Peng Zhang


2021

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Natural Language Processing Meets Quantum Physics: A Survey and Categorization
Sixuan Wu | Jian Li | Peng Zhang | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent research has investigated quantum NLP, designing algorithms that process natural language in quantum computers, and also quantum-inspired algorithms that improve NLP performance on classical computers. In this survey, we review representative methods at the intersection of NLP and quantum physics in the past ten years, categorizing them according to the use of quantum theory, the linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. The literature review ends with a discussion on the key factors to the success that has been achieved by existing work, as well as challenges ahead, with the goal of better understanding the promises and further directions.

2019

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CASA-NLU: Context-Aware Self-Attentive Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Chatbots
Arshit Gupta | Peng Zhang | Garima Lalwani | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a core component of dialog systems. It typically involves two tasks - Intent Classification (IC) and Slot Labeling (SL), which are then followed by a dialogue management (DM) component. Such NLU systems cater to utterances in isolation, thus pushing the problem of context management to DM. However, contextual information is critical to the correct prediction of intents in a conversation. Prior work on contextual NLU has been limited in terms of the types of contextual signals used and the understanding of their impact on the model. In this work, we propose a context-aware self-attentive NLU (CASA-NLU) model that uses multiple signals over a variable context window, such as previous intents, slots, dialog acts and utterances, in addition to the current user utterance. CASA-NLU outperforms a recurrent contextual NLU baseline on two conversational datasets, yielding a gain of up to 7% on the IC task. Moreover, a non-contextual variant of CASA-NLU achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard public datasets - SNIPS and ATIS.

2015

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Reinforcing the Topic of Embeddings with Theta Pure Dependence for Text Classification
Ning Xing | Yuexian Hou | Peng Zhang | Wenjie Li | Dawei Song
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2010

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Event-Based Hyperspace Analogue to Language for Query Expansion
Tingxu Yan | Tamsin Maxwell | Dawei Song | Yuexian Hou | Peng Zhang
Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers

2008

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Exploiting the Role of Position Feature in Chinese Relation Extraction
Peng Zhang | Wenjie Li | Furu Wei | Qin Lu | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

Relation extraction is the task of finding pre-defined semantic relations between two entities or entity mentions from text. Many methods, such as feature-based and kernel-based methods, have been proposed in the literature. Among them, feature-based methods draw much attention from researchers. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing feature-based methods did not explicitly incorporate the position feature and no in-depth analysis was conducted in this regard. In this paper, we define and exploit nine types of position information between two named entity mentions and then use it along with other features in a multi-class classification framework for Chinese relation extraction. Experiments on the ACE 2005 data set show that the position feature is more effective than the other recognized features like entity type/subtype and character-based N-gram context. Most important, it can be easily captured and does not require as much effort as applying deep natural language processing.

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A Novel Feature-based Approach to Chinese Entity Relation Extraction
Wenjie Li | Peng Zhang | Furu Wei | Yuexian Hou | Qin Lu
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, Short Papers