easily detected from both the trigger and the label perspectives: the trigger injected, which is usually a rare word, leads to an abnormal natural language expression, and thus can be easily detected by a defense model; the changed target label leads the example to be mistakenly labeled, and thus can be easily detected by manual inspections. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a new strategy to perform textual backdoor attack which does not require an external trigger and the poisoned samples are correctly labeled. The core idea of the proposed strategy is to construct clean-labeled examples, whose labels are correct but can lead to test label changes when fused with the training set. To generate poisoned clean-labeled examples, we propose a sentence generation model based on the genetic algorithm to cater to the non-differentiable characteristic of text data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed attacking strategy is not only effective, but more importantly, hard to defend due to its triggerless and clean-labeled nature. Our work marks the first step towards developing triggerless attacking strategies in NLP.

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Exploring and Adapting Chinese GPT to Pinyin Input Method
Minghuan Tan | Yong Dai | Duyu Tang | Zhangyin Feng | Guoping Huang | Jing Jiang | Jiwei Li | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

While GPT has become the de-facto method for text generation tasks, its application to pinyin input method remains unexplored.In this work, we make the first exploration to leverage Chinese GPT for pinyin input method.We find that a frozen GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin.However, the performance drops dramatically when the input includes abbreviated pinyin.A reason is that an abbreviated pinyin can be mapped to many perfect pinyin, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters.We mitigate this issue with two strategies,including enriching the context with pinyin and optimizing the training process to help distinguish homophones. To further facilitate the evaluation of pinyin input method, we create a dataset consisting of 270K instances from fifteen domains.Results show that our approach improves the performance on abbreviated pinyin across all domains.Model analysis demonstrates that both strategiescontribute to the performance boost.

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Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Prediction
Leilei Gan | Yuxian Meng | Kun Kuang | Xiaofei Sun | Chun Fan | Fei Wu | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Higher-order methods for dependency parsing can partially but not fully address the issue that edges in dependency trees should be constructed at the text span/subtree level rather than word level. In this paper, we propose a new method for dependency parsing to address this issue. The proposed method constructs dependency trees by directly modeling span-span (in other words, subtree-subtree) relations. It consists of two modules: the text span proposal module which proposes candidate text spans, each of which represents a subtree in the dependency tree denoted by (root, start, end); and the span linking module, which constructs links between proposed spans. We use the machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework as the backbone to formalize the span linking module, where one span is used as query to extract the text span/subtree it should be linked to. The proposed method has the following merits: (1) it addresses the fundamental problem that edges in a dependency tree should be constructed between subtrees; (2) the MRC framework allows the method to retrieve missing spans in the span proposal stage, which leads to higher recall for eligible spans. Extensive experiments on the PTB, CTB and Universal Dependencies (UD) benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/ShannonAI/mrc-for-dependency-parsing

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An MRC Framework for Semantic Role Labeling
Nan Wang | Jiwei Li | Yuxian Meng | Xiaofei Sun | Han Qiu | Ziyao Wang | Guoyin Wang | Jun He
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) aims at recognizing the predicate-argument structure of a sentence and can be decomposed into two subtasks: predicate disambiguation and argument labeling. Prior work deals with these two tasks independently, which ignores the semantic connection between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose to use the machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework to bridge this gap. We formalize predicate disambiguation as multiple-choice machine reading comprehension, where the descriptions of candidate senses of a given predicate are used as options to select the correct sense. The chosen predicate sense is then used to determine the semantic roles for that predicate, and these semantic roles are used to construct the query for another MRC model for argument labeling. In this way, we are able to leverage both the predicate semantics and the semantic role semantics for argument labeling. We also propose to select a subset of all the possible semantic roles for computational efficiency. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or comparable results to previous work.

