Fei Sun


2023

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ReFSQL: A Retrieval-Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation
Kun Zhang | Xiexiong Lin | Yuanzhuo Wang | Xin Zhang | Fei Sun | Cen Jianhe | Hexiang Tan | Xuhui Jiang | Huawei Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Text-to-SQL is the task that aims at translating natural language questions into SQL queries. Existing methods directly align the natural language with SQL Language and train one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions. However, they underestimate the inherent structural characteristics of SQL, as well as the gap between specific structure knowledge and general knowledge. This leads to structure errors in the generated SQL. To address the above challenges, we propose a retrieval-argument framework, namely ReFSQL. It contains two parts, structure-enhanced retriever and the generator. Structure-enhanced retriever is designed to identify samples with comparable specific knowledge in an unsupervised way. Subsequently, we incorporate the retrieved samples’ SQL into the input, enabling the model to acquire prior knowledge of similar SQL grammar. To further bridge the gap between specific and general knowledge, we present a mahalanobis contrastive learning method, which facilitates the transfer of the sample toward the specific knowledge distribution constructed by the retrieved samples. Experimental results on five datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach in improving the accuracy and robustness of Text-to-SQL generation. Our framework has achieved improved performance when combined with many other backbone models (including the 11B flan-T5) and also achieved state-of-the-art performance when compared to existing methods that employ the fine-tuning approach.

2022

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Multi-Scale Distribution Deep Variational Autoencoder for Explanation Generation
ZeFeng Cai | Linlin Wang | Gerard de Melo | Fei Sun | Liang He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Generating explanations for recommender systems is essential for improving their transparency, as users often wish to understand the reason for receiving a specified recommendation. Previous methods mainly focus on improving the generation quality, but often produce generic explanations that fail to incorporate user and item specific details. To resolve this problem, we present Multi-Scale Distribution Deep Variational Autoencoders (MVAE).These are deep hierarchical VAEs with a prior network that eliminates noise while retaining meaningful signals in the input, coupled with a recognition network serving as the source of information to guide the learning of the prior network. Further, the Multi-scale distribution Learning Framework (MLF) along with a Target Tracking Kullback-Leibler divergence (TKL) mechanism are proposed to employ multi KL divergences at different scales for more effective learning. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that our methods can generate explanations with concrete input-specific contents.

2021

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Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation
Yuexiang Xie | Fei Sun | Yang Deng | Yaliang Li | Bolin Ding
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Despite significant progress has been achieved in text summarization, factual inconsistency in generated summaries still severely limits its practical applications. Among the key factors to ensure factual consistency, a reliable automatic evaluation metric is the first and the most crucial one. However, existing metrics either neglect the intrinsic cause of the factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks, leading to an unsatisfied correlation with human judgments or increasing the inconvenience of usage in practice. In light of these challenges, we propose a novel metric to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship among the source document, the generated summary, and the language prior. We remove the effect of language prior, which can cause factual inconsistency, from the total causal effect on the generated summary, and provides a simple yet effective way to evaluate consistency without relying on other auxiliary tasks. We conduct a series of experiments on three public abstractive text summarization datasets, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed metric in both improving the correlation with human judgments and the convenience of usage. The source code is available at https://github.com/xieyxclack/factual_coco.

2019

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Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling with Utterance ReWriter
Hui Su | Xiaoyu Shen | Rongzhi Zhang | Fei Sun | Pengwei Hu | Cheng Niu | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent research has achieved impressive results in single-turn dialogue modelling. In the multi-turn setting, however, current models are still far from satisfactory. One major challenge is the frequently occurred coreference and information omission in our daily conversation, making it hard for machines to understand the real intention. In this paper, we propose rewriting the human utterance as a pre-process to help multi-turn dialgoue modelling. Each utterance is first rewritten to recover all coreferred and omitted information. The next processing steps are then performed based on the rewritten utterance. To properly train the utterance rewriter, we collect a new dataset with human annotations and introduce a Transformer-based utterance rewriting architecture using the pointer network. We show the proposed architecture achieves remarkably good performance on the utterance rewriting task. The trained utterance rewriter can be easily integrated into online chatbots and brings general improvement over different domains.

2015

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Component-Enhanced Chinese Character Embeddings
Yanran Li | Wenjie Li | Fei Sun | Sujian Li
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Learning Word Representations by Jointly Modeling Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations
Fei Sun | Jiafeng Guo | Yanyan Lan | Jun Xu | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)