JinJun Xiong


2021

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Measuring Fine-Grained Domain Relevance of Terms: A Hierarchical Core-Fringe Approach
Jie Huang | Kevin Chang | JinJun Xiong | Wen-mei Hwu
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)

We propose to measure fine-grained domain relevance– the degree that a term is relevant to a broad (e.g., computer science) or narrow (e.g., deep learning) domain. Such measurement is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. To handle long-tail terms, we build a core-anchored semantic graph, which uses core terms with rich description information to bridge the vast remaining fringe terms semantically. To support a fine-grained domain without relying on a matching corpus for supervision, we develop hierarchical core-fringe learning, which learns core and fringe terms jointly in a semi-supervised manner contextualized in the hierarchy of the domain. To reduce expensive human efforts, we employ automatic annotation and hierarchical positive-unlabeled learning. Our approach applies to big or small domains, covers head or tail terms, and requires little human effort. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods outperform strong baselines and even surpass professional human performance.

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xER: An Explainable Model for Entity Resolution using an Efficient Solution for the Clique Partitioning Problem
Samhita Vadrevu | Rakesh Nagi | JinJun Xiong | Wen-mei Hwu
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we propose a global, self- explainable solution to solve a prominent NLP problem: Entity Resolution (ER). We formu- late ER as a graph partitioning problem. Every mention of a real-world entity is represented by a node in the graph, and the pairwise sim- ilarity scores between the mentions are used to associate these nodes to exactly one clique, which represents a real-world entity in the ER domain. In this paper, we use Clique Partition- ing Problem (CPP), which is an Integer Pro- gram (IP) to formulate ER as a graph partition- ing problem and then highlight the explainable nature of this method. Since CPP is NP-Hard, we introduce an efficient solution procedure, the xER algorithm, to solve CPP as a combi- nation of finding maximal cliques in the graph and then performing generalized set packing using a novel formulation. We discuss the advantages of using xER over the traditional methods and provide the computational exper- iments and results of applying this method to ER data sets.

2020

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Exploring Semantic Capacity of Terms
Jie Huang | Zilong Wang | Kevin Chang | Wen-mei Hwu | JinJun Xiong
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We introduce and study semantic capacity of terms. For example, the semantic capacity of artificial intelligence is higher than that of linear regression since artificial intelligence possesses a broader meaning scope. Understanding semantic capacity of terms will help many downstream tasks in natural language processing. For this purpose, we propose a two-step model to investigate semantic capacity of terms, which takes a large text corpus as input and can evaluate semantic capacity of terms if the text corpus can provide enough co-occurrence information of terms. Extensive experiments in three fields demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of our model compared with well-designed baselines and human-level evaluations.

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A Multi-Perspective Architecture for Semantic Code Search
Rajarshi Haldar | Lingfei Wu | JinJun Xiong | Julia Hockenmaier
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The ability to match pieces of code to their corresponding natural language descriptions and vice versa is fundamental for natural language search interfaces to software repositories. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-perspective cross-lingual neural framework for code–text matching, inspired in part by a previous model for monolingual text-to-text matching, to capture both global and local similarities. Our experiments on the CoNaLa dataset show that our proposed model yields better performance on this cross-lingual text-to-code matching task than previous approaches that map code and text to a single joint embedding space.

2019

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Equipping Educational Applications with Domain Knowledge
Tarek Sakakini | Hongyu Gong | Jong Yoon Lee | Robert Schloss | JinJun Xiong | Suma Bhat
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

One of the challenges of building natural language processing (NLP) applications for education is finding a large domain-specific corpus for the subject of interest (e.g., history or science). To address this challenge, we propose a tool, Dexter, that extracts a subject-specific corpus from a heterogeneous corpus, such as Wikipedia, by relying on a small seed corpus and distributed document representations. We empirically show the impact of the generated corpus on language modeling, estimating word embeddings, and consequently, distractor generation, resulting in better performances than while using a general domain corpus, a heuristically constructed domain-specific corpus, and a corpus generated by a popular system: BootCaT.

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Reinforcement Learning Based Text Style Transfer without Parallel Training Corpus
Hongyu Gong | Suma Bhat | Lingfei Wu | JinJun Xiong | Wen-mei Hwu
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)

Text style transfer rephrases a text from a source style (e.g., informal) to a target style (e.g., formal) while keeping its original meaning. Despite the success existing works have achieved using a parallel corpus for the two styles, transferring text style has proven significantly more challenging when there is no parallel training corpus. In this paper, we address this challenge by using a reinforcement-learning-based generator-evaluator architecture. Our generator employs an attention-based encoder-decoder to transfer a sentence from the source style to the target style. Our evaluator is an adversarially trained style discriminator with semantic and syntactic constraints that score the generated sentence for style, meaning preservation, and fluency. Experimental results on two different style transfer tasks–sentiment transfer, and formality transfer–show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.Furthermore, we perform a manual evaluation that demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method using subjective metrics of generated text quality.

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PaRe: A Paper-Reviewer Matching Approach Using a Common Topic Space
Omer Anjum | Hongyu Gong | Suma Bhat | Wen-Mei Hwu | JinJun Xiong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Finding the right reviewers to assess the quality of conference submissions is a time consuming process for conference organizers. Given the importance of this step, various automated reviewer-paper matching solutions have been proposed to alleviate the burden. Prior approaches including bag-of-words model and probabilistic topic model are less effective to deal with the vocabulary mismatch and partial topic overlap between the submission and reviewer. Our approach, the common topic model, jointly models the topics common to the submission and the reviewer’s profile while relying on abstract topic vectors. Experiments and insightful evaluations on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent improvements compared to the state-of-the-art.

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Faceted Hierarchy: A New Graph Type to Organize Scientific Concepts and a Construction Method
Qingkai Zeng | Mengxia Yu | Wenhao Yu | JinJun Xiong | Yiyu Shi | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-13)

On a scientific concept hierarchy, a parent concept may have a few attributes, each of which has multiple values being a group of child concepts. We call these attributes facets: classification has a few facets such as application (e.g., face recognition), model (e.g., svm, knn), and metric (e.g., precision). In this work, we aim at building faceted concept hierarchies from scientific literature. Hierarchy construction methods heavily rely on hypernym detection, however, the faceted relations are parent-to-child links but the hypernym relation is a multi-hop, i.e., ancestor-to-descendent link with a specific facet “type-of”. We use information extraction techniques to find synonyms, sibling concepts, and ancestor-descendent relations from a data science corpus. And we propose a hierarchy growth algorithm to infer the parent-child links from the three types of relationships. It resolves conflicts by maintaining the acyclic structure of a hierarchy.

2018

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Document Similarity for Texts of Varying Lengths via Hidden Topics
Hongyu Gong | Tarek Sakakini | Suma Bhat | JinJun Xiong
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Measuring similarity between texts is an important task for several applications. Available approaches to measure document similarity are inadequate for document pairs that have non-comparable lengths, such as a long document and its summary. This is because of the lexical, contextual and the abstraction gaps between a long document of rich details and its concise summary of abstract information. In this paper, we present a document matching approach to bridge this gap, by comparing the texts in a common space of hidden topics. We evaluate the matching algorithm on two matching tasks and find that it consistently and widely outperforms strong baselines. We also highlight the benefits of the incorporation of domain knowledge to text matching.