Li Yang


2020

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ETC: Encoding Long and Structured Inputs in Transformers
Joshua Ainslie | Santiago Ontanon | Chris Alberti | Vaclav Cvicek | Zachary Fisher | Philip Pham | Anirudh Ravula | Sumit Sanghai | Qifan Wang | Li Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Transformer models have advanced the state of the art in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present a new Transformer architecture, “Extended Transformer Construction” (ETC), that addresses two key challenges of standard Transformer architectures, namely scaling input length and encoding structured inputs. To scale attention to longer inputs, we introduce a novel global-local attention mechanism between global tokens and regular input tokens. We also show that combining global-local attention with relative position encodings and a “Contrastive Predictive Coding” (CPC) pre-training objective allows ETC to encode structured inputs. We achieve state-of-the-art results on four natural language datasets requiring long and/or structured inputs.

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Improving Multimodal Named Entity Recognition via Entity Span Detection with Unified Multimodal Transformer
Jianfei Yu | Jing Jiang | Li Yang | Rui Xia
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we study Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for social media posts. Existing approaches for MNER mainly suffer from two drawbacks: (1) despite generating word-aware visual representations, their word representations are insensitive to the visual context; (2) most of them ignore the bias brought by the visual context. To tackle the first issue, we propose a multimodal interaction module to obtain both image-aware word representations and word-aware visual representations. To alleviate the visual bias, we further propose to leverage purely text-based entity span detection as an auxiliary module, and design a Unified Multimodal Transformer to guide the final predictions with the entity span predictions. Experiments show that our unified approach achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

2019

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Naive Bayes and BiLSTM Ensemble for Discriminating between Mainland and Taiwan Variation of Mandarin Chinese
Li Yang | Yang Xiang
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

Automatic dialect identification is a more challengingctask than language identification, as it requires the ability to discriminate between varieties of one language. In this paper, we propose an ensemble based system, which combines traditional machine learning models trained on bag of n-gram fetures, with deep learning models trained on word embeddings, to solve the Discriminating between Mainland and Taiwan Variation of Mandarin Chinese (DMT) shared task at VarDial 2019. Our experiments show that a character bigram-trigram combination based Naive Bayes is a very strong model for identifying varieties of Mandarin Chinense. Through further ensemble of Navie Bayes and BiLSTM, our system (team: itsalexyang) achived an macro-averaged F1 score of 0.8530 and 0.8687 in two tracks.

2011

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Unsupervised Russian POS Tagging with Appropriate Context
Li Yang | Erik Peterson | John Chen | Yana Petrova | Rohini Srihari
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop On Cross Lingual Information Access

2009

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Generalizable Features Help Semantic Role Labeling
Li Yang
Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Volume 2