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Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation
Xiaofei Sun | Yufei Tian | Yuxian Meng | Nanyun Peng | Fei Wu | Jiwei Li | Chun Fan
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for paraphrase generation by treating the task as unsupervised machine translation (UMT) based on the assumption that there must be pairs of sentences expressing the same meaning in a large-scale unlabeled monolingual corpus. The proposed paradigm first splits a large unlabeled corpus into multiple clusters, and trains multiple UMT models using pairs of these clusters. Then based on the paraphrase pairs produced by these UMT models, a unified surrogate model can be trained to serve as the final model to generate paraphrases, which can be directly used for test in the unsupervised setup, or be finetuned on labeled datasets in the supervised setup. The proposed method offers merits over machine-translation-based paraphrase generation methods, as it avoids reliance on bilingual sentence pairs. It also allows human intervene with the model so that more diverse paraphrases can be generated using different filtering criteria. Extensive experiments on existing paraphrase dataset for both the supervised and unsupervised setups demonstrate the effectiveness the proposed paradigm.

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Summarize, Outline, and Elaborate: Long-Text Generation via Hierarchical Supervision from Extractive Summaries
Xiaofei Sun | Zijun Sun | Yuxian Meng | Jiwei Li | Chun Fan
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The difficulty of generating coherent long texts lies in the fact that existing models overwhelmingly focus on the tasks of local word prediction, and cannot make high level plans on what to generate or capture the high-level discourse dependencies between chunks of texts. Inspired by how humans write, where a list of bullet points or a catalog is first outlined, and then each bullet point is expanded to form the whole article, we propose SOE, a pipelined system that involves of summarizing, outlining and elaborating for long text generation: the model first outlines the summaries for different segments of long texts, and then elaborates on each bullet point to generate the corresponding segment. To avoid the labor-intensive process of summary soliciting, we propose the reconstruction strategy, which extracts segment summaries in an unsupervised manner by selecting its most informative part to reconstruct the segment. The proposed generation system comes with the following merits: (1) the summary provides high-level guidance for text generation and avoids the local minimum of individual word predictions; (2) the high-level discourse dependencies are captured in the conditional dependencies between summaries and are preserved during the summary expansion process and (3) additionally, we are able to consider significantly more contexts by representing contexts as concise summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOE produces long texts with significantly better quality, along with faster convergence speed.

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Rescue Implicit and Long-tail Cases: Nearest Neighbor Relation Extraction
Zhen Wan | Qianying Liu | Zhuoyuan Mao | Fei Cheng | Sadao Kurohashi | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation types, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. In this paper, we introduce a simple enhancement of RE using k nearest neighbors (kNN-RE). kNN-RE allows the model to consult training relations at test time through a nearest-neighbor search and provides a simple yet effective means to tackle the two issues above. Additionally, we observe that kNN-RE serves as an effective way to leverage distant supervision (DS) data for RE. Experimental results show that the proposed kNN-RE achieves state-of-the-art performances on a variety of supervised RE datasets, i.e., ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80, along with outperforming the best model to date on the i2b2 and Wiki80 datasets in the setting of allowing using DS. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/kNN-RE.

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Open World Classification with Adaptive Negative Samples
Ke Bai | Guoyin Wang | Jiwei Li | Sunghyun Park | Sungjin Lee | Puyang Xu | Ricardo Henao | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Open world classification is a task in natural language processing with key practical relevance and impact.Since the open or unknown category data only manifests in the inference phase, finding a model with a suitable decision boundary accommodating for the identification of known classes and discrimination of the open category is challenging.The performance of existing models is limited by the lack of effective open category data during the training stage or the lack of a good mechanism to learn appropriate decision boundaries.We propose an approach based on Adaptive Negative Samples (ANS) designed to generate effective synthetic open category samples in the training stage and without requiring any prior knowledge or external datasets.Empirically, we find a significant advantage in using auxiliary one-versus-rest binary classifiers, which effectively utilize the generated negative samples and avoid the complex threshold-seeking stage in previous works.Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ANS achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

