Lejian Liao


2021

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To be Closer: Learning to Link up Aspects with Opinions
Yuxiang Zhou | Lejian Liao | Yang Gao | Zhanming Jie | Wei Lu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Dependency parse trees are helpful for discovering the opinion words in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) (CITATION). However, the trees obtained from off-the-shelf dependency parsers are static, and could be sub-optimal in ABSA. This is because the syntactic trees are not designed for capturing the interactions between opinion words and aspect words. In this work, we aim to shorten the distance between aspects and corresponding opinion words by learning an aspect-centric tree structure. The aspect and opinion words are expected to be closer along such tree structure compared to the standard dependency parse tree. The learning process allows the tree structure to adaptively correlate the aspect and opinion words, enabling us to better identify the polarity in the ABSA task. We conduct experiments on five aspect-based sentiment datasets, and the proposed model significantly outperforms recent strong baselines. Furthermore, our thorough analysis demonstrates the average distance between aspect and opinion words are shortened by at least 19% on the standard SemEval Restaurant14 (CITATION) dataset.

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Modularized Interaction Network for Named Entity Recognition
Fei Li | Zheng Wang | Siu Cheung Hui | Lejian Liao | Dandan Song | Jing Xu | Guoxiu He | Meihuizi Jia
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)

Although the existing Named Entity Recognition (NER) models have achieved promising performance, they suffer from certain drawbacks. The sequence labeling-based NER models do not perform well in recognizing long entities as they focus only on word-level information, while the segment-based NER models which focus on processing segment instead of single word are unable to capture the word-level dependencies within the segment. Moreover, as boundary detection and type prediction may cooperate with each other for the NER task, it is also important for the two sub-tasks to mutually reinforce each other by sharing their information. In this paper, we propose a novel Modularized Interaction Network (MIN) model which utilizes both segment-level information and word-level dependencies, and incorporates an interaction mechanism to support information sharing between boundary detection and type prediction to enhance the performance for the NER task. We have conducted extensive experiments based on three NER benchmark datasets. The performance results have shown that the proposed MIN model has outperformed the current state-of-the-art models.

2018

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Genre Separation Network with Adversarial Training for Cross-genre Relation Extraction
Ge Shi | Chong Feng | Lifu Huang | Boliang Zhang | Heng Ji | Lejian Liao | Heyan Huang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Relation Extraction suffers from dramatical performance decrease when training a model on one genre and directly applying it to a new genre, due to the distinct feature distributions. Previous studies address this problem by discovering a shared space across genres using manually crafted features, which requires great human effort. To effectively automate this process, we design a genre-separation network, which applies two encoders, one genre-independent and one genre-shared, to explicitly extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features. Then we train a relation classifier using the genre-agnostic features on the source genre and directly apply to the target genre. Experiment results on three distinct genres of the ACE dataset show that our approach achieves up to 6.1% absolute F1-score gain compared to previous methods. By incorporating a set of external linguistic features, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.7% absolute F1 gain. We make all programs of our model publicly available for research purpose

2017

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Can Syntax Help? Improving an LSTM-based Sentence Compression Model for New Domains
Liangguo Wang | Jing Jiang | Hai Leong Chieu | Chen Hui Ong | Dandan Song | Lejian Liao
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In this paper, we study how to improve the domain adaptability of a deletion-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network model for sentence compression. We hypothesize that syntactic information helps in making such models more robust across domains. We propose two major changes to the model: using explicit syntactic features and introducing syntactic constraints through Integer Linear Programming (ILP). Our evaluation shows that the proposed model works better than the original model as well as a traditional non-neural-network-based model in a cross-domain setting.

2015

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LDTM: A Latent Document Type Model for Cumulative Citation Recommendation
Jingang Wang | Dandan Song | Zhiwei Zhang | Lejian Liao | Luo Si | Chin-Yew Lin
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing