Xiaoli Li


2023

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Hierarchical Enhancement Framework for Aspect-based Argument Mining
Yujie Fu | Yang Li | Suge Wang | Xiaoli Li | Deyu Li | Jian Liao | JianXing Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Aspect-Based Argument Mining (ABAM) is a critical task in computational argumentation. Existing methods have primarily treated ABAM as a nested named entity recognition problem, overlooking the need for tailored strategies to effectively address the specific challenges of ABAM tasks. To this end, we propose a layer-based Hierarchical Enhancement Framework (HEF) for ABAM, and introduce three novel components: the Semantic and Syntactic Fusion (SSF) component, the Batch-level Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (BHGAT) component, and the Span Mask Interactive Attention (SMIA) component. These components serve the purposes of optimizing underlying representations, detecting argument unit stances, and constraining aspect term recognition boundaries, respectively. By incorporating these components, our framework enables better handling of the challenges and improves the performance and accuracy in argument unit and aspect term recognition. Experiments on multiple datasets and various tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework and components.

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From Speculation Detection to Trustworthy Relational Tuples in Information Extraction
Kuicai Dong | Aixin Sun | Jung-jae Kim | Xiaoli Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Speculation detection is an important NLP task to identify text factuality. However, the extracted speculative information (e.g., speculative polarity, cue, and scope) lacks structure and poses challenges for direct utilization in downstream tasks. Open Information Extraction (OIE), on the other hand, extracts structured tuples as facts, without examining the certainty of these tuples. Bridging this gap between speculation detection and information extraction becomes imperative to generate structured speculative information and trustworthy relational tuples. Existing studies on speculation detection are defined at sentence level; but even if a sentence is determined to be speculative, not all factual tuples extracted from it are speculative. In this paper, we propose to study speculations in OIE tuples and determine whether a tuple is speculative. We formally define the research problem of tuple-level speculation detection. We then conduct detailed analysis on the LSOIE dataset which provides labels for speculative tuples. Lastly, we propose a baseline model SpecTup for this new research task.

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Decomposed Prompt Tuning via Low-Rank Reparameterization
Yao Xiao | Lu Xu | Jiaxi Li | Wei Lu | Xiaoli Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

While prompt tuning approaches have achieved competitive performance with high efficiency, we observe that they invariably employ the same initialization process, wherein the soft prompt is either randomly initialized or derived from an existing embedding vocabulary. In contrast to these conventional methods, this study aims to investigate an alternative way to derive soft prompt. Our empirical studies show that the soft prompt typically exhibits a low “intrinsic rank” characteristic. With such observations, we propose decomposed prompt tuning, a novel approach that utilizes low-rank matrices to initialize the soft prompt. Through the low-rank reparameterization, our method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining effectiveness. Experimental results on the SuperGLUE benchmark in both high-resource and low-resource scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Code Pre-trained Models through Structure-Aware Adversarial Samples Generation
Nuo Chen | Qiushi Sun | Jianing Wang | Ming Gao | Xiaoli Li | Xiang Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Code pre-trained models (CodePTMs) have significantly advanced the field of neural code intelligence. Despite their capabilities, these models are susceptible to adversarial attacks that subtly modify the model inputs, resulting in incorrect outputs or predictions. Previous methods of robustness evaluation for CodePTMs primarily stem from a textual perspective, without explicitly taking into account the structure of the code. Furthermore, prior studies fail to encompass a broad enough spectrum of tasks and models. In this paper, we propose a set of novel robustness evaluation methods based on the intrinsic structure of the code. Specifically, we first launch adversarial attacks on crucial identifier tokens and sub-tree structures to explore the impact of imperceptible perturbation. Then, we perform global restructuring of the code using different traversal methods for abstract syntax trees, aiming to explore the model’s sensitivity to input samples with equivalent information. Moreover, for each scenario, we employ adversarial training methods to explore the possibility of restoring the performance of perturbed models. For both code understanding and generation, our proposed method has demonstrated its effectiveness across a wide range of models and tasks, thereby allowing us to make one step forward in our understanding of the inner mechanisms of CodePTMs.

