Yue Zhang


2021

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G-Transformer for Document-Level Machine TranslationG-Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation
Guangsheng Bao | Yue Zhang | Zhiyang Teng | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo
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)

Document-level MT models are still far from satisfactory. Existing work extend translation unit from single sentence to multiple sentences. However, study shows that when we further enlarge the translation unit to a whole document, supervised training of Transformer can fail. In this paper, we find such failure is not caused by overfitting, but by sticking around local minima during training. Our analysis shows that the increased complexity of target-to-source attention is a reason for the failure. As a solution, we propose G-Transformer, introducing locality assumption as an inductive bias into Transformer, reducing the hypothesis space of the attention from target to source. Experiments show that G-Transformer converges faster and more stably than Transformer, achieving new state-of-the-art BLEU scores for both nonpretraining and pre-training settings on three benchmark datasets.

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TextFlint : Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language ProcessingTextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing
Xiao Wang | Qin Liu | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang | Yicheng Zou | Xin Zhou | Jiacheng Ye | Yongxin Zhang | Rui Zheng | Zexiong Pang | Qinzhuo Wu | Zhengyan Li | Chong Zhang | Ruotian Ma | Zichu Fei | Ruijian Cai | Jun Zhao | Xingwu Hu | Zhiheng Yan | Yiding Tan | Yuan Hu | Qiyuan Bian | Zhihua Liu | Shan Qin | Bolin Zhu | Xiaoyu Xing | Jinlan Fu | Yue Zhang | Minlong Peng | Xiaoqing Zheng | Yaqian Zhou | Zhongyu Wei | Xipeng Qiu | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

TextFlint is a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP tasks that incorporates universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. This enables practitioners to automatically evaluate their models from various aspects or to customize their evaluations as desired with just a few lines of code. TextFlint also generates complete analytical reports as well as targeted augmented data to address the shortcomings of the model in terms of its robustness. To guarantee acceptability, all the text transformations are linguistically based and all the transformed data selected (up to 100,000 texts) scored highly under human evaluation. To validate the utility, we performed large-scale empirical evaluations (over 67,000) on state-of-the-art deep learning models, classic supervised methods, and real-world systems. The toolkit is already available at https://github.com/textflint with all the evaluation results demonstrated at textflint.io.

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Learning to Rank in the Age of Muppets : EffectivenessEfficiency Tradeoffs in Multi-Stage Ranking
Yue Zhang | ChengCheng Hu | Yuqi Liu | Hui Fang | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing

It is well known that rerankers built on pretrained transformer models such as BERT have dramatically improved retrieval effectiveness in many tasks. However, these gains have come at substantial costs in terms of efficiency, as noted by many researchers. In this work, we show that it is possible to retain the benefits of transformer-based rerankers in a multi-stage reranking pipeline by first using feature-based learning-to-rank techniques to reduce the number of candidate documents under consideration without adversely affecting their quality in terms of recall. Applied to the MS MARCO passage and document ranking tasks, we are able to achieve the same level of effectiveness, but with up to 18 increase in efficiency. Furthermore, our techniques are orthogonal to other methods focused on accelerating transformer inference, and thus can be combined for even greater efficiency gains. A higher-level message from our work is that, even though pretrained transformers dominate the modern IR landscape, there are still important roles for traditional LTR techniques, and that we should not forget history.

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Knowledge Enhanced Fine-Tuning for Better Handling Unseen Entities in Dialogue Generation
Leyang Cui | Yu Wu | Shujie Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Although pre-training models have achieved great success in dialogue generation, their performance drops dramatically when the input contains an entity that does not appear in pre-training and fine-tuning datasets (unseen entity). To address this issue, existing methods leverage an external knowledge base to generate appropriate responses. In real-world practical, the entity may not be included by the knowledge base or suffer from the precision of knowledge retrieval. To deal with this problem, instead of introducing knowledge base as the input, we force the model to learn a better semantic representation by predicting the information in the knowledge base, only based on the input context. Specifically, with the help of a knowledge base, we introduce two auxiliary training objectives : 1) Interpret Masked Word, which conjectures the meaning of the masked entity given the context ; 2) Hypernym Generation, which predicts the hypernym of the entity based on the context. Experiment results on two dialogue corpus verify the effectiveness of our methods under both knowledge available and unavailable settings.