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Fast Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
Yuxian Meng | Xiaoya Li | Xiayu Zheng | Fei Wu | Xiaofei Sun | Tianwei Zhang | Jiwei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Though nearest neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) (CITATION) has proved to introduce significant performance boosts over standard neural MT systems, it is prohibitively slow since it uses the entire reference corpus as the datastore for the nearest neighbor search. This means each step for each beam in the beam search has to search over the entire reference corpus. kNN-MT is thus two-orders slower than vanilla MT models, making it hard to be applied to real-world applications, especially online services. In this work, we propose Fast kNN-MT to address this issue. Fast kNN-MT constructs a significantly smaller datastore for the nearest neighbor search: for each word in a source sentence, Fast kNN-MT first selects its nearest token-level neighbors, which is limited to tokens that are the same as the query token. Then at each decoding step, in contrast to using the entire corpus as the datastore, the search space is limited to target tokens corresponding to the previously selected reference source tokens. This strategy avoids search through the whole datastore for nearest neighbors and drastically improves decoding efficiency. Without loss of performance, Fast kNN-MT is two-orders faster than kNN-MT, and is only two times slower than the standard NMT model. Fast kNN-MT enables the practical use of kNN-MT systems in real-world MT applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ShannonAI/fast-knn-nmt.

2021

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BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GNN and BERT
Yuxiao Lin | Yuxian Meng | Xiaofei Sun | Qinghong Han | Kun Kuang | Jiwei Li | Fei Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Making Flexible Use of Subtasks: A Multiplex Interaction Network for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Guoxin Yu | Xiang Ao | Ling Luo | Min Yang | Xiaofei Sun | Jiwei Li | Qing He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Self Question-answering: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis by Role Flipped Machine Reading Comprehension
Guoxin Yu | Jiwei Li | Ling Luo | Yuxian Meng | Xiang Ao | Qing He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

The pivot for the unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is to couple aspect terms with their corresponding opinion terms, which might further derive easier sentiment predictions. In this paper, we investigate the unified ABSA task from the perspective of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) by observing that the aspect and the opinion terms can serve as the query and answer in MRC interchangeably. We propose a new paradigm named Role Flipped Machine Reading Comprehension (RF-MRC) to resolve. At its heart, the predicted results of either the Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) or the Opinion Terms Extraction (OTE) are regarded as the queries, respectively, and the matched opinion or aspect terms are considered as answers. The queries and answers can be flipped for multi-hop detection. Finally, every matched aspect-opinion pair is predicted by the sentiment classifier. RF-MRC can solve the ABSA task without any additional data annotation or transformation. Experiments on three widely used benchmarks and a challenging dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework.

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ConRPG: Paraphrase Generation using Contexts as Regularizer
Yuxian Meng | Xiang Ao | Qing He | Xiaofei Sun | Qinghong Han | Fei Wu | Chun Fan | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

A long-standing issue with paraphrase generation is the lack of reliable supervision signals. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised paradigm for paraphrase generation based on the assumption that the probabilities of generating two sentences with the same meaning given the same context should be the same. Inspired by this fundamental idea, we propose a pipelined system which consists of paraphrase candidate generation based on contextual language models, candidate filtering using scoring functions, and paraphrase model training based on the selected candidates. The proposed paradigm offers merits over existing paraphrase generation methods: (1) using the context regularizer on meanings, the model is able to generate massive amounts of high-quality paraphrase pairs; (2) the combination of the huge amount of paraphrase candidates and further diversity-promoting filtering yields paraphrases with more lexical and syntactic diversity; and (3) using human-interpretable scoring functions to select paraphrase pairs from candidates, the proposed framework provides a channel for developers to intervene with the data generation process, leading to a more controllable model. Experimental results across different tasks and datasets demonstrate that the proposed paradigm significantly outperforms existing paraphrase approaches in both supervised and unsupervised setups.

