Wei Wei


2023

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Bridge the Gap Between CV and NLP! A Gradient-based Textual Adversarial Attack Framework
Lifan Yuan | YiChi Zhang | Yangyi Chen | Wei Wei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Despite recent success on various tasks, deep learning techniques still perform poorly on adversarial examples with small perturbations. While optimization-based methods for adversarial attacks are well-explored in the field of computer vision, it is impractical to directly apply them in natural language processing due to the discrete nature of the text. To address the problem, we propose a unified framework to extend the existing optimization-based adversarial attack methods in the vision domain to craft textual adversarial samples. In this framework, continuously optimized perturbations are added to the embedding layer and amplified in the forward propagation process. Then the final perturbed latent representations are decoded with a masked language model head to obtain potential adversarial samples. In this paper, we instantiate our framework with an attack algorithm named Textual Projected Gradient Descent (T-PGD). We find our algorithm effective even using proxy gradient information. Therefore, we perform the more challenging transfer black-box attack and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our attack algorithm with several models on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves overall better performance and produces more fluent and grammatical adversarial samples compared to strong baseline methods. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Phantivia/T-PGD.

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AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking
Yuxiang Nie | Heyan Huang | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Annotating long-document question answering (long-document QA) pairs is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate the problem, it might be possible to generate long-document QA pairs via unsupervised question answering (UQA) methods. However, existing UQA tasks are based on short documents, and can hardly incorporate long-range information. To tackle the problem, we propose a new task, named unsupervised long-document question answering (ULQA), aiming to generate high-quality long-document QA instances in an unsupervised manner. Besides, we propose AttenWalker, a novel unsupervised method to aggregate and generate answers with long-range dependency so as to construct long-document QA pairs. Specifically, AttenWalker is composed of three modules, i.e. span collector, span linker and answer aggregator. Firstly, the span collector takes advantage of constituent parsing and reconstruction loss to select informative candidate spans for constructing answers. Secondly, with the help of the attention graph of a pre-trained long-document model, potentially interrelated text spans (that might be far apart) could be linked together via an attention-walking algorithm. Thirdly, in the answer aggregator, linked spans are aggregated into the final answer via the mask-filling ability of a pre-trained model. Extensive experiments show that AttenWalker outperforms previous methods on NarrativeQA and Qasper. In addition, AttenWalker also shows strong performance in the few-shot learning setting.

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Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control
Zhenyi Lu | Wei Wei | Xiaoye Qu | Xian-Ling Mao | Dangyang Chen | Jixiong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-like models. However, textual personas are limited in describing multi-faceted attributes (e.g., language style, inner character nuances), implicit embedding suffers from personality sparsity, and handicraft prompts lack fine-grained and stable controllability. Hence, these approaches may struggle with complex personalized dialogue generation tasks that require generating controllable responses with multiple personal attributes. To this end, we propose Miracle, a novel personalized dialogue generation method through MultIple PeRsonal Attributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. ttributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. Specifically, our approach first disentangles complex personality into multi-faceted attributes. Subsequently, we employ a conditional variational auto-encoder to align with the dense personalized responses within a latent joint attribute space. We have also tailored a dedicated energy function and customized the ordinary differential equations sampling method to offer flexible attribute composition and precise attribute control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Miracle outperforms several strong baselines in terms of personality controllability and response generation quality. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LZY-the-boys/MIRACLE

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On Task-personalized Multimodal Few-shot Learning for Visually-rich Document Entity Retrieval
Jiayi Chen | Hanjun Dai | Bo Dai | Aidong Zhang | Wei Wei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Visually-rich document entity retrieval (VDER), which extracts key information (e.g. date, address) from document images like invoices and receipts, has become an important topic in industrial NLP applications. The emergence of new document types at a constant pace, each with its unique entity types, presents a unique challenge: many documents contain unseen entity types that occur only a couple of times. Addressing this challenge requires models to have the ability of learning entities in a few-shot manner. However, prior works for Few-shot VDER mainly address the problem at the document level with a predefined global entity space, which doesn’t account for the entity-level few-shot scenario: target entity types are locally personalized by each task and entity occurrences vary significantly among documents. To address this unexplored scenario, this paper studies a novel entity-level few-shot VDER task. The challenges lie in the uniqueness of the label space for each task and the increased complexity of out-of-distribution (OOD) contents. To tackle this novel task, we present a task-aware meta-learning based framework, with a central focus on achieving effective task personalization that distinguishes between in-task and out-of-task distribution. Specifically, we adopt a hierarchical decoder (HC) and employ contrastive learning (ContrastProtoNet) to achieve this goal. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset, FewVEX, to boost future research in the field of entity-level few-shot VDER. Experimental results demonstrate our approaches significantly improve the robustness of popular meta-learning baselines.