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Solving Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis as a Text Generation Task
Jian Liu | Zhiyang Teng | Leyang Cui | Hanmeng Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Aspect category sentiment analysis has attracted increasing research attention. The dominant methods make use of pre-trained language models by learning effective aspect category-specific representations, and adding specific output layers to its pre-trained representation. We consider a more direct way of making use of pre-trained language models, by casting the ACSA tasks into natural language generation tasks, using natural language sentences to represent the output. Our method allows more direct use of pre-trained knowledge in seq2seq language models by directly following the task setting during pre-training. Experiments on several benchmarks show that our method gives the best reported results, having large advantages in few-shot and zero-shot settings.

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DialogSum Challenge : Summarizing Real-Life Scenario DialoguesDialogSum Challenge: Summarizing Real-Life Scenario Dialogues
Yulong Chen | Yang Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We propose a shared task on summarizing real-life scenario dialogues, DialogSum Challenge, to encourage researchers to address challenges in dialogue summarization, which has been less studied by the summarization community. Real-life scenario dialogue summarization has a wide potential application prospect in chat-bot and personal assistant. It contains unique challenges such as special discourse structure, coreference, pragmatics, and social common sense, which require specific representation learning technologies to deal with. We carefully annotate a large-scale dialogue summarization dataset based on multiple public dialogue corpus, opening the door to all kinds of summarization models.

2020

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What Have We Achieved on Text Summarization?
Dandan Huang | Leyang Cui | Sen Yang | Guangsheng Bao | Kun Wang | Jun Xie | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Deep learning has led to significant improvement in text summarization with various methods investigated and improved ROUGE scores reported over the years. However, gaps still exist between summaries produced by automatic summarizers and human professionals. Aiming to gain more understanding of summarization systems with respect to their strengths and limits on a fine-grained syntactic and semantic level, we consult the Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) and quantify 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarization models manually. Primarily, we find that 1) under similar settings, extractive summarizers are in general better than their abstractive counterparts thanks to strength in faithfulness and factual-consistency ; 2) milestone techniques such as copy, coverage and hybrid extractive / abstractive methods do bring specific improvements but also demonstrate limitations ; 3) pre-training techniques, and in particular sequence-to-sequence pre-training, are highly effective for improving text summarization, with BART giving the best results.

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Online Back-Parsing for AMR-to-Text GenerationAMR-to-Text Generation
Xuefeng Bai | Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

AMR-to-text generation aims to recover a text containing the same meaning as an input AMR graph. Current research develops increasingly powerful graph encoders to better represent AMR graphs, with decoders based on standard language modeling being used to generate outputs. We propose a decoder that back predicts projected AMR graphs on the target sentence during text generation. As the result, our outputs can better preserve the input meaning than standard decoders. Experiments on two AMR benchmarks show the superiority of our model over the previous state-of-the-art system based on graph Transformer.

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Inducing Target-Specific Latent Structures for Aspect Sentiment Classification
Chenhua Chen | Zhiyang Teng | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Aspect-level sentiment analysis aims to recognize the sentiment polarity of an aspect or a target in a comment. Recently, graph convolutional networks based on linguistic dependency trees have been studied for this task. However, the dependency parsing accuracy of commercial product comments or tweets might be unsatisfactory. To tackle this problem, we associate linguistic dependency trees with automatically induced aspectspecific graphs. We propose gating mechanisms to dynamically combine information from word dependency graphs and latent graphs which are learned by self-attention networks. Our model can complement supervised syntactic features with latent semantic dependencies. Experimental results on five benchmarks show the effectiveness of our proposed latent models, giving significantly better results than models without using latent graphs.

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Coarse-to-Fine Pre-training for Named Entity RecognitionCoarse-to-Fine Pre-training for Named Entity Recognition
Xue Mengge | Bowen Yu | Zhenyu Zhang | Tingwen Liu | Yue Zhang | Bin Wang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

More recently, Named Entity Recognition hasachieved great advances aided by pre-trainingapproaches such as BERT. However, currentpre-training techniques focus on building lan-guage modeling objectives to learn a gen-eral representation, ignoring the named entity-related knowledge. To this end, we proposea NER-specific pre-training framework to in-ject coarse-to-fine automatically mined entityknowledge into pre-trained models. Specifi-cally, we first warm-up the model via an en-tity span identification task by training it withWikipedia anchors, which can be deemed asgeneral-typed entities. Then we leverage thegazetteer-based distant supervision strategy totrain the model extract coarse-grained typedentities. Finally, we devise a self-supervisedauxiliary task to mine the fine-grained namedentity knowledge via clustering. Empiricalstudies on three public NER datasets demon-strate that our framework achieves significantimprovements against several pre-trained base-lines, establishing the new state-of-the-art per-formance on three benchmarks. Besides, weshow that our framework gains promising re-sults without using human-labeled trainingdata, demonstrating its effectiveness in label-few and low-resource scenarios.

