Yang Liu

Edinburgh

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 (National University of Defense Technology), 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 (Microsoft Cognitive Services Research), 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)


2021

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Fusing Context Into Knowledge Graph for Commonsense Question Answering
Yichong Xu | Chenguang Zhu | Ruochen Xu | Yang Liu | Michael Zeng | Xuedong Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Retrieval Enhanced Model for Commonsense Generation
Han Wang | Yang Liu | Chenguang Zhu | Linjun Shou | Ming Gong | Yichong Xu | Michael Zeng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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DialogSum: A Real-Life Scenario Dialogue Summarization Dataset
Yulong Chen | Yang Liu | Liang Chen | Yue Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Noisy Self-Knowledge Distillation for Text Summarization
Yang Liu | Sheng Shen | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In this paper we apply self-knowledge distillation to text summarization which we argue can alleviate problems with maximum-likelihood training on single reference and noisy datasets. Instead of relying on one-hot annotation labels, our student summarization model is trained with guidance from a teacher which generates smoothed labels to help regularize training. Furthermore, to better model uncertainty during training, we introduce multiple noise signals for both teacher and student models. We demonstrate experimentally on three benchmarks that our framework boosts the performance of both pretrained and non-pretrained summarizers achieving state-of-the-art results.

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QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization
Ming Zhong | Da Yin | Tao Yu | Ahmad Zaidi | Mutethia Mutuma | Rahul Jha | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Asli Celikyilmaz | Yang Liu | Xipeng Qiu | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Meetings are a key component of human collaboration. As increasing numbers of meetings are recorded and transcribed, meeting summaries have become essential to remind those who may or may not have attended the meetings about the key decisions made and the tasks to be completed. However, it is hard to create a single short summary that covers all the content of a long meeting involving multiple people and topics. In order to satisfy the needs of different types of users, we define a new query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task, where models have to select and summarize relevant spans of meetings in response to a query, and we introduce QMSum, a new benchmark for this task. QMSum consists of 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains. Besides, we investigate a locate-then-summarize method and evaluate a set of strong summarization baselines on the task. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that QMSum presents significant challenges in long meeting summarization for future research. Dataset is available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/QMSum.

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MediaSum: A Large-scale Media Interview Dataset for Dialogue Summarization
Chenguang Zhu | Yang Liu | Jie Mei | Michael Zeng
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

This paper introduces MediaSum, a large-scale media interview dataset consisting of 463.6K transcripts with abstractive summaries. To create this dataset, we collect interview transcripts from NPR and CNN and employ the overview and topic descriptions as summaries. Compared with existing public corpora for dialogue summarization, our dataset is an order of magnitude larger and contains complex multi-party conversations from multiple domains. We conduct statistical analysis to demonstrate the unique positional bias exhibited in the transcripts of televised and radioed interviews. We also show that MediaSum can be used in transfer learning to improve a model’s performance on other dialogue summarization tasks.

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DialogSum Challenge: Summarizing Real-Life Scenario Dialogues
Yulong Chen | Yang Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We propose a shared task on summarizing real-life scenario dialogues, DialogSum Challenge, to encourage researchers to address challenges in dialogue summarization, which has been less studied by the summarization community. Real-life scenario dialogue summarization has a wide potential application prospect in chat-bot and personal assistant. It contains unique challenges such as special discourse structure, coreference, pragmatics, and social common sense, which require specific representation learning technologies to deal with. We carefully annotate a large-scale dialogue summarization dataset based on multiple public dialogue corpus, opening the door to all kinds of summarization models.

2019

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Single Document Summarization as Tree Induction
Yang Liu | Ivan Titov | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

In this paper, we conceptualize single-document extractive summarization as a tree induction problem. In contrast to previous approaches which have relied on linguistically motivated document representations to generate summaries, our model induces a multi-root dependency tree while predicting the output summary. Each root node in the tree is a summary sentence, and the subtrees attached to it are sentences whose content relates to or explains the summary sentence. We design a new iterative refinement algorithm: it induces the trees through repeatedly refining the structures predicted by previous iterations. We demonstrate experimentally on two benchmark datasets that our summarizer performs competitively against state-of-the-art methods.

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Hierarchical Transformers for Multi-Document Summarization
Yang Liu | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we develop a neural summarization model which can effectively process multiple input documents and distill Transformer architecture with the ability to encode documents in a hierarchical manner. We represent cross-document relationships via an attention mechanism which allows to share information as opposed to simply concatenating text spans and processing them as a flat sequence. Our model learns latent dependencies among textual units, but can also take advantage of explicit graph representations focusing on similarity or discourse relations. Empirical results on the WikiSum dataset demonstrate that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines.

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Generating Summaries with Topic Templates and Structured Convolutional Decoders
Laura Perez-Beltrachini | Yang Liu | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing neural generation approaches create multi-sentence text as a single sequence. In this paper we propose a structured convolutional decoder that is guided by the content structure of target summaries. We compare our model with existing sequential decoders on three data sets representing different domains. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our summaries have better content coverage.

2018

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Learning Structured Text Representations
Yang Liu | Mirella Lapata
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6

In this paper, we focus on learning structure-aware document representations from data without recourse to a discourse parser or additional annotations. Drawing inspiration from recent efforts to empower neural networks with a structural bias (Cheng et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2017), we propose a model that can encode a document while automatically inducing rich structural dependencies. Specifically, we embed a differentiable non-projective parsing algorithm into a neural model and use attention mechanisms to incorporate the structural biases. Experimental evaluations across different tasks and datasets show that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on document modeling tasks while inducing intermediate structures which are both interpretable and meaningful.

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Structured Alignment Networks for Matching Sentences
Yang Liu | Matt Gardner | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Many tasks in natural language processing involve comparing two sentences to compute some notion of relevance, entailment, or similarity. Typically this comparison is done either at the word level or at the sentence level, with no attempt to leverage the inherent structure of the sentence. When sentence structure is used for comparison, it is obtained during a non-differentiable pre-processing step, leading to propagation of errors. We introduce a model of structured alignments between sentences, showing how to compare two sentences by matching their latent structures. Using a structured attention mechanism, our model matches candidate spans in the first sentence to candidate spans in the second sentence, simultaneously discovering the tree structure of each sentence. Our model is fully differentiable and trained only on the matching objective. We evaluate this model on two tasks, natural entailment detection and answer sentence selection, and find that modeling latent tree structures results in superior performance. Analysis of the learned sentence structures shows they can reflect some syntactic phenomena.

2017

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Learning Contextually Informed Representations for Linear-Time Discourse Parsing
Yang Liu | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent advances in RST discourse parsing have focused on two modeling paradigms: (a) high order parsers which jointly predict the tree structure of the discourse and the relations it encodes; or (b) linear-time parsers which are efficient but mostly based on local features. In this work, we propose a linear-time parser with a novel way of representing discourse constituents based on neural networks which takes into account global contextual information and is able to capture long-distance dependencies. Experimental results show that our parser obtains state-of-the art performance on benchmark datasets, while being efficient (with time complexity linear in the number of sentences in the document) and requiring minimal feature engineering.

2016

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Recognizing Implicit Discourse Relations via Repeated Reading: Neural Networks with Multi-Level Attention
Yang Liu | Sujian Li
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

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A Dependency-Based Neural Network for Relation Classification
Yang Liu | Furu Wei | Sujian Li | Heng Ji | Ming Zhou | Houfeng 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)