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DocumentNet: Bridging the Data Gap in Document Pre-training
Lijun Yu | Jin Miao | Xiaoyu Sun | Jiayi Chen | Alexander Hauptmann | Hanjun Dai | Wei Wei
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Document understanding tasks, in particular, Visually-rich Document Entity Retrieval (VDER), have gained significant attention in recent years thanks to their broad applications in enterprise AI. However, publicly available data have been scarce for these tasks due to strict privacy constraints and high annotation costs. To make things worse, the non-overlapping entity spaces from different datasets hinder the knowledge transfer between document types. In this paper, we propose a method to collect massive-scale and weakly labeled data from the web to benefit the training of VDER models. The collected dataset, named DocumentNet, does not depend on specific document types or entity sets, making it universally applicable to all VDER tasks. The current DocumentNet consists of 30M documents spanning nearly 400 document types organized in a four-level ontology. Experiments on a set of broadly adopted VDER tasks show significant improvements when DocumentNet is incorporated into the pre-training for both classic and few-shot learning settings. With the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs), DocumentNet provides a large data source to extend their multimodal capabilities for VDER.

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TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation
Wendi Li | Wei Wei | Xiaoye Qu | Xian-Ling Mao | Ye Yuan | Wenfeng Xie | Dangyang Chen
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to timely trace the dynamic interests of users through dialogues and generate relevant responses for item recommendations. Recently, various external knowledge bases (especially knowledge graphs) are incorporated into CRS to enhance the understanding of conversation contexts. However, recent reasoning-based models heavily rely on simplified structures such as linear structures or fixed-hierarchical structures for causality reasoning, hence they cannot fully figure out sophisticated relationships among utterances with external knowledge. To address this, we propose a novel Tree structure Reasoning schEmA named TREA. TREA constructs a multi-hierarchical scalable tree as the reasoning structure to clarify the causal relationships between mentioned entities, and fully utilizes historical conversations to generate more reasonable and suitable responses for recommended results. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

2022

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BiSyn-GAT+: Bi-Syntax Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Shuo Liang | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao | Fei Wang | Zhiyong He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to align aspects and corresponding sentiments for aspect-specific sentiment polarity inference. It is challenging because a sentence may contain multiple aspects or complicated (e.g., conditional, coordinating, or adversative) relations. Recently, exploiting dependency syntax information with graph neural networks has been the most popular trend. Despite its success, methods that heavily rely on the dependency tree pose challenges in accurately modeling the alignment of the aspects and their words indicative of sentiment, since the dependency tree may provide noisy signals of unrelated associations (e.g., the “conj” relation between “great” and “dreadful” in Figure 2). In this paper, to alleviate this problem, we propose a Bi-Syntax aware Graph Attention Network (BiSyn-GAT+). Specifically, BiSyn-GAT+ fully exploits the syntax information (e.g., phrase segmentation and hierarchical structure) of the constituent tree of a sentence to model the sentiment-aware context of every single aspect (called intra-context) and the sentiment relations across aspects (called inter-context) for learning. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that BiSyn-GAT+ outperforms the state-of-the-art methods consistently.

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Sequential Topic Selection Model with Latent Variable for Topic-Grounded Dialogue
Xiao-Fei Wen | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Recently, topic-grounded dialogue system has attracted significant attention due to its effectiveness in predicting the next topic to yield better responses via the historical context and given topic sequence. However, almost all existing topic prediction solutions focus on only the current conversation and corresponding topic sequence to predict the next conversation topic, without exploiting other topic-guided conversations which may contain relevant topic-transitions to current conversation. To address the problem, in this paper we propose a novel approach, named Sequential Global Topic Attention (SGTA) to exploit topic transition over all conversations in a subtle way for better modeling post-to-response topic-transition and guiding the response generation to the current conversation. Specifically, we introduce a latent space modeled as a Multivariate Skew-Normal distribution with hybrid kernel functions to flexibly integrate the global-level information with sequence-level information, and predict the topic based on the distribution sampling results. We also leverage a topic-aware prior-posterior approach for secondary selection of predicted topics, which is utilized to optimize the response generation task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms competitive baselines on prediction and generation tasks.

