Qianren Mao


2023

pdf bib
DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining
Weifeng Jiang | Qianren Mao | Chenghua Lin | Jianxin Li | Ting Deng | Weiyi Yang | Zheng Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Many text mining models are constructed by fine-tuning a large deep pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. However, a significant challenge that arises nowadays is how to maintain performance when we use a lightweight model with limited labeled samples. We present DisCo, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large PLM using knowledge distillation. Our key insight is to share complementary knowledge among distilled student cohorts to promote their SSL effectiveness. DisCo employs a novel co-training technique to optimize a cohort of multiple small student models by promoting knowledge sharing among students under diversified views: model views produced by different distillation strategies and data views produced by various input augmentations. We evaluate DisCo on both semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks. Experimental results show that DisCo can produce student models that are 7.6× smaller and 4.8 × faster in inference than the baseline PLMs while maintaining comparable performance. We also show that DisCo-generated student models outperform the similar-sized models elaborately tuned in distinct tasks.

pdf bib
LATENTLOGIC: Learning Logic Rules in Latent Space over Knowledge Graphs
Junnan Liu | Qianren Mao | Chenghua Lin | Yangqiu Song | Jianxin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Learning logic rules for knowledge graph reasoning is essential as such rules provide interpretable explanations for reasoning and can be generalized to different domains. However, existing methods often face challenges such as searching in a vast search space (e.g., enumeration of relational paths or multiplication of high-dimensional matrices) and inefficient optimization (e.g., techniques based on reinforcement learning or EM algorithm). To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework called LatentLogic to efficiently mine logic rules by controllable generation in the latent space. Specifically, to map the discrete relational paths into the latent space, we leverage a pre-trained VAE and employ a discriminator to establish an energy-based distribution. Additionally, we incorporate a sampler based on ordinary differential equations, enabling the efficient generation of logic rules in our approach. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

pdf bib
Bipartite Graph Pre-training for Unsupervised Extractive Summarization with Graph Convolutional Auto-Encoders
Qianren Mao | Shaobo Zhao | Jiarui Li | Xiaolei Gu | Shizhu He | Bo Li | Jianxin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Pre-trained sentence representations are crucial for identifying significant sentences in unsupervised document extractive summarization. However, the traditional two-step paradigm of pre-training and sentence-ranking, creates a gap due to differing optimization objectives. To address this issue, we argue that utilizing pre-trained embeddings derived from a process specifically designed to optimize informative and distinctive sentence representations helps rank significant sentences. To do so, we propose a novel graph pre-training auto-encoder to obtain sentence embeddings by explicitly modelling intra-sentential distinctive features and inter-sentential cohesive features through sentence-word bipartite graphs. These fine-tuned sentence embeddings are then utilized in a graph-based ranking algorithm for unsupervised summarization. Our method is a plug-and-play pre-trained model that produces predominant performance for unsupervised summarization frameworks by providing summary-worthy sentence representations. It surpasses heavy BERT- or RoBERTa-based sentence representations in downstream tasks.

2022

pdf bib
Noise-injected Consistency Training and Entropy-constrained Pseudo Labeling for Semi-supervised Extractive Summarization
Yiming Wang | Qianren Mao | Junnan Liu | Weifeng Jiang | Hongdong Zhu | Jianxin Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Labeling large amounts of extractive summarization data is often prohibitive expensive due to time, financial, and expertise constraints, which poses great challenges to incorporating summarization system in practical applications. This limitation can be overcome by semi-supervised approaches: consistency-training and pseudo-labeling to make full use of unlabeled data. Researches on the two, however, are conducted independently, and very few works try to connect them. In this paper, we first use the noise-injected consistency training paradigm to regularize model predictions. Subsequently, we propose a novel entropy-constrained pseudo labeling strategy to obtain high-confidence labels from unlabeled predictions, which can obtain high-confidence labels from unlabeled predictions by comparing the entropy of supervised and unsupervised predictions. By combining consistency training and pseudo-labeling, this framework enforce a low-density separation between classes, which decently improves the performance of supervised learning over an insufficient labeled extractive summarization dataset.