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Layer-wise Model Pruning based on Mutual Information
Chun Fan | Jiwei Li | Tianwei Zhang | Xiang Ao | Fei Wu | Yuxian Meng | Xiaofei Sun
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Inspired by mutual information (MI) based feature selection in SVMs and logistic regression, in this paper, we propose MI-based layer-wise pruning: for each layer of a multi-layer neural network, neurons with higher values of MI with respect to preserved neurons in the upper layer are preserved. Starting from the top softmax layer, layer-wise pruning proceeds in a top-down fashion until reaching the bottom word embedding layer. The proposed pruning strategy offers merits over weight-based pruning techniques: (1) it avoids irregular memory access since representations and matrices can be squeezed into their smaller but dense counterparts, leading to greater speedup; (2) in a manner of top-down pruning, the proposed method operates from a more global perspective based on training signals in the top layer, and prunes each layer by propagating the effect of global signals through layers, leading to better performances at the same sparsity level. Extensive experiments show that at the same sparsity level, the proposed strategy offers both greater speedup and higher performances than weight-based pruning methods (e.g., magnitude pruning, movement pruning).

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kFolden: k-Fold Ensemble for Out-Of-Distribution Detection
Xiaoya Li | Jiwei Li | Xiaofei Sun | Chun Fan | Tianwei Zhang | Fei Wu | Yuxian Meng | Jun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is an important problem in natural language processing (NLP). In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework kFolden, which mimics the behaviors of OOD detection during training without the use of any external data. For a task with k training labels, kFolden induces k sub-models, each of which is trained on a subset with k-1 categories with the left category masked unknown to the sub-model. Exposing an unknown label to the sub-model during training, the model is encouraged to learn to equally attribute the probability to the seen k-1 labels for the unknown label, enabling this framework to simultaneously resolve in- and out-distribution examples in a natural way via OOD simulations. Taking text classification as an archetype, we develop benchmarks for OOD detection using existing text classification datasets. By conducting comprehensive comparisons and analyses on the developed benchmarks, we demonstrate the superiority of kFolden against current methods in terms of improving OOD detection performances while maintaining improved in-domain classification accuracy.

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ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information
Zijun Sun | Xiaoya Li | Xiaofei Sun | Yuxian Meng | Xiang Ao | Qing He | Fei Wu | Jiwei Li
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)

Recent pretraining models in Chinese neglect two important aspects specific to the Chinese language: glyph and pinyin, which carry significant syntax and semantic information for language understanding. In this work, we propose ChineseBERT, which incorporates both the glyph and pinyin information of Chinese characters into language model pretraining. The glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a Chinese character, being able to capture character semantics from the visual features, and the pinyin embedding characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which handles the highly prevalent heteronym phenomenon in Chinese (the same character has different pronunciations with different meanings). Pretrained on large-scale unlabeled Chinese corpus, the proposed ChineseBERT model yields significant performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps. The proposed model achieves new SOTA performances on a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, text classification, sentence pair matching, and competitive performances in named entity recognition and word segmentation.

2020

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Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks
Xiaoya Li | Xiaofei Sun | Yuxian Meng | Junjun Liang | Fei Wu | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Many NLP tasks such as tagging and machine reading comprehension are faced with the severe data imbalance issue: negative examples significantly outnumber positive examples, and the huge number of easy-negative examples overwhelms the training. The most commonly used cross entropy (CE) criteria is actually an accuracy-oriented objective, and thus creates a discrepancy between training and test: at training time, each training instance contributes equally to the objective function, while at test time F1 score concerns more about positive examples. In this paper, we propose to use dice loss in replacement of the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. Dice loss is based on the Sørensen–Dice coefficient or Tversky index , which attaches similar importance to false positives and false negatives, and is more immune to the data-imbalance issue. To further alleviate the dominating influence from easy-negative examples in training, we propose to associate training examples with dynamically adjusted weights to deemphasize easy-negative examples. Theoretical analysis shows that this strategy narrows down the gap between the F1 score in evaluation and the dice loss in training. With the proposed training objective, we observe significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced NLP tasks. Notably, we are able to achieve SOTA results on CTB5, CTB6 and UD1.4 for the part of speech tagging task; SOTA results on CoNLL03, OntoNotes5.0, MSRA and OntoNotes4.0 for the named entity recognition task; along with competitive results on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and paraphrase identification.