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HCL-TAT: A Hybrid Contrastive Learning Method for Few-shot Event Detection with Task-Adaptive Threshold
Ruihan Zhang | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao | Rui Fang | Dangyang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Event detection has been suffering from constantly emerging event types with lack of sufficient data. Existing works formulate the new problem as few-shot event detection (FSED), and employ two-stage or unified models based on meta-learning to address the problem. However, these methods fall far short of expectations due to: (i) insufficient learning of discriminative representations in low-resource scenarios, and (ii) representation overlap between triggers and non-triggers. To resolve the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid Contrastive Learning method with a Task-Adaptive Threshold (abbreviated as HCL-TAT), which enables discriminative representation learning with a two-view contrastive loss (support-support and prototype-query), and devises an easily-adapted threshold to alleviate misidentification of triggers. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset FewEvent demonstrate the superiority of our method to achieve better results compared to the state-of-the-arts. All the data and codes will be available to facilitate future research.

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A GlobalPointer based Robust Approach for Information Extraction from Dialog Transcripts
Yanbo J. Wang | Sheng Chen | Hengxing Cai | Wei Wei | Kuo Yan | Zhe Sun | Hui Qin | Yuming Li | Xiaochen Cai
Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)

With the widespread popularisation of intelligent technology, task-based dialogue systems (TOD) are increasingly being applied to a wide variety of practical scenarios. As the key tasks in dialogue systems, named entity recognition and slot filling play a crucial role in the completeness and accuracy of information extraction. This paper is an evaluation paper for Sere-TOD 2022 Workshop challenge (Track 1 Information extraction from dialog transcripts). We proposed a multi-model fusion approach based on GlobalPointer, combined with some optimisation tricks, finally achieved an entity F1 of 60.73, an entity-slot-value triple F1 of 56, and an average F1 of 58.37, and got the highest score in SereTOD 2022 Workshop challenge

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Cross-Lingual Phrase Retrieval
Heqi Zheng | Xiao Zhang | Zewen Chi | Heyan Huang | Yan Tan | Tian Lan | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Cross-lingual retrieval aims to retrieve relevant text across languages. Current methods typically achieve cross-lingual retrieval by learning language-agnostic text representations in word or sentence level. However, how to learn phrase representations for cross-lingual phrase retrieval is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose , a cross-lingual phrase retriever that extracts phrase representations from unlabeled example sentences. Moreover, we create a large-scale cross-lingual phrase retrieval dataset, which contains 65K bilingual phrase pairs and 4.2M example sentences in 8 English-centric language pairs. Experimental results show that outperforms state-of-the-art baselines which utilize word-level or sentence-level representations. also shows impressive zero-shot transferability that enables the model to perform retrieval in an unseen language pair during training. Our dataset, code, and trained models are publicly available at github.com/cwszz/XPR/.

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Incorporating Causal Analysis into Diversified and Logical Response Generation
Jiayi Liu | Wei Wei | Zhixuan Chu | Xing Gao | Ji Zhang | Tan Yan | Yulin Kang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Although the Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE) model can generate more diversified responses than the traditional Seq2Seq model, the responses often have low relevance with the input words or are illogical with the question. A causal analysis is carried out to study the reasons behind, and a methodology of searching for the mediators and mitigating the confounding bias in dialogues is provided. Specifically, we propose to predict the mediators to preserve relevant information and auto-regressively incorporate the mediators into generating process. Besides, a dynamic topic graph guided conditional variational auto-encoder (TGG-CVAE) model is utilized to complement the semantic space and reduce the confounding bias in responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate both relevant and informative responses, and outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of automatic metrics and human evaluations.