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HyperRouter: Towards Efficient Training and Inference of Sparse Mixture of Experts
Truong Giang Do | Le Khiem | Quang Pham | TrungTin Nguyen | Thanh-Nam Doan | Binh Nguyen | Chenghao Liu | Savitha Ramasamy | Xiaoli Li | Steven Hoi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

By routing input tokens to only a few split experts, Sparse Mixture-of-Experts has enabled efficient training of large language models. Recent findings suggest that fixing the routers can achieve competitive performance by alleviating the collapsing problem, where all experts eventually learn similar representations. However, this strategy has two key limitations: (i) the policy derived from random routers might be sub-optimal, and (ii) it requires extensive resources during training and evaluation, leading to limited efficiency gains. This work introduces HyperRouter, which dynamically generates the router’s parameters through a fixed hypernetwork and trainable embeddings to achieve a balance between training the routers and freezing them to learn an improved routing policy. Extensive experiments across a wide range of tasks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency gains of HyperRouter compared to existing routing methods. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/giangdip2410/HyperRouter.

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Open Information Extraction via Chunks
Kuicai Dong | Aixin Sun | Jung-jae Kim | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Existing OIE systems split a sentence into tokens and recognize token spans as tuple relations and arguments. We instead propose Sentence as Chunk sequence (SaC) and recognize chunk spans as tuple relations and arguments. We argue that SaC has better properties for OIE than sentence as token sequence, and evaluate four choices of chunks (i.e., CoNLL chunks, OIA simple phrases, noun phrases, and spans from SpanOIE). Also, we propose a simple end-to-end BERT-based model, Chunk-OIE, for sentence chunking and tuple extraction on top of SaC. Chunk-OIE achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple OIE datasets, showing that SaC benefits the OIE task.

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MS-DETR: Natural Language Video Localization with Sampling Moment-Moment Interaction
Wang Jing | Aixin Sun | Hao Zhang | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Given a text query, the task of Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) is to localize a temporal moment in an untrimmed video that semantically matches the query. In this paper, we adopt a proposal-based solution that generates proposals (i.e. candidate moments) and then select the best matching proposal. On top of modeling the cross-modal interaction between candidate moments and the query, our proposed Moment Sampling DETR (MS-DETR) enables efficient moment-moment relation modeling. The core idea is to sample a subset of moments guided by the learnable templates with an adopted DETR framework. To achieve this, we design a multi-scale visual-linguistic encoder, and an anchor-guided moment decoder paired with a set of learnable templates. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MS-DETR.

2022

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Syntactic Multi-view Learning for Open Information Extraction
Kuicai Dong | Aixin Sun | Jung-Jae Kim | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) aims to extract relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Traditional rule-based or statistical models were developed based on syntactic structure of sentence, identified by syntactic parsers. However, previous neural OpenIE models under-explored the useful syntactic information. In this paper, we model both constituency and dependency trees into word-level graphs, and enable neural OpenIE to learn from the syntactic structures. To better fuse heterogeneous information from the two graphs, we adopt multi-view learning to capture multiple relationships from them. Finally, the finetuned constituency and dependency representations are aggregated with sentential semantic representations for tuple generation. Experiments show that both constituency and dependency information, and the multi-view learning are effective.

2021

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GCRC: A New Challenging MRC Dataset from Gaokao Chinese for Explainable Evaluation
Hongye Tan | Xiaoyue Wang | Yu Ji | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Zhiwei Hu | Yunxiao Zhao | Xiaoqi Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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DocOIE: A Document-level Context-Aware Dataset for OpenIE
Kuicai Dong | Zhao Yilin | Aixin Sun | Jung-Jae Kim | Xiaoli Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Integrating Semantic Scenario and Word Relations for Abstractive Sentence Summarization
Yong Guan | Shaoru Guo | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Hu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recently graph-based methods have been adopted for Abstractive Text Summarization. However, existing graph-based methods only consider either word relations or structure information, which neglect the correlation between them. To simultaneously capture the word relations and structure information from sentences, we propose a novel Dual Graph network for Abstractive Sentence Summarization. Specifically, we first construct semantic scenario graph and semantic word relation graph based on FrameNet, and subsequently learn their representations and design graph fusion method to enhance their correlation and obtain better semantic representation for summary generation. Experimental results show our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two popular benchmark datasets, i.e., Gigaword and DUC 2004.