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A Unified MRC Framework for Named Entity Recognition
Xiaoya Li | Jingrong Feng | Yuxian Meng | Qinghong Han | Fei Wu | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The task of named entity recognition (NER) is normally divided into nested NER and flat NER depending on whether named entities are nested or not.Models are usually separately developed for the two tasks, since sequence labeling models, the most widely used backbone for flat NER, are only able to assign a single label to a particular token, which is unsuitable for nested NER where a token may be assigned several labels. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that is capable of handling both flat and nested NER tasks. Instead of treating the task of NER as a sequence labeling problem, we propose to formulate it as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) task. For example, extracting entities with the per label is formalized as extracting answer spans to the question “which person is mentioned in the text".This formulation naturally tackles the entity overlapping issue in nested NER: the extraction of two overlapping entities with different categories requires answering two independent questions. Additionally, since the query encodes informative prior knowledge, this strategy facilitates the process of entity extraction, leading to better performances for not only nested NER, but flat NER. We conduct experiments on both nested and flat NER datasets.Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation. We are able to achieve a vast amount of performance boost over current SOTA models on nested NER datasets, i.e., +1.28, +2.55, +5.44, +6.37,respectively on ACE04, ACE05, GENIA and KBP17, along with SOTA results on flat NER datasets, i.e., +0.24, +1.95, +0.21, +1.49 respectively on English CoNLL 2003, English OntoNotes 5.0, Chinese MSRA and Chinese OntoNotes 4.0.

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CorefQA: Coreference Resolution as Query-based Span Prediction
Wei Wu | Fei Wang | Arianna Yuan | Fei Wu | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we present CorefQA, an accurate and extensible approach for the coreference resolution task. We formulate the problem as a span prediction task, like in question answering: A query is generated for each candidate mention using its surrounding context, and a span prediction module is employed to extract the text spans of the coreferences within the document using the generated query. This formulation comes with the following key advantages: (1) The span prediction strategy provides the flexibility of retrieving mentions left out at the mention proposal stage; (2) In the question answering framework, encoding the mention and its context explicitly in a query makes it possible to have a deep and thorough examination of cues embedded in the context of coreferent mentions; and (3) A plethora of existing question answering datasets can be used for data augmentation to improve the model’s generalization capability. Experiments demonstrate significant performance boost over previous models, with 83.1 (+3.5) F1 score on the CoNLL-2012 benchmark and 87.5 (+2.5) F1 score on the GAP benchmark.

2019

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Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering
Xiaoya Li | Fan Yin | Zijun Sun | Xiayu Li | Arianna Yuan | Duo Chai | Mingxin Zhou | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for the task of entity-relation extraction. We cast the task as a multi-turn question answering problem, i.e., the extraction of entities and elations is transformed to the task of identifying answer spans from the context. This multi-turn QA formalization comes with several key advantages: firstly, the question query encodes important information for the entity/relation class we want to identify; secondly, QA provides a natural way of jointly modeling entity and relation; and thirdly, it allows us to exploit the well developed machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. Experiments on the ACE and the CoNLL04 corpora demonstrate that the proposed paradigm significantly outperforms previous best models. We are able to obtain the state-of-the-art results on all of the ACE04, ACE05 and CoNLL04 datasets, increasing the SOTA results on the three datasets to 49.6 (+1.2), 60.3 (+0.7) and 69.2 (+1.4), respectively. Additionally, we construct and will release a newly developed dataset RESUME, which requires multi-step reasoning to construct entity dependencies, as opposed to the single-step dependency extraction in the triplet exaction in previous datasets. The proposed multi-turn QA model also achieves the best performance on the RESUME dataset.