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Capturing Global Structural Information in Long Document Question Answering with Compressive Graph Selector Network
Yuxiang Nie | Heyan Huang | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Long document question answering is a challenging task due to its demands for complex reasoning over long text. Previous works usually take long documents as non-structured flat texts or only consider the local structure in long documents. However, these methods usually ignore the global structure of the long document, which is essential for long-range understanding. To tackle this problem, we propose Compressive Graph Selector Network (CGSN) to capture the global structure in a compressive and iterative manner. The proposed model mainly focuses on the evidence selection phase of long document question answering. Specifically, it consists of three modules: local graph network, global graph network and evidence memory network. Firstly, the local graph network builds the graph structure of the chunked segment in token, sentence, paragraph and segment levels to capture the short-term dependency of the text. Secondly, the global graph network selectively receives the information of each level from the local graph, compresses them into the global graph nodes and applies graph attention to the global graph nodes to build the long-range reasoning over the entire text in an iterative way. Thirdly, the evidence memory network is designed to alleviate the redundancy problem in the evidence selection by saving the selected result in the previous steps. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods on two datasets.

2021

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The First Workshop on Evaluations and Assessments of Neural Conversation Systems
Wei Wei | Bo Dai | Tuo Zhao | Lihong Li | Diyi Yang | Yun-Nung Chen | Y-Lan Boureau | Asli Celikyilmaz | Alborz Geramifard | Aman Ahuja | Haoming Jiang
The First Workshop on Evaluations and Assessments of Neural Conversation Systems

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Context-aware Entity Typing in Knowledge Graphs
Weiran Pan | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Knowledge graph entity typing aims to infer entities’ missing types in knowledge graphs which is an important but under-explored issue. This paper proposes a novel method for this task by utilizing entities’ contextual information. Specifically, we design two inference mechanisms: i) N2T: independently use each neighbor of an entity to infer its type; ii) Agg2T: aggregate the neighbors of an entity to infer its type. Those mechanisms will produce multiple inference results, and an exponentially weighted pooling method is used to generate the final inference result. Furthermore, we propose a novel loss function to alleviate the false-negative problem during training. Experiments on two real-world KGs demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The source code and data of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/CCIIPLab/CET.

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Multi-granularity Textual Adversarial Attack with Behavior Cloning
Yangyi Chen | Jin Su | Wei Wei
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recently, the textual adversarial attack models become increasingly popular due to their successful in estimating the robustness of NLP models. However, existing works have obvious deficiencies. (1)They usually consider only a single granularity of modification strategies (e.g. word-level or sentence-level), which is insufficient to explore the holistic textual space for generation; (2) They need to query victim models hundreds of times to make a successful attack, which is highly inefficient in practice. To address such problems, in this paper we propose MAYA, a Multi-grAnularitY Attack model to effectively generate high-quality adversarial samples with fewer queries to victim models. Furthermore, we propose a reinforcement-learning based method to train a multi-granularity attack agent through behavior cloning with the expert knowledge from our MAYA algorithm to further reduce the query times. Additionally, we also adapt the agent to attack black-box models that only output labels without confidence scores. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our attack models by attacking BiLSTM, BERT and RoBERTa in two different black-box attack settings and three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our models achieve overall better attacking performance and produce more fluent and grammatical adversarial samples compared to baseline models. Besides, our adversarial attack agent significantly reduces the query times in both attack settings. Our codes are released at https://github.com/Yangyi-Chen/MAYA.

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Towards Automatic Evaluation of Dialog Systems: A Model-Free Off-Policy Evaluation Approach
Haoming Jiang | Bo Dai | Mengjiao Yang | Tuo Zhao | Wei Wei
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Reliable automatic evaluation of dialogue systems under an interactive environment has long been overdue. An ideal environment for evaluating dialog systems, also known as the Turing test, needs to involve human interaction, which is usually not affordable for large-scale experiments. Though researchers have attempted to use metrics for language generation tasks (e.g., perplexity, BLEU) or some model-based reinforcement learning methods (e.g., self-play evaluation) for automatic evaluation, these methods only show very weak correlation with the actual human evaluation in practice. To bridge such a gap, we propose a new framework named ENIGMA for estimating human evaluation scores based on recent advances of off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. ENIGMA only requires a handful of pre-collected experience data, and therefore does not involve human interaction with the target policy during the evaluation, making automatic evaluations feasible. More importantly, ENIGMA is model-free and agnostic to the behavior policies for collecting the experience data, which significantly alleviates the technical difficulties of modeling complex dialogue environments and human behaviors. Our experiments show that ENIGMA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of correlation with human evaluation scores.