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Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Sentence-level Extractive Text Summarization
Yong Guan | Shaoru Guo | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Hongye Tan
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Sentence-level extractive text summarization aims to select important sentences from a given document. However, it is very challenging to model the importance of sentences. In this paper, we propose a novel Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Extractive Summarization, which leverages Frame semantics to model sentences from both intra-sentence level and inter-sentence level, facilitating the text summarization task. In particular, intra-sentence level semantics leverage Frames and Frame Elements to model internal semantic structure within a sentence, while inter-sentence level semantics leverage Frame-to-Frame relations to model relationships among sentences. Extensive experiments on two benchmark corpus CNN/DM and NYT demonstrate that our model outperforms six state-of-the-art methods significantly.

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RST Parsing from Scratch
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We introduce a novel top-down end-to-end formulation of document level discourse parsing in the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) framework. In this formulation, we consider discourse parsing as a sequence of splitting decisions at token boundaries and use a seq2seq network to model the splitting decisions. Our framework facilitates discourse parsing from scratch without requiring discourse segmentation as a prerequisite; rather, it yields segmentation as part of the parsing process. Our unified parsing model adopts a beam search to decode the best tree structure by searching through a space of high scoring trees. With extensive experiments on the standard RST discourse treebank, we demonstrate that our parser outperforms existing methods by a good margin in both end-to-end parsing and parsing with gold segmentation. More importantly, it does so without using any handcrafted features, making it faster and easily adaptable to new languages and domains.

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A Knowledge-Guided Framework for Frame Identification
Xuefeng Su | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Jeff Z. Pan | Hu Zhang | Qinghua Chai | Xiaoqi Han
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)

Frame Identification (FI) is a fundamental and challenging task in frame semantic parsing. The task aims to find the exact frame evoked by a target word in a given sentence. It is generally regarded as a classification task in existing work, where frames are treated as discrete labels or represented using onehot embeddings. However, the valuable knowledge about frames is neglected. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Guided Frame Identification framework (KGFI) that integrates three types frame knowledge, including frame definitions, frame elements and frame-to-frame relations, to learn better frame representation, which guides the KGFI to jointly map target words and frames into the same embedding space and subsequently identify the best frame by calculating the dot-product similarity scores between the target word embedding and all of the frame embeddings. The extensive experimental results demonstrate KGFI significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.

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A Conditional Splitting Framework for Efficient Constituency Parsing
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
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)

We introduce a generic seq2seq parsing framework that casts constituency parsing problems (syntactic and discourse parsing) into a series of conditional splitting decisions. Our parsing model estimates the conditional probability distribution of possible splitting points in a given text span and supports efficient top-down decoding, which is linear in number of nodes. The conditional splitting formulation together with efficient beam search inference facilitate structural consistency without relying on expensive structured inference. Crucially, for discourse analysis we show that in our formulation, discourse segmentation can be framed as a special case of parsing which allows us to perform discourse parsing without requiring segmentation as a pre-requisite. Experiments show that our model achieves good results on the standard syntactic parsing tasks under settings with/without pre-trained representations and rivals state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods that are more computationally expensive than ours. In discourse parsing, our method outperforms SoTA by a good margin.

2020

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Public Sentiment Drift Analysis Based on Hierarchical Variational Auto-encoder
Wenyue Zhang | Xiaoli Li | Yang Li | Suge Wang | Deyu Li | Jian Liao | Jianxing Zheng
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Detecting public sentiment drift is a challenging task due to sentiment change over time. Existing methods first build a classification model using historical data and subsequently detect drift if the model performs much worse on new data. In this paper, we focus on distribution learning by proposing a novel Hierarchical Variational Auto-Encoder (HVAE) model to learn better distribution representation, and design a new drift measure to directly evaluate distribution changes between historical data and new data. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves better results than three existing state-of-the-art methods.

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A Frame-based Sentence Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension
Shaoru Guo | Ru Li | Hongye Tan | Xiaoli Li | Yong Guan | Hongyan Zhao | Yueping Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Sentence representation (SR) is the most crucial and challenging task in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). MRC systems typically only utilize the information contained in the sentence itself, while human beings can leverage their semantic knowledge. To bridge the gap, we proposed a novel Frame-based Sentence Representation (FSR) method, which employs frame semantic knowledge to facilitate sentence modelling. Specifically, different from existing methods that only model lexical units (LUs), Frame Representation Models, which utilize both LUs in frame and Frame-to-Frame (F-to-F) relations, are designed to model frames and sentences with attention schema. Our proposed FSR method is able to integrate multiple-frame semantic information to get much better sentence representations. Our extensive experimental results show that it performs better than state-of-the-art technologies on machine reading comprehension task.