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Entity Enhanced BERT Pre-training for Chinese NERBERT Pre-training for Chinese NER
Chen Jia | Yuefeng Shi | Qinrong Yang | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Character-level BERT pre-trained in Chinese suffers a limitation of lacking lexicon information, which shows effectiveness for Chinese NER. To integrate the lexicon into pre-trained LMs for Chinese NER, we investigate a semi-supervised entity enhanced BERT pre-training method. In particular, we first extract an entity lexicon from the relevant raw text using a new-word discovery method. We then integrate the entity information into BERT using Char-Entity-Transformer, which augments the self-attention using a combination of character and entity representations. In addition, an entity classification task helps inject the entity information into model parameters in pre-training. The pre-trained models are used for NER fine-tuning. Experiments on a news dataset and two datasets annotated by ourselves for NER in long-text show that our method is highly effective and achieves the best results.

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Multiscale Collaborative Deep Models for Neural Machine Translation
Xiangpeng Wei | Heng Yu | Yue Hu | Yue Zhang | Rongxiang Weng | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent evidence reveals that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models with deeper neural networks can be more effective but are difficult to train. In this paper, we present a MultiScale Collaborative (MSC) framework to ease the training of NMT models that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly boost the gradient back-propagation from top to bottom levels by introducing a block-scale collaboration mechanism into deep NMT models. Then, instead of forcing the whole encoder stack directly learns a desired representation, we let each encoder block learns a fine-grained representation and enhance it by encoding spatial dependencies using a context-scale collaboration. We provide empirical evidence showing that the MSC nets are easy to optimize and can obtain improvements of translation quality from considerably increased depth. On IWSLT translation tasks with three translation directions, our extremely deep models (with 72-layer encoders) surpass strong baselines by +2.2~+3.1 BLEU points. In addition, our deep MSC achieves a BLEU score of 30.56 on WMT14 English-to-German task that significantly outperforms state-of-the-art deep NMT models. We have included the source code in supplementary materials.

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ZPR2 : Joint Zero Pronoun Recovery and Resolution using Multi-Task Learning and BERTZPR2: Joint Zero Pronoun Recovery and Resolution using Multi-Task Learning and BERT
Linfeng Song | Kun Xu | Yue Zhang | Jianshu Chen | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Zero pronoun recovery and resolution aim at recovering the dropped pronoun and pointing out its anaphoric mentions, respectively. We propose to better explore their interaction by solving both tasks together, while the previous work treats them separately. For zero pronoun resolution, we study this task in a more realistic setting, where no parsing trees or only automatic trees are available, while most previous work assumes gold trees. Experiments on two benchmarks show that joint modeling significantly outperforms our baseline that already beats the previous state of the arts.

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DRTS Parsing with Structure-Aware Encoding and DecodingDRTS Parsing with Structure-Aware Encoding and Decoding
Qiankun Fu | Yue Zhang | Jiangming Liu | Meishan Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Discourse representation tree structure (DRTS) parsing is a novel semantic parsing task which has been concerned most recently. State-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a neural sequence-to-sequence model, treating the tree construction as an incremental sequence generation problem. Structural information such as input syntax and the intermediate skeleton of the partial output has been ignored in the model, which could be potentially useful for the DRTS parsing. In this work, we propose a structural-aware model at both the encoder and decoder phase to integrate the structural information, where graph attention network (GAT) is exploited for effectively modeling. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed model is effective and can obtain the best performance in the literature.

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Structural Information Preserving for Graph-to-Text Generation
Linfeng Song | Ante Wang | Jinsong Su | Yue Zhang | Kun Xu | Yubin Ge | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The task of graph-to-text generation aims at producing sentences that preserve the meaning of input graphs. As a crucial defect, the current state-of-the-art models may mess up or even drop the core structural information of input graphs when generating outputs. We propose to tackle this problem by leveraging richer training signals that can guide our model for preserving input information. In particular, we introduce two types of autoencoding losses, each individually focusing on different aspects (a.k.a. views) of input graphs. The losses are then back-propagated to better calibrate our model via multi-task training. Experiments on two benchmarks for graph-to-text generation show the effectiveness of our approach over a state-of-the-art baseline.