2020

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A Data-Centric Framework for Composable NLP Workflows
Zhengzhong Liu | Guanxiong Ding | Avinash Bukkittu | Mansi Gupta | Pengzhi Gao | Atif Ahmed | Shikun Zhang | Xin Gao | Swapnil Singhavi | Linwei Li | Wei Wei | Zecong Hu | Haoran Shi | Xiaodan Liang | Teruko Mitamura | Eric Xing | Zhiting Hu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems in application domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education) involve interoperation among multiple components, ranging from data ingestion, human annotation, to text retrieval, analysis, generation, and visualization. We establish a unified open-source framework to support fast development of such sophisticated NLP workflows in a composable manner. The framework introduces a uniform data representation to encode heterogeneous results by a wide range of NLP tasks. It offers a large repository of processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, which can be easily assembled with full interoperability under the unified representation. The highly extensible framework allows plugging in custom processors from external off-the-shelf NLP and deep learning libraries. The whole framework is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, namely Forte (for workflow infrastructure and NLP function processors) and Stave (for user interaction, visualization, and annotation).

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AirConcierge: Generating Task-Oriented Dialogue via Efficient Large-Scale Knowledge Retrieval
Chieh-Yang Chen | Pei-Hsin Wang | Shih-Chieh Chang | Da-Cheng Juan | Wei Wei | Jia-Yu Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Despite recent success in neural task-oriented dialogue systems, developing such a real-world system involves accessing large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which cannot be simply encoded by neural approaches, such as memory network mechanisms. To alleviate the above problem, we propose , an end-to-end trainable text-to-SQL guided framework to learn a neural agent that interacts with KBs using the generated SQL queries. Specifically, the neural agent first learns to ask and confirm the customer’s intent during the multi-turn interactions, then dynamically determining when to ground the user constraints into executable SQL queries so as to fetch relevant information from KBs. With the help of our method, the agent can use less but more accurate fetched results to generate useful responses efficiently, instead of incorporating the entire KBs. We evaluate the proposed method on the AirDialogue dataset, a large corpus released by Google, containing the conversations of customers booking flight tickets from the agent. The experimental results show that significantly improves over previous work in terms of accuracy and the BLEU score, which demonstrates not only the ability to achieve the given task but also the good quality of the generated dialogues.

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Question Answering with Long Multiple-Span Answers
Ming Zhu | Aman Ahuja | Da-Cheng Juan | Wei Wei | Chandan K. Reddy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Answering questions in many real-world applications often requires complex and precise information excerpted from texts spanned across a long document. However, currently no such annotated dataset is publicly available, which hinders the development of neural question-answering (QA) systems. To this end, we present MASH-QA, a Multiple Answer Spans Healthcare Question Answering dataset from the consumer health domain, where answers may need to be excerpted from multiple, non-consecutive parts of text spanned across a long document. We also propose MultiCo, a neural architecture that is able to capture the relevance among multiple answer spans, by using a query-based contextualized sentence selection approach, for forming the answer to the given question. We also demonstrate that conventional QA models are not suitable for this type of task and perform poorly in this setting. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the experimental results confirm the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art QA models in this multi-span QA setting.

2019

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On the Robustness of Self-Attentive Models
Yu-Lun Hsieh | Minhao Cheng | Da-Cheng Juan | Wei Wei | Wen-Lian Hsu | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This work examines the robustness of self-attentive neural networks against adversarial input perturbations. Specifically, we investigate the attention and feature extraction mechanisms of state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and self-attentive architectures for sentiment analysis, entailment and machine translation under adversarial attacks. We also propose a novel attack algorithm for generating more natural adversarial examples that could mislead neural models but not humans. Experimental results show that, compared to recurrent neural models, self-attentive models are more robust against adversarial perturbation. In addition, we provide theoretical explanations for their superior robustness to support our claims.