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Efficient Constituency Parsing by Pointing
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose a novel constituency parsing model that casts the parsing problem into a series of pointing tasks. Specifically, our model estimates the likelihood of a span being a legitimate tree constituent via the pointing score corresponding to the boundary words of the span. Our parsing model supports efficient top-down decoding and our learning objective is able to enforce structural consistency without resorting to the expensive CKY inference. The experiments on the standard English Penn Treebank parsing task show that our method achieves 92.78 F1 without using pre-trained models, which is higher than all the existing methods with similar time complexity. Using pre-trained BERT, our model achieves 95.48 F1, which is competitive with the state-of-the-art while being faster. Our approach also establishes new state-of-the-art in Basque and Swedish in the SPMRL shared tasks on multilingual constituency parsing.

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Differentiable Window for Dynamic Local Attention
Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Shafiq Joty | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose Differentiable Window, a new neural module and general purpose component for dynamic window selection. While universally applicable, we demonstrate a compelling use case of utilizing Differentiable Window to improve standard attention modules by enabling more focused attentions over the input regions. We propose two variants of Differentiable Window, and integrate them within the Transformer architecture in two novel ways. We evaluate our proposed approach on a myriad of NLP tasks, including machine translation, sentiment analysis, subject-verb agreement and language modeling. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent and sizable improvements across all tasks.

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Incorporating Syntax and Frame Semantics in Neural Network for Machine Reading Comprehension
Shaoru Guo | Yong Guan | Ru Li | Xiaoli Li | Hongye Tan
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is one of the most critical yet challenging tasks in natural language understanding(NLU), where both syntax and semantics information of text are essential components for text understanding. It is surprising that jointly considering syntax and semantics in neural networks was never formally reported in literature. This paper makes the first attempt by proposing a novel Syntax and Frame Semantics model for Machine Reading Comprehension (SS-MRC), which takes full advantage of syntax and frame semantics to get richer text representation. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that SS-MRC performs better than ten state-of-the-art technologies on machine reading comprehension task.

2019

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Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Semi-supervised Short Text Classification
Hu Linmei | Tianchi Yang | Chuan Shi | Houye Ji | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Short text classification has found rich and critical applications in news and tweet tagging to help users find relevant information. Due to lack of labeled training data in many practical use cases, there is a pressing need for studying semi-supervised short text classification. Most existing studies focus on long texts and achieve unsatisfactory performance on short texts due to the sparsity and limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network based method for semi-supervised short text classification, leveraging full advantage of few labeled data and large unlabeled data through information propagation along the graph. In particular, we first present a flexible HIN (heterogeneous information network) framework for modeling the short texts, which can integrate any type of additional information as well as capture their relations to address the semantic sparsity. Then, we propose Heterogeneous Graph ATtention networks (HGAT) to embed the HIN for short text classification based on a dual-level attention mechanism, including node-level and type-level attentions. The attention mechanism can learn the importance of different neighboring nodes as well as the importance of different node (information) types to a current node. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six benchmark datasets significantly.

2015

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TSDPMM: Incorporating Prior Topic Knowledge into Dirichlet Process Mixture Models for Text Clustering
Linmei Hu | Juanzi Li | Xiaoli Li | Chao Shao | Xuzhong Wang
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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EMNLP versus ACL: Analyzing NLP research over time
Sujatha Das Gollapalli | Xiaoli Li
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Learning Topic Hierarchies for Wikipedia Categories
Linmei Hu | Xuzhong Wang | Mengdi Zhang | Juanzi Li | Xiaoli Li | Chao Shao | Jie Tang | Yongbin Liu
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Novel Computational Approaches to Keyphrase Extraction
Sujatha Das Gollapalli | Cornelia Caragea | Xiaoli Li | C. Lee Giles
Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Novel Computational Approaches to Keyphrase Extraction