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Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts
Agata Savary | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

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Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Maosong Sun (孙茂松) | Sujian Li (李素建) | Yue Zhang (张岳) | Yang Liu (刘洋)
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

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Does Chinese BERT Encode Word Structure?Chinese BERT Encode Word Structure?
Yile Wang | Leyang Cui | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Contextualized representations give significantly improved results for a wide range of NLP tasks. Much work has been dedicated to analyzing the features captured by representative models such as BERT. Existing work finds that syntactic, semantic and word sense knowledge are encoded in BERT. However, little work has investigated word features for character languages such as Chinese. We investigate Chinese BERT using both attention weight distribution statistics and probing tasks, finding that (1) word information is captured by BERT ; (2) word-level features are mostly in the middle representation layers ; (3) downstream tasks make different use of word features in BERT, with POS tagging and chunking relying the most on word features, and natural language inference relying the least on such features.

2019

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Hierarchically-Refined Label Attention Network for Sequence Labeling
Leyang Cui | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

CRF has been used as a powerful model for statistical sequence labeling. For neural sequence labeling, however, BiLSTM-CRF does not always lead to better results compared with BiLSTM-softmax local classification. This can be because the simple Markov label transition model of CRF does not give much information gain over strong neural encoding. For better representing label sequences, we investigate a hierarchically-refined label attention network, which explicitly leverages label embeddings and captures potential long-term label dependency by giving each word incrementally refined label distributions with hierarchical attention. Results on POS tagging, NER and CCG supertagging show that the proposed model not only improves the overall tagging accuracy with similar number of parameters, but also significantly speeds up the training and testing compared to BiLSTM-CRF.

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Semantic Neural Machine Translation Using AMRAMR
Linfeng Song | Daniel Gildea | Yue Zhang | Zhiguo Wang | Jinsong Su
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7

It is intuitive that semantic representations can be useful for machine translation, mainly because they can help in enforcing meaning preservation and handling data sparsity (many sentences correspond to one meaning) of machine translation models. On the other hand, little work has been done on leveraging semantics for neural machine translation (NMT). In this work, we study the usefulness of AMR (abstract meaning representation) on NMT. Experiments on a standard English-to-German dataset show that incorporating AMR as additional knowledge can significantly improve a strong attention-based sequence-to-sequence neural translation model.

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Multi-Granular Text Encoding for Self-Explaining Categorization
Zhiguo Wang | Yue Zhang | Mo Yu | Wei Zhang | Lin Pan | Linfeng Song | Kun Xu | Yousef El-Kurdi
Proceedings of the 2019 ACL Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Self-explaining text categorization requires a classifier to make a prediction along with supporting evidence. A popular type of evidence is sub-sequences extracted from the input text which are sufficient for the classifier to make the prediction. In this work, we define multi-granular ngrams as basic units for explanation, and organize all ngrams into a hierarchical structure, so that shorter ngrams can be reused while computing longer ngrams. We leverage the tree-structured LSTM to learn a context-independent representation for each unit via parameter sharing. Experiments on medical disease classification show that our model is more accurate, efficient and compact than the BiLSTM and CNN baselines. More importantly, our model can extract intuitive multi-granular evidence to support its predictions.

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Code-Switching for Enhancing NMT with Pre-Specified TranslationNMT with Pre-Specified Translation
Kai Song | Yue Zhang | Heng Yu | Weihua Luo | Kun Wang | Min Zhang
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)

Leveraging user-provided translation to constrain NMT has practical significance. Existing methods can be classified into two main categories, namely the use of placeholder tags for lexicon words and the use of hard constraints during decoding. Both methods can hurt translation fidelity for various reasons. We investigate a data augmentation method, making code-switched training data by replacing source phrases with their target translations. Our method does not change the MNT model or decoding algorithm, allowing the model to learn lexicon translations by copying source-side target words. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves consistent improvements over existing approaches, improving translation of constrained words without hurting unconstrained words.

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Subword Encoding in Lattice LSTM for Chinese Word SegmentationLSTM for Chinese Word Segmentation
Jie Yang | Yue Zhang | Shuailong Liang
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)

We investigate subword information for Chinese word segmentation, by integrating sub word embeddings trained using byte-pair encoding into a Lattice LSTM (LaLSTM) network over a character sequence. Experiments on standard benchmark show that subword information brings significant gains over strong character-based segmentation models. To our knowledge, this is the first research on the effectiveness of subwords on neural word segmentation.