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Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Dialogue Systems: A Case Study on a Negotiation Agent
Minhao Cheng | Wei Wei | Cho-Jui Hsieh
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)

Recent research has demonstrated that goal-oriented dialogue agents trained on large datasets can achieve striking performance when interacting with human users. In real world applications, however, it is important to ensure that the agent performs smoothly interacting with not only regular users but also those malicious ones who would attack the system through interactions in order to achieve goals for their own advantage. In this paper, we develop algorithms to evaluate the robustness of a dialogue agent by carefully designed attacks using adversarial agents. Those attacks are performed in both black-box and white-box settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that adversarial training using our attacks can significantly improve the robustness of a goal-oriented dialogue system. On a case-study of the negotiation agent developed by (Lewis et al., 2017), our attacks reduced the average advantage of rewards between the attacker and the trained RL-based agent from 2.68 to -5.76 on a scale from -10 to 10 for randomized goals. Moreover, we show that with the adversarial training, we are able to improve the robustness of negotiation agents by 1.5 points on average against all our attacks.

2018

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AirDialogue: An Environment for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Research
Wei Wei | Quoc Le | Andrew Dai | Jia Li
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent progress in dialogue generation has inspired a number of studies on dialogue systems that are capable of accomplishing tasks through natural language interactions. A promising direction among these studies is the use of reinforcement learning techniques, such as self-play, for training dialogue agents. However, current datasets are limited in size, and the environment for training agents and evaluating progress is relatively unsophisticated. We present AirDialogue, a large dataset that contains 301,427 goal-oriented conversations. To collect this dataset, we create a context-generator which provides travel and flight restrictions. We then ask human annotators to play the role of a customer or an agent and interact with the goal of successfully booking a trip given the restrictions. Key to our environment is the ease of evaluating the success of the dialogue, which is achieved by using ground-truth states (e.g., the flight being booked) generated by the restrictions. Any dialogue agent that does not generate the correct states is considered to fail. Our experimental results indicate that state-of-the-art dialogue models can only achieve a score of 0.17 while humans can reach a score of 0.91, which suggests significant opportunities for future improvement.

2017

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Structural Embedding of Syntactic Trees for Machine Comprehension
Rui Liu | Junjie Hu | Wei Wei | Zi Yang | Eric Nyberg
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Deep neural networks for machine comprehension typically utilizes only word or character embeddings without explicitly taking advantage of structured linguistic information such as constituency trees and dependency trees. In this paper, we propose structural embedding of syntactic trees (SEST), an algorithm framework to utilize structured information and encode them into vector representations that can boost the performance of algorithms for the machine comprehension. We evaluate our approach using a state-of-the-art neural attention model on the SQuAD dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can accurately identify the syntactic boundaries of the sentences and extract answers that are syntactically coherent over the baseline methods.

2013

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Phrase-based Parallel Fragments Extraction from Comparable Corpora
Xiaoyin Fu | Wei Wei | Shixiang Lu | Zhenbiao Chen | Bo Xu
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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The CASIA machine translation system for IWSLT 2013
Xingyuan Peng | Xiaoyin Fu | Wei Wei | Zhenbiao Chen | Wei Chen | Bo Xu
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

In this paper, we describe the CASIA statistical machine translation (SMT) system for the IWSLT2013 Evaluation Campaign. We participated in the Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation tasks. For both of these tasks, we used a hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) decoder and made it as our baseline translation system. A number of techniques were proposed to deal with these translation tasks, including parallel sentence extraction, pre-processing, translation model (TM) optimization, language model (LM) interpolation, turning, and post-processing. With these techniques, the translation results were significantly improved compared with that of the baseline system.

2012

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Translation Model Based Cross-Lingual Language Model Adaptation: from Word Models to Phrase Models
Shixiang Lu | Wei Wei | Xiaoyin Fu | Bo Xu
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

2011

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Enhancing the HL-SOT Approach to Sentiment Analysis via a Localized Feature Selection Framework
Wei Wei | Jon Atle Gulla
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Effective Use of Discontinuous Phrases for Hierarchical Phrase-based Translation
Wei Wei | Bo Xu
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIII: Papers

2010

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Sentiment Learning on Product Reviews via Sentiment Ontology Tree
Wei Wei | Jon Atle Gulla
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2006

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NLPR translation system for IWSLT 2006 evaluation campaign
Chunguang Chai | Jinhua Du | Wei Wei | Peng Liu | Keyan Zhou | Yanqing He | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

2005

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The CASIA Phrase-Based Machine Translation System
Wei Pang | Zhendong Yang | Zhenbiao Chen | Wei Wei | Bo Xu | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation