We present a framework called G3R for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL generation. G3R aims to address two limitations of current approaches: (1) The structure of the abstract syntax tree (AST) is not fully explored during the decoding process which is crucial for complex SQL generation; (2) Domain knowledge is not incorporated to enhance their ability to generalise to unseen domains. G3R consists of a graph-guided SQL generator and a knowledge-enhanced re-ranking mechanism. Firstly, during the decoding process, An AST-Grammar bipartite graph is constructed for both the AST and corresponding grammar rules of the generated partial SQL query. The graph-guided SQL generator captures its structural information and fuses heterogeneous information to predict the action sequence which can construct the AST for the corresponding SQL query uniquely. Then, in the inference stage, a knowledge-enhanced re-ranking mechanism is proposed to introduce domain knowledge to re-rank candidate SQL queries from the beam output and choose the final answer. The SQL ranker is based on pre-trained language models (PLM) and contrastive learning with hybrid prompt tuning is incorporated to stimulate the knowledge of PLMs and make it more discriminative. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the Spider and Spider-DK benchmarks, which are challenging complex and cross-domain benchmarks for Text-to-SQL semantic analysis.

Despite advances in large pre-trained neural language models, they are prone to generating toxic language, which brings security risks to their applications.We introduce MIL-Decoding, which detoxifies language models at token-level by interpolating it with a trained multiple instance learning (MIL) network.MIL model is trained on a corpus with a toxicity label for each text to predict the overall toxicity and the toxicity of each token in its context.Intuitively, the MIL network computes a toxicity distribution over next tokens according to the generated context which supplements the original language model to avoid toxicity.We evaluate MIL-Decoding with automatic metrics and human evaluation, where MIL-Decoding outperforms other baselines in detoxification while it only hurts generation fluency a little bit.

Previous research for adapting a general neural machine translation (NMT) model into a specific domain usually neglects the diversity in translation within the same domain, which is a core problem for domain adaptation in real-world scenarios. One representative of such challenging scenarios is to deploy a translation system for a conference with a specific topic, e.g., global warming or coronavirus, where there are usually extremely less resources due to the limited schedule. To motivate wider investigation in such a scenario, we present a real-world fine-grained domain adaptation task in machine translation (FGraDA). The FGraDA dataset consists of Chinese-English translation task for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. Each sub-domain is equipped with a development set and test set for evaluation purposes. To be closer to reality, FGraDA does not employ any in-domain bilingual training data but provides bilingual dictionaries and wiki knowledge base, which can be easier obtained within a short time. We benchmark the fine-grained domain adaptation task and present in-depth analyses showing that there are still challenging problems to further improve the performance with heterogeneous resources.

With the development of pre-trained models (PTMs), the performance of text classification has been continuously improved by directly employing the features generated by PTMs. However such way might not fully explore the knowledge in PTMs as it is constrained by the difficulty of the task. Compared to difficult task, the learning algorithms tend to saturate early on the simple task. Moreover, the native sentence representations derived from BERT are prone to be collapsed and directly employing such representation for text classification might fail to fully capture discriminative features. In order to address these issues, in this paper we propose a novel framework for text classification which implements a two-stage training strategy. In the pre-training stage, auxiliary labels are introduced to increase the task difficulties and to fully exploit the knowledge in the pre-trained model. In the fine-tuning stage, the textual representation learned in the pre-training stage is employed and the classifier is fine-tuned to obtain better classification performance. Experiments were conducted on six text classification corpora and the results showed that the proposed framework outperformed several state-of-the-art baselines.

Currently, researchers focus on generating codes from the requirement documents. However, current approaches still perform poorly on some requirements needing complex problem-solving skills. In reality, to tackle such complex requirements, instead of directly translating requirement documents into codes, software engineers write codes via unified modeling language diagrams, such as flowcharts, an intermediate tool to analyze and visualize the system. Therefore, we propose a new source code generation task, that is, to generate source code from flowcharts with texts. We manually construct a benchmark dataset containing 320 flowcharts with their corresponding source codes. Obviously, it is not straightforward to employ the current approaches for the new source code generation task since (1) the flowchart is a graph that contains various structures, including loop, selection, and others which is different from texts; (2) the connections between nodes in the flowchart are abundant and diverse which need to be carefully handled. To solve the above problems, we propose a two-stage code generation model. In the first stage, a structure recognition algorithm is employed to transform the flowchart into pseudo-code containing the structural conventions of a typical programming language such as while, if. In the second stage, a code generation model is employed to convert the pseudo-code into code. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve some improvement over the baselines.

Sentence intention matching is vital for natural language understanding. Especially for Chinese sentence intention matching task, due to the ambiguity of Chinese words, semantic missing or semantic confusion are more likely to occur in the encoding process. Although the existing methods have enriched text representation through pre-trained word embedding to solve this problem, due to the particularity of Chinese text, different granularities of pre-trained word embedding will affect the semantic description of a piece of text. In this paper, we propose an effective approach that combines character-granularity and word-granularity features to perform sentence intention matching, and we utilize soft alignment attention to enhance the local information of sentences on the corresponding levels. The proposed method can capture sentence feature information from multiple perspectives and correlation information between different levels of sentences. By evaluating on BQ and LCQMC datasets, our model has achieved remarkable results, and demonstrates better or comparable performance with BERT-based models.