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Open Domain Event Extraction Using Neural Latent Variable Models
Xiao Liu | Heyan Huang | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We consider open domain event extraction, the task of extracting unconstraint types of events from news clusters. A novel latent variable neural model is constructed, which is scalable to very large corpus. A dataset is collected and manually annotated, with task-specific evaluation metrics being designed. Results show that the proposed unsupervised model gives better performance compared to the state-of-the-art method for event schema induction.

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Leveraging Local and Global Patterns for Self-Attention Networks
Mingzhou Xu | Derek F. Wong | Baosong Yang | Yue Zhang | Lidia S. Chao
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Self-attention networks have received increasing research attention. By default, the hidden states of each word are hierarchically calculated by attending to all words in the sentence, which assembles global information. However, several studies pointed out that taking all signals into account may lead to overlooking neighboring information (e.g. phrase pattern). To address this argument, we propose a hybrid attention mechanism to dynamically leverage both of the local and global information. Specifically, our approach uses a gating scalar for integrating both sources of the information, which is also convenient for quantifying their contributions. Experiments on various neural machine translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The extensive analyses verify that the two types of contexts are complementary to each other, and our method gives highly effective improvements in their integration.

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Does it Make Sense? And Why? A Pilot Study for Sense Making and Explanation
Cunxiang Wang | Shuailong Liang | Yue Zhang | Xiaonan Li | Tian Gao
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Introducing common sense to natural language understanding systems has received increasing research attention. It remains a fundamental question on how to evaluate whether a system has the sense-making capability. Existing benchmarks measure common sense knowledge indirectly or without reasoning. In this paper, we release a benchmark to directly test whether a system can differentiate natural language statements that make sense from those that do not make sense. In addition, a system is asked to identify the most crucial reason why a statement does not make sense. We evaluate models trained over large-scale language modeling tasks as well as human performance, showing that there are different challenges for system sense-making.

2018

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Two Local Models for Neural Constituent Parsing
Zhiyang Teng | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Non-local features have been exploited by syntactic parsers for capturing dependencies between sub output structures. Such features have been a key to the success of state-of-the-art statistical parsers. With the rise of deep learning, however, it has been shown that local output decisions can give highly competitive accuracies, thanks to the power of dense neural input representations that embody global syntactic information. We investigate two conceptually simple local neural models for constituent parsing, which make local decisions to constituent spans and CFG rules, respectively. Consistent with previous findings along the line, our best model gives highly competitive results, achieving the labeled bracketing F1 scores of 92.4 % on PTB and 87.3 % on CTB 5.1.

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Design Challenges and Misconceptions in Neural Sequence Labeling
Jie Yang | Shuailong Liang | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We investigate the design challenges of constructing effective and efficient neural sequence labeling systems, by reproducing twelve neural sequence labeling models, which include most of the state-of-the-art structures, and conduct a systematic model comparison on three benchmarks (i.e. NER, Chunking, and POS tagging). Misconceptions and inconsistent conclusions in existing literature are examined and clarified under statistical experiments. In the comparison and analysis process, we reach several practical conclusions which can be useful to practitioners.

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Joint models for NLP
Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

Joint models have received much research attention in NLP, allowing relevant tasks to share common information while avoiding error propagation in multi-stage pepelines. Several main approaches have been taken by statistical joint modeling, while neural models allow parameter sharing and adversarial training. This tutorial reviews main approaches to joint modeling for both statistical and neural methods.

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Neural Transition-based Syntactic Linearization
Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang | Daniel Gildea
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

The task of linearization is to find a grammatical order given a set of words. Traditional models use statistical methods. Syntactic linearization systems, which generate a sentence along with its syntactic tree, have shown state-of-the-art performance. Recent work shows that a multilayer LSTM language model outperforms competitive statistical syntactic linearization systems without using syntax. In this paper, we study neural syntactic linearization, building a transition-based syntactic linearizer leveraging a feed forward neural network, observing significantly better results compared to LSTM language models on this task.