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Is Word Segmentation Necessary for Deep Learning of Chinese Representations?
Xiaoya Li | Yuxian Meng | Xiaofei Sun | Qinghong Han | Arianna Yuan | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Segmenting a chunk of text into words is usually the first step of processing Chinese text, but its necessity has rarely been explored. In this paper, we ask the fundamental question of whether Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is necessary for deep learning-based Chinese Natural Language Processing. We benchmark neural word-based models which rely on word segmentation against neural char-based models which do not involve word segmentation in four end-to-end NLP benchmark tasks: language modeling, machine translation, sentence matching/paraphrase and text classification. Through direct comparisons between these two types of models, we find that char-based models consistently outperform word-based models. Based on these observations, we conduct comprehensive experiments to study why word-based models underperform char-based models in these deep learning-based NLP tasks. We show that it is because word-based models are more vulnerable to data sparsity and the presence of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, and thus more prone to overfitting. We hope this paper could encourage researchers in the community to rethink the necessity of word segmentation in deep learning-based Chinese Natural Language Processing.

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Deep Adversarial Learning for NLP
William Yang Wang | Sameer Singh | Jiwei Li
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorials

Adversarial learning is a game-theoretic learning paradigm, which has achieved huge successes in the field of Computer Vision recently. Adversarial learning is also a general framework that enables a variety of learning models, including the popular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Due to the discrete nature of language, designing adversarial learning models is still challenging for NLP problems. In this tutorial, we provide a gentle introduction to the foundation of deep adversarial learning, as well as some practical problem formulations and solutions in NLP. We describe recent advances in deep adversarial learning for NLP, with a special focus on generation, adversarial examples & rules, and dialogue. We provide an overview of the research area, categorize different types of adversarial learning models, and discuss pros and cons, aiming at providing some practical perspectives on the future of adversarial learning for solving real-world NLP problems.

2018

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Deep Reinforcement Learning for NLP
William Yang Wang | Jiwei Li | Xiaodong He
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks (including generation, language grounding, reasoning, information extraction, coreference resolution, and dialog) can be formulated as deep reinforcement learning (DRL) problems. However, since language is often discrete and the space for all sentences is infinite, there are many challenges for formulating reinforcement learning problems of NLP tasks. In this tutorial, we provide a gentle introduction to the foundation of deep reinforcement learning, as well as some practical DRL solutions in NLP. We describe recent advances in designing deep reinforcement learning for NLP, with a special focus on generation, dialogue, and information extraction. Finally, we discuss why they succeed, and when they may fail, aiming at providing some practical advice about deep reinforcement learning for solving real-world NLP problems.

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Generating More Interesting Responses in Neural Conversation Models with Distributional Constraints
Ashutosh Baheti | Alan Ritter | Jiwei Li | Bill Dolan
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural conversation models tend to generate safe, generic responses for most inputs. This is due to the limitations of likelihood-based decoding objectives in generation tasks with diverse outputs, such as conversation. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach for incorporating side information in the form of distributional constraints over the generated responses. We propose two constraints that help generate more content rich responses that are based on a model of syntax and topics (Griffiths et al., 2005) and semantic similarity (Arora et al., 2016). We evaluate our approach against a variety of competitive baselines, using both automatic metrics and human judgments, showing that our proposed approach generates responses that are much less generic without sacrificing plausibility. A working demo of our code can be found at https://github.com/abaheti95/DC-NeuralConversation.

2017

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Neural Net Models of Open-domain Discourse Coherence
Jiwei Li | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Discourse coherence is strongly associated with text quality, making it important to natural language generation and understanding. Yet existing models of coherence focus on measuring individual aspects of coherence (lexical overlap, rhetorical structure, entity centering) in narrow domains. In this paper, we describe domain-independent neural models of discourse coherence that are capable of measuring multiple aspects of coherence in existing sentences and can maintain coherence while generating new sentences. We study both discriminative models that learn to distinguish coherent from incoherent discourse, and generative models that produce coherent text, including a novel neural latent-variable Markovian generative model that captures the latent discourse dependencies between sentences in a text. Our work achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple coherence evaluations, and marks an initial step in generating coherent texts given discourse contexts.

