Yizhong Wang


2023

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One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings
Hongjin Su | Weijia Shi | Jungo Kasai | Yizhong Wang | Yushi Hu | Mari Ostendorf | Wen-tau Yih | Noah A. Smith | Luke Zettlemoyer | Tao Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

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HINT: Hypernetwork Instruction Tuning for Efficient Zero- and Few-Shot Generalisation
Hamish Ivison | Akshita Bhagia | Yizhong Wang | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Matthew Peters
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent NLP models have shown the remarkable ability to effectively generalise ‘zero-shot’ to new tasks using only natural language instructions as guidance. However, many of these approaches suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on concatenating lengthy instructions with every input example, resulting in costly reprocessing of the instruction. To avoid this, we introduce Hypernetworks for INstruction Tuning (HINT), which convert task instructions and examples into parameter-efficient modules inserted into an underlying model using a pretrained text encoder, eliminating the need to include instructions in the model input. The hypernetwork in HINT also produces an encoded instruction, which we concatenate with encoded inputs during decoding to further improve performance. HINT models outperform strong state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% when controlling for compute (measured in FLOPs). By converting instructions into modules, HINT models can effectively disregard the length of instructions and few-shot example inputs in terms of compute usage. As a result, HINT can enhance its performance by up to 25% by incorporating additional few-shot data, while utilizing only up to 5% more compute. This combines the strengths of parameter-efficient fine-tuning and in-context learning.

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Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions
Yizhong Wang | Yeganeh Kordi | Swaroop Mishra | Alisa Liu | Noah A. Smith | Daniel Khashabi | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large “instruction-tuned” language models (i.e., finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. Our pipeline generates instructions, input, and output samples from a language model, then filters invalid or similar ones before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to the vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT-001, which was trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT-001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

2022

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Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks
Yizhong Wang | Swaroop Mishra | Pegah Alipoormolabashi | Yeganeh Kordi | Amirreza Mirzaei | Atharva Naik | Arjun Ashok | Arut Selvan Dhanasekaran | Anjana Arunkumar | David Stap | Eshaan Pathak | Giannis Karamanolakis | Haizhi Lai | Ishan Purohit | Ishani Mondal | Jacob Anderson | Kirby Kuznia | Krima Doshi | Kuntal Kumar Pal | Maitreya Patel | Mehrad Moradshahi | Mihir Parmar | Mirali Purohit | Neeraj Varshney | Phani Rohitha Kaza | Pulkit Verma | Ravsehaj Singh Puri | Rushang Karia | Savan Doshi | Shailaja Keyur Sampat | Siddhartha Mishra | Sujan Reddy A | Sumanta Patro | Tanay Dixit | Xudong Shen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions? To address this question, we first introduce Super-NaturalInstructions, a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written instructions. Our collection covers 76 distinct task types, including but not limited to classification, extraction, infilling, sequence tagging, text rewriting, and text composition. This large and diverse collection of tasks enables rigorous benchmarking of cross-task generalization under instructions—training models to follow instructions on a subset of tasks and evaluating them on the remaining unseen ones. Furthermore, we build Tk-Instruct, a transformer model trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples). Our experiments show that Tk-Instruct outperforms existing instruction-following models such as InstructGPT by over 9% on our benchmark despite being an order of magnitude smaller. We further analyze generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances per task, and model sizes. We hope our dataset and model facilitate future progress towards more general-purpose NLP models.

2021

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Probing Across Time: What Does RoBERTa Know and When?
Zeyu Liu | Yizhong Wang | Jungo Kasai | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Noah A. Smith
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Models of language trained on very large corpora have been demonstrated useful for natural language processing. As fixed artifacts, they have become the object of intense study, with many researchers “probing” the extent to which they acquire and readily demonstrate linguistic abstractions, factual and commonsense knowledge, and reasoning abilities. Recent work applied several probes to intermediate training stages to observe the developmental process of a large-scale model (Chiang et al., 2020). Following this effort, we systematically answer a question: for various types of knowledge a language model learns, when during (pre)training are they acquired? Using RoBERTa as a case study, we find: linguistic knowledge is acquired fast, stably, and robustly across domains. Facts and commonsense are slower and more domain-sensitive. Reasoning abilities are, in general, not stably acquired. As new datasets, pretraining protocols, and probes emerge, we believe that probing-across-time analyses can help researchers understand the complex, intermingled learning that these models undergo and guide us toward more efficient approaches that accomplish necessary learning faster.