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Mining Evidences for Concept Stock Recommendation
Qi Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

We investigate the task of mining relevant stocks given a topic of concern on emerging capital markets, for which there is lack of structural understanding. Deep learning is leveraged to mine evidences from large scale textual data, which contain valuable market information. In particular, distributed word similarities trained over large scale raw texts are taken as a basis of relevance measuring, and deep reinforcement learning is leveraged to learn a strategy of topic expansion, given a small amount of manually labeled data from financial analysts. Results on two Chinese stock market datasets show that our method outperforms a strong baseline using information retrieval techniques.

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Sentence-State LSTM for Text RepresentationLSTM for Text Representation
Yue Zhang | Qi Liu | Linfeng Song
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Bi-directional LSTMs are a powerful tool for text representation. On the other hand, they have been shown to suffer various limitations due to their sequential nature. We investigate an alternative LSTM structure for encoding text, which consists of a parallel state for each word. Recurrent steps are used to perform local and global information exchange between words simultaneously, rather than incremental reading of a sequence of words. Results on various classification and sequence labelling benchmarks show that the proposed model has strong representation power, giving highly competitive performances compared to stacked BiLSTM models with similar parameter numbers.

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A Graph-to-Sequence Model for AMR-to-Text GenerationAMR-to-Text Generation
Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang | Zhiguo Wang | Daniel Gildea
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The problem of AMR-to-text generation is to recover a text representing the same meaning as an input AMR graph. The current state-of-the-art method uses a sequence-to-sequence model, leveraging LSTM for encoding a linearized AMR structure. Although being able to model non-local semantic information, a sequence LSTM can lose information from the AMR graph structure, and thus facing challenges with large-graphs, which result in long sequences. We introduce a neural graph-to-sequence model, using a novel LSTM structure for directly encoding graph-level semantics. On a standard benchmark, our model shows superior results to existing methods in the literature.

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A Rank-Based Similarity Metric for Word Embeddings
Enrico Santus | Hongmin Wang | Emmanuele Chersoni | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Word Embeddings have recently imposed themselves as a standard for representing word meaning in NLP. Semantic similarity between word pairs has become the most common evaluation benchmark for these representations, with vector cosine being typically used as the only similarity metric. In this paper, we report experiments with a rank-based metric for WE, which performs comparably to vector cosine in similarity estimation and outperforms it in the recently-introduced and challenging task of outlier detection, thus suggesting that rank-based measures can improve clustering quality.

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YEDDA : A Lightweight Collaborative Text Span Annotation ToolYEDDA: A Lightweight Collaborative Text Span Annotation Tool
Jie Yang | Yue Zhang | Linwei Li | Xingxuan Li
Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations

In this paper, we introduce Yedda, a lightweight but efficient and comprehensive open-source tool for text span annotation. Yedda provides a systematic solution for text span annotation, ranging from collaborative user annotation to administrator evaluation and analysis. It overcomes the low efficiency of traditional text annotation tools by annotating entities through both command line and shortcut keys, which are configurable with custom labels. Yedda also gives intelligent recommendations by learning the up-to-date annotated text. An administrator client is developed to evaluate annotation quality of multiple annotators and generate detailed comparison report for each annotator pair. Experiments show that the proposed system can reduce the annotation time by half compared with existing annotation tools. And the annotation time can be further compressed by 16.47 % through intelligent recommendation.

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NCRF++ : An Open-source Neural Sequence Labeling ToolkitNCRF++: An Open-source Neural Sequence Labeling Toolkit
Jie Yang | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations

This paper describes NCRF++, a toolkit for neural sequence labeling. NCRF++ is designed for quick implementation of different neural sequence labeling models with a CRF inference layer. It provides users with an inference for building the custom model structure through configuration file with flexible neural feature design and utilization. Built on PyTorch, the core operations are calculated in batch, making the toolkit efficient with the acceleration of GPU. It also includes the implementations of most state-of-the-art neural sequence labeling models such as LSTM-CRF, facilitating reproducing and refinement on those methods.http://pytorch.org/, the core operations are calculated in batch, making the toolkit efficient with the acceleration of GPU. It also includes the implementations of most state-of-the-art neural sequence labeling models such as LSTM-CRF, facilitating reproducing and refinement on those methods.