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Adversarial Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation
Jiwei Li | Will Monroe | Tianlin Shi | Sébastien Jean | Alan Ritter | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We apply adversarial training to open-domain dialogue generation, training a system to produce sequences that are indistinguishable from human-generated dialogue utterances. We cast the task as a reinforcement learning problem where we jointly train two systems: a generative model to produce response sequences, and a discriminator—analagous to the human evaluator in the Turing test— to distinguish between the human-generated dialogues and the machine-generated ones. In this generative adversarial network approach, the outputs from the discriminator are used to encourage the system towards more human-like dialogue. Further, we investigate models for adversarial evaluation that uses success in fooling an adversary as a dialogue evaluation metric, while avoiding a number of potential pitfalls. Experimental results on several metrics, including adversarial evaluation, demonstrate that the adversarially-trained system generates higher-quality responses than previous baselines

2016

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A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models
Jiwei Li | Michel Galley | Chris Brockett | Jianfeng Gao | Bill Dolan
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Visualizing and Understanding Neural Models in NLP
Jiwei Li | Xinlei Chen | Eduard Hovy | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation
Jiwei Li | Will Monroe | Alan Ritter | Dan Jurafsky | Michel Galley | Jianfeng Gao
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model
Jiwei Li | Michel Galley | Chris Brockett | Georgios Spithourakis | Jianfeng Gao | Bill Dolan
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2015

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Do Multi-Sense Embeddings Improve Natural Language Understanding?
Jiwei Li | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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When Are Tree Structures Necessary for Deep Learning of Representations?
Jiwei Li | Thang Luong | Dan Jurafsky | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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A Hierarchical Neural Autoencoder for Paragraphs and Documents
Jiwei Li | Thang Luong | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2014

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Sentiment Analysis on the People’s Daily
Jiwei Li | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Major Life Event Extraction from Twitter based on Congratulations/Condolences Speech Acts
Jiwei Li | Alan Ritter | Claire Cardie | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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A Model of Coherence Based on Distributed Sentence Representation
Jiwei Li | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Recursive Deep Models for Discourse Parsing
Jiwei Li | Rumeng Li | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Weakly Supervised User Profile Extraction from Twitter
Jiwei Li | Alan Ritter | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Towards a General Rule for Identifying Deceptive Opinion Spam
Jiwei Li | Myle Ott | Claire Cardie | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2013

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TopicSpam: a Topic-Model based approach for spam detection
Jiwei Li | Claire Cardie | Sujian Li
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Evolutionary Hierarchical Dirichlet Process for Timeline Summarization
Jiwei Li | Sujian Li
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Identifying Manipulated Offerings on Review Portals
Jiwei Li | Myle Ott | Claire Cardie
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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A Novel Feature-based Bayesian Model for Query Focused Multi-document Summarization
Jiwei Li | Sujian Li
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 1

Supervised learning methods and LDA based topic model have been successfully applied in the field of multi-document summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised approach that can incorporate rich sentence features into Bayesian topic models in a principled way, thus taking advantages of both topic model and feature based supervised learning methods. Experimental results on DUC2007, TAC2008 and TAC2009 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

2012

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Update Summarization using a Multi-level Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Model
Jiwei Li | Sujian Li | Xun Wang | Ye Tian | Baobao Chang
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition by Selecting Typical Training Examples
Xun Wang | Sujian Li | Jiwei Li | Wenjie Li
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Fine-Grained Classification of Named Entities by Fusing Multi-Features
Wenjie Li | Jiwei Li | Ye Tian | Zhifang Sui
Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters