Fei Liu

University of Melbourne

Other people with similar names: Fei Liu (May refer to several people), Fei Liu (UT Dallas, Bosch, CMU, University of Central Florida)


2020

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Evaluating the Utility of Model Configurations and Data Augmentation on Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity
Yuxia Wang | Fei Liu | Karin Verspoor | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the 19th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

In this paper, we apply pre-trained language models to the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task, with a specific focus on the clinical domain. In low-resource setting of clinical STS, these large models tend to be impractical and prone to overfitting. Building on BERT, we study the impact of a number of model design choices, namely different fine-tuning and pooling strategies. We observe that the impact of domain-specific fine-tuning on clinical STS is much less than that in the general domain, likely due to the concept richness of the domain. Based on this, we propose two data augmentation techniques. Experimental results on N2C2-STS 1 demonstrate substantial improvements, validating the utility of the proposed methods.

2019

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The Referential Reader: A Recurrent Entity Network for Anaphora Resolution
Fei Liu | Luke Zettlemoyer | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present a new architecture for storing and accessing entity mentions during online text processing. While reading the text, entity references are identified, and may be stored by either updating or overwriting a cell in a fixed-length memory. The update operation implies coreference with the other mentions that are stored in the same cell; the overwrite operation causes these mentions to be forgotten. By encoding the memory operations as differentiable gates, it is possible to train the model end-to-end, using both a supervised anaphora resolution objective as well as a supplementary language modeling objective. Evaluation on a dataset of pronoun-name anaphora demonstrates strong performance with purely incremental text processing.

2018

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Evaluating the Utility of Hand-crafted Features in Sequence Labelling
Minghao Wu | Fei Liu | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Conventional wisdom is that hand-crafted features are redundant for deep learning models, as they already learn adequate representations of text automatically from corpora. In this work, we test this claim by proposing a new method for exploiting handcrafted features as part of a novel hybrid learning approach, incorporating a feature auto-encoder loss component. We evaluate on the task of named entity recognition (NER), where we show that including manual features for part-of-speech, word shapes and gazetteers can improve the performance of a neural CRF model. We obtain a F 1 of 91.89 for the CoNLL-2003 English shared task, which significantly outperforms a collection of highly competitive baseline models. We also present an ablation study showing the importance of auto-encoding, over using features as either inputs or outputs alone, and moreover, show including the autoencoder components reduces training requirements to 60%, while retaining the same predictive accuracy.

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Narrative Modeling with Memory Chains and Semantic Supervision
Fei Liu | Trevor Cohn | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Story comprehension requires a deep semantic understanding of the narrative, making it a challenging task. Inspired by previous studies on ROC Story Cloze Test, we propose a novel method, tracking various semantic aspects with external neural memory chains while encouraging each to focus on a particular semantic aspect. Evaluated on the task of story ending prediction, our model demonstrates superior performance to a collection of competitive baselines, setting a new state of the art.

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Recurrent Entity Networks with Delayed Memory Update for Targeted Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Fei Liu | Trevor Cohn | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

While neural networks have been shown to achieve impressive results for sentence-level sentiment analysis, targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis (TABSA) — extraction of fine-grained opinion polarity w.r.t. a pre-defined set of aspects — remains a difficult task. Motivated by recent advances in memory-augmented models for machine reading, we propose a novel architecture, utilising external “memory chains” with a delayed memory update mechanism to track entities. On a TABSA task, the proposed model demonstrates substantial improvements over state-of-the-art approaches, including those using external knowledge bases.

2017

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Improving End-to-End Memory Networks with Unified Weight Tying
Fei Liu | Trevor Cohn | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2017

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Gated End-to-End Memory Networks
Fei Liu | Julien Perez
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

Machine reading using differentiable reasoning models has recently shown remarkable progress. In this context, End-to-End trainable Memory Networks (MemN2N) have demonstrated promising performance on simple natural language based reasoning tasks such as factual reasoning and basic deduction. However, other tasks, namely multi-fact question-answering, positional reasoning or dialog related tasks, remain challenging particularly due to the necessity of more complex interactions between the memory and controller modules composing this family of models. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end memory access regulation mechanism inspired by the current progress on the connection short-cutting principle in the field of computer vision. Concretely, we develop a Gated End-to-End trainable Memory Network architecture (GMemN2N). From the machine learning perspective, this new capability is learned in an end-to-end fashion without the use of any additional supervision signal which is, as far as our knowledge goes, the first of its kind. Our experiments show significant improvements on the most challenging tasks in the 20 bAbI dataset, without the use of any domain knowledge. Then, we show improvements on the Dialog bAbI tasks including the real human-bot conversion-based Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset. On these two datasets, our model sets the new state of the art.

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Dialog state tracking, a machine reading approach using Memory Network
Julien Perez | Fei Liu
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate a compact representation of the current dialog status from a sequence of noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. This paper introduces a novel method of dialog state tracking based on the general paradigm of machine reading and proposes to solve it using an End-to-End Memory Network, MemN2N, a memory-enhanced neural network architecture. We evaluate the proposed approach on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset. The corpus has been converted for the occasion in order to frame the hidden state variable inference as a question-answering task based on a sequence of utterances extracted from a dialog. We show that the proposed tracker gives encouraging results. Then, we propose to extend the DSTC-2 dataset with specific reasoning capabilities requirement like counting, list maintenance, yes-no question answering and indefinite knowledge management. Finally, we present encouraging results using our proposed MemN2N based tracking model.

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A Language-independent and Compositional Model for Personality Trait Recognition from Short Texts
Fei Liu | Julien Perez | Scott Nowson
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

There have been many attempts at automatically recognising author personality traits from text, typically incorporating linguistic features with conventional machine learning models, e.g. linear regression or Support Vector Machines. In this work, we propose to use deep-learning-based models with atomic features of text – the characters – to build hierarchical, vectorial word and sentence representations for the task of trait inference. On a corpus of tweets, this method shows state-of-the-art performance across five traits and three languages (English, Spanish and Italian) compared with prior work in author profiling. The results, supported by preliminary visualisation work, are encouraging for the ability to detect complex human traits.

2016

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A Recurrent and Compositional Model for Personality Trait Recognition from Short Texts
Fei Liu | Julien Perez | Scott Nowson
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media (PEOPLES)

Many methods have been used to recognise author personality traits from text, typically combining linguistic feature engineering with shallow learning models, e.g. linear regression or Support Vector Machines. This work uses deep-learning-based models and atomic features of text, the characters, to build hierarchical, vectorial word and sentence representations for trait inference. This method, applied to a corpus of tweets, shows state-of-the-art performance across five traits compared with prior work. The results, supported by preliminary visualisation work, are encouraging for the ability to detect complex human traits.

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VectorWeavers at SemEval-2016 Task 10: From Incremental Meaning to Semantic Unit (phrase by phrase)
Andreas Scherbakov | Ekaterina Vylomova | Fei Liu | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2014

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Automatic Identification of Expressions of Locations in Tweet Messages using Conditional Random Fields
Fei Liu | Afshin Rahimi | Bahar Salehi | Miji Choi | Ping Tan | Long Duong
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2014