2017

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Implicit Syntactic Features for Target-dependent Sentiment Analysis
Yuze Gao | Yue Zhang | Tong Xiao
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Targeted sentiment analysis investigates the sentiment polarities on given target mentions from input texts. Different from sentence level sentiment, it offers more fine-grained knowledge on each entity mention. While early work leveraged syntactic information, recent research has used neural representation learning to induce features automatically, thereby avoiding error propagation of syntactic parsers, which are particularly severe on social media texts. We study a method to leverage syntactic information without explicitly building the parser outputs, by training an encoder-decoder structure parser model on standard syntactic treebanks, and then leveraging its hidden encoder layers when analysing tweets. Such hidden vectors do not contain explicit syntactic outputs, yet encode rich syntactic features. We use them to augment the inputs to a baseline state-of-the-art targeted sentiment classifier, observing significant improvements on various benchmark datasets. We obtain the best accuracies on all test sets.

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Abstractive Multi-document Summarization by Partial Tree Extraction, Recombination and Linearization
Litton J Kurisinkel | Yue Zhang | Vasudeva Varma
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Existing work for abstractive multidocument summarization utilise existing phrase structures directly extracted from input documents to generate summary sentences. These methods can suffer from lack of consistence and coherence in merging phrases. We introduce a novel approach for abstractive multidocument summarization through partial dependency tree extraction, recombination and linearization. The method entrusts the summarizer to generate its own topically coherent sequential structures from scratch for effective communication. Results on TAC 2011, DUC-2004 and 2005 show that our system gives competitive results compared with state of the art abstractive summarization approaches in the literature. We also achieve competitive results in linguistic quality assessed by human evaluators.

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Deep Learning in Lexical Analysis and Parsing
Wanxiang Che | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the IJCNLP 2017, Tutorial Abstracts

Neural networks, also with a fancy name deep learning, just right can overcome the above feature engineering problem. In theory, they can use non-linear activation functions and multiple layers to automatically find useful features. The novel network structures, such as convolutional or recurrent, help to reduce the difficulty further. These deep learning models have been successfully used for lexical analysis and parsing. In this tutorial, we will give a review of each line of work, by contrasting them with traditional statistical methods, and organizing them in consistent orders.

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Attention-based Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network for Automatic Essay Scoring
Fei Dong | Yue Zhang | Jie Yang
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

Neural network models have recently been applied to the task of automatic essay scoring, giving promising results. Existing work used recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks to model input essays, giving grades based on a single vector representation of the essay. On the other hand, the relative advantages of RNNs and CNNs have not been compared. In addition, different parts of the essay can contribute differently for scoring, which is not captured by existing models. We address these issues by building a hierarchical sentence-document model to represent essays, using the attention mechanism to automatically decide the relative weights of words and sentences. Results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the attention mechanism.

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Neural Word Segmentation with Rich Pretraining
Jie Yang | Yue Zhang | Fei Dong
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Neural word segmentation research has benefited from large-scale raw texts by leveraging them for pretraining character and word embeddings. On the other hand, statistical segmentation research has exploited richer sources of external information, such as punctuation, automatic segmentation and POS. We investigate the effectiveness of a range of external training sources for neural word segmentation by building a modular segmentation model, pretraining the most important submodule using rich external sources. Results show that such pretraining significantly improves the model, leading to accuracies competitive to the best methods on six benchmarks.

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AMR-to-text Generation with Synchronous Node Replacement GrammarAMR-to-text Generation with Synchronous Node Replacement Grammar
Linfeng Song | Xiaochang Peng | Yue Zhang | Zhiguo Wang | Daniel Gildea
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This paper addresses the task of AMR-to-text generation by leveraging synchronous node replacement grammar. During training, graph-to-string rules are learned using a heuristic extraction algorithm. At test time, a graph transducer is applied to collapse input AMRs and generate output sentences. Evaluated on a standard benchmark, our method gives the state-of-the-art result.

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Proceedings of the 9th SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing
Yue Zhang | Zhifang Sui
Proceedings of the 9th SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

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Encoder-Decoder Shift-Reduce Syntactic Parsing
Jiangming Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Parsing Technologies

Encoder-decoder neural networks have been used for many NLP tasks, such as neural machine translation. They have also been applied to constituent parsing by using bracketed tree structures as a target language, translating input sentences into syntactic trees. A more commonly used method to linearize syntactic trees is the shift-reduce system, which uses a sequence of transition-actions to build trees. We empirically investigate the effectiveness of applying the encoder-decoder network to transition-based parsing. On standard benchmarks, our system gives comparable results to the stack LSTM parser for dependency parsing, and significantly better results compared to the aforementioned parser for constituent parsing, which uses bracketed tree formats.

