Wenlin Yao


2021

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Connect-the-Dots: Bridging Semantics between Words and Definitions via Aligning Word Sense Inventories
Wenlin Yao | Xiaoman Pan | Lifeng Jin | Jianshu Chen | Dian Yu | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to automatically identify the exact meaning of one word according to its context. Existing supervised models struggle to make correct predictions on rare word senses due to limited training data and can only select the best definition sentence from one predefined word sense inventory (e.g., WordNet). To address the data sparsity problem and generalize the model to be independent of one predefined inventory, we propose a gloss alignment algorithm that can align definition sentences (glosses) with the same meaning from different sense inventories to collect rich lexical knowledge. We then train a model to identify semantic equivalence between a target word in context and one of its glosses using these aligned inventories, which exhibits strong transfer capability to many WSD tasks. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method improves predictions on both frequent and rare word senses, outperforming prior work by 1.2% on the All-Words WSD Task and 4.3% on the Low-Shot WSD Task. Evaluation on WiC Task also indicates that our method can better capture word meanings in context.

2020

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Weakly Supervised Subevent Knowledge Acquisition
Wenlin Yao | Zeyu Dai | Maitreyi Ramaswamy | Bonan Min | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Subevents elaborate an event and widely exist in event descriptions. Subevent knowledge is useful for discourse analysis and event-centric applications. Acknowledging the scarcity of subevent knowledge, we propose a weakly supervised approach to extract subevent relation tuples from text and build the first large scale subevent knowledge base. We first obtain the initial set of event pairs that are likely to have the subevent relation, by exploiting two observations that 1) subevents are temporally contained by the parent event, and 2) the definitions of the parent event can be used to further guide the identification of subevents. Then, we collect rich weak supervision using the initial seed subevent pairs to train a contextual classifier using BERT and apply the classifier to identify new subevent pairs. The evaluation showed that the acquired subevent tuples (239K) are of high quality (90.1% accuracy) and cover a wide range of event types. The acquired subevent knowledge has been shown useful for discourse analysis and identifying a range of event-event relations.

2018

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Temporal Event Knowledge Acquisition via Identifying Narratives
Wenlin Yao | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Inspired by the double temporality characteristic of narrative texts, we propose a novel approach for acquiring rich temporal “before/after” event knowledge across sentences in narrative stories. The double temporality states that a narrative story often describes a sequence of events following the chronological order and therefore, the temporal order of events matches with their textual order. We explored narratology principles and built a weakly supervised approach that identifies 287k narrative paragraphs from three large corpora. We then extracted rich temporal event knowledge from these narrative paragraphs. Such event knowledge is shown useful to improve temporal relation classification and outperforms several recent neural network models on the narrative cloze task.

2017

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Using Context Events in Neural Network Models for Event Temporal Status Identification
Zeyu Dai | Wenlin Yao | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Focusing on the task of identifying event temporal status, we find that events directly or indirectly governing the target event in a dependency tree are most important contexts. Therefore, we extract dependency chains containing context events and use them as input in neural network models, which consistently outperform previous models using local context words as input. Visualization verifies that the dependency chain representation can effectively capture the context events which are closely related to the target event and play key roles in predicting event temporal status.

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Online Deception Detection Refueled by Real World Data Collection
Wenlin Yao | Zeyu Dai | Ruihong Huang | James Caverlee
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017

The lack of large realistic datasets presents a bottleneck in online deception detection studies. In this paper, we apply a data collection method based on social network analysis to quickly identify high quality deceptive and truthful online reviews1 from Amazon. The dataset contains more than 10,000 deceptive reviews and is diverse in product domains and reviewers. Using this dataset, we explore effective general features for online deception detection that perform well across domains. We demonstrate that with generalized features – advertising speak and writing complexity scores – deception detection performance can be further improved by adding additional deceptive reviews from assorted domains in training. Finally, reviewer level evaluation gives an interesting insight into different deceptive reviewers’ writing styles.

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A Weakly Supervised Approach to Train Temporal Relation Classifiers and Acquire Regular Event Pairs Simultaneously
Wenlin Yao | Saipravallika Nettyam | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017

Capabilities of detecting temporal and causal relations between two events can benefit many applications. Most of existing temporal relation classifiers were trained in a supervised manner. Instead, we explore the observation that regular event pairs show a consistent temporal relation despite of their various contexts and these rich contexts can be used to train a contextual temporal relation classifier, which can further recognize new temporal relation contexts and identify new regular event pairs. We focus on detecting after and before temporal relations and design a weakly supervised learning approach that extracts thousands of regular event pairs and learns a contextual temporal relation classifier simultaneously. Evaluation shows that the acquired regular event pairs are of high quality and contain rich commonsense knowledge and domain specific knowledge. In addition, the weakly supervised trained temporal relation classifier achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art supervised systems.