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Shift-Reduce Constituent Parsing with Neural Lookahead Features
Jiangming Liu | Yue Zhang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 5

Transition-based models can be fast and accurate for constituent parsing. Compared with chart-based models, they leverage richer features by extracting history information from a parser stack, which consists of a sequence of non-local constituents. On the other hand, during incremental parsing, constituent information on the right hand side of the current word is not utilized, which is a relative weakness of shift-reduce parsing. To address this limitation, we leverage a fast neural model to extract lookahead features. In particular, we build a bidirectional LSTM model, which leverages full sentence information to predict the hierarchy of constituents that each word starts and ends. The results are then passed to a strong transition-based constituent parser as lookahead features. The resulting parser gives 1.3 % absolute improvement in WSJ and 2.3 % in CTB compared to the baseline, giving the highest reported accuracies for fully-supervised parsing.

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Head-Lexicalized Bidirectional Tree LSTMsLSTMs
Zhiyang Teng | Yue Zhang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 5

Sequential LSTMs have been extended to model tree structures, giving competitive results for a number of tasks. Existing methods model constituent trees by bottom-up combinations of constituent nodes, making direct use of input word information only for leaf nodes. This is different from sequential LSTMs, which contain references to input words for each node. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic head-lexicalization for tree-structure LSTMs, propagating head words from leaf nodes to every constituent node. In addition, enabled by head lexicalization, we build a tree LSTM in the top-down direction, which corresponds to bidirectional sequential LSTMs in structure. Experiments show that both extensions give better representations of tree structures. Our final model gives the best results on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and highly competitive results on the TREC question type classification task.

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Word-Context Character Embeddings for Chinese Word SegmentationChinese Word Segmentation
Hao Zhou | Zhenting Yu | Yue Zhang | Shujian Huang | Xinyu Dai | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural parsers have benefited from automatically labeled data via dependency-context word embeddings. We investigate training character embeddings on a word-based context in a similar way, showing that the simple method improves state-of-the-art neural word segmentation models significantly, beating tri-training baselines for leveraging auto-segmented data.

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End-to-End Neural Relation Extraction with Global Optimization
Meishan Zhang | Yue Zhang | Guohong Fu
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural networks have shown promising results for relation extraction. State-of-the-art models cast the task as an end-to-end problem, solved incrementally using a local classifier. Yet previous work using statistical models have demonstrated that global optimization can achieve better performances compared to local classification. We build a globally optimized neural model for end-to-end relation extraction, proposing novel LSTM features in order to better learn context representations. In addition, we present a novel method to integrate syntactic information to facilitate global learning, yet requiring little background on syntactic grammars thus being easy to extend. Experimental results show that our proposed model is highly effective, achieving the best performances on two standard benchmarks.

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Transition-Based Disfluency Detection using LSTMsLSTMs
Shaolei Wang | Wanxiang Che | Yue Zhang | Meishan Zhang | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we model the problem of disfluency detection using a transition-based framework, which incrementally constructs and labels the disfluency chunk of input sentences using a new transition system without syntax information. Compared with sequence labeling methods, it can capture non-local chunk-level features ; compared with joint parsing and disfluency detection methods, it is free for noise in syntax. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art f-score of 87.5 % on the commonly used English Switchboard test set, and a set of in-house annotated Chinese data.

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Transition-Based Deep Input Linearization
Ratish Puduppully | Yue Zhang | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

Traditional methods for deep NLG adopt pipeline approaches comprising stages such as constructing syntactic input, predicting function words, linearizing the syntactic input and generating the surface forms. Though easier to visualize, pipeline approaches suffer from error propagation. In addition, information available across modules can not be leveraged by all modules. We construct a transition-based model to jointly perform linearization, function word prediction and morphological generation, which considerably improves upon the accuracy compared to a pipelined baseline system. On a standard deep input linearization shared task, our system achieves the best results reported so far.

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Attention Modeling for Targeted Sentiment
Jiangming Liu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

Neural network models have been used for target-dependent sentiment analysis. Previous work focus on learning a target specific representation for a given input sentence which is used for classification. However, they do not explicitly model the contribution of each word in a sentence with respect to targeted sentiment polarities. We investigate an attention model to this end. In particular, a vanilla LSTM model is used to induce an attention value of the whole sentence. The model is further extended to differentiate left and right contexts given a certain target following previous work. Results show that by using attention to model the contribution of each word with respect to the target, our model gives significantly improved results over two standard benchmarks. We report the best accuracy for this task.
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