2020

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Dataset Cartography: Mapping and Diagnosing Datasets with Training Dynamics
Swabha Swayamdipta | Roy Schwartz | Nicholas Lourie | Yizhong Wang | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Noah A. Smith | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Large datasets have become commonplace in NLP research. However, the increased emphasis on data quantity has made it challenging to assess the quality of data. We introduce Data Maps—a model-based tool to characterize and diagnose datasets. We leverage a largely ignored source of information: the behavior of the model on individual instances during training (training dynamics) for building data maps. This yields two intuitive measures for each example—the model’s confidence in the true class, and the variability of this confidence across epochs—obtained in a single run of training. Experiments on four datasets show that these model-dependent measures reveal three distinct regions in the data map, each with pronounced characteristics. First, our data maps show the presence of “ambiguous” regions with respect to the model, which contribute the most towards out-of-distribution generalization. Second, the most populous regions in the data are “easy to learn” for the model, and play an important role in model optimization. Finally, data maps uncover a region with instances that the model finds “hard to learn”; these often correspond to labeling errors. Our results indicate that a shift in focus from quantity to quality of data could lead to robust models and improved out-of-distribution generalization.

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Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Shruti Rijhwani | Jiangming Liu | Yizhong Wang | Rotem Dror
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

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LiveQA: A Question Answering Dataset over Sports Live
Qianying Liu | Sicong Jiang | Yizhong Wang | Sujian Li
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we introduce LiveQA, a new question answering dataset constructed from play-by-play live broadcast. It contains 117k multiple-choice questions written by human commentators for over 1,670 NBA games, which are collected from the Chinese Hupu1 website. Derived from the characteristics of sports games, LiveQA can potentially test the reasoning ability across timeline-based live broadcasts, which is challenging compared to the existing datasets. In LiveQA, the questions require understanding the timeline, tracking events or doing mathematical computations. Our preliminary experiments show that the dataset introduces a challenging problem for question answering models, and a strong baseline model only achieves the accuracy of 53.1% and cannot beat the dominant option rule. We release the code and data of this paper for future research.

2019

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DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs
Dheeru Dua | Yizhong Wang | Pradeep Dasigi | Gabriel Stanovsky | Sameer Singh | Matt Gardner
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)

Reading comprehension has recently seen rapid progress, with systems matching humans on the most popular datasets for the task. However, a large body of work has highlighted the brittleness of these systems, showing that there is much work left to be done. We introduce a new reading comprehension benchmark, DROP, which requires Discrete Reasoning Over the content of Paragraphs. In this crowdsourced, adversarially-created, 55k-question benchmark, a system must resolve references in a question, perhaps to multiple input positions, and perform discrete operations over them (such as addition, counting, or sorting). These operations require a much more comprehensive understanding of the content of paragraphs, as they remove the paraphrase-and-entity-typing shortcuts available in prior datasets. We apply state-of-the-art methods from both the reading comprehension and semantic parsing literatures on this dataset and show that the best systems only achieve 38.4% F1 on our generalized accuracy metric, while expert human performance is 96%. We additionally present a new model that combines reading comprehension methods with simple numerical reasoning to achieve 51% F1.

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Do NLP Models Know Numbers? Probing Numeracy in Embeddings
Eric Wallace | Yizhong Wang | Sujian Li | Sameer Singh | Matt Gardner
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

The ability to understand and work with numbers (numeracy) is critical for many complex reasoning tasks. Currently, most NLP models treat numbers in text in the same way as other tokens—they embed them as distributed vectors. Is this enough to capture numeracy? We begin by investigating the numerical reasoning capabilities of a state-of-the-art question answering model on the DROP dataset. We find this model excels on questions that require numerical reasoning, i.e., it already captures numeracy. To understand how this capability emerges, we probe token embedding methods (e.g., BERT, GloVe) on synthetic list maximum, number decoding, and addition tasks. A surprising degree of numeracy is naturally present in standard embeddings. For example, GloVe and word2vec accurately encode magnitude for numbers up to 1,000. Furthermore, character-level embeddings are even more precise—ELMo captures numeracy the best for all pre-trained methods—but BERT, which uses sub-word units, is less exact.

2018

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DuReader: a Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset from Real-world Applications
Wei He | Kai Liu | Jing Liu | Yajuan Lyu | Shiqi Zhao | Xinyan Xiao | Yuan Liu | Yizhong Wang | Hua Wu | Qiaoqiao She | Xuan Liu | Tian Wu | Haifeng Wang
Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

This paper introduces DuReader, a new large-scale, open-domain Chinese machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset, designed to address real-world MRC. DuReader has three advantages over previous MRC datasets: (1) data sources: questions and documents are based on Baidu Search and Baidu Zhidao; answers are manually generated. (2) question types: it provides rich annotations for more question types, especially yes-no and opinion questions, that leaves more opportunity for the research community. (3) scale: it contains 200K questions, 420K answers and 1M documents; it is the largest Chinese MRC dataset so far. Experiments show that human performance is well above current state-of-the-art baseline systems, leaving plenty of room for the community to make improvements. To help the community make these improvements, both DuReader and baseline systems have been posted online. We also organize a shared competition to encourage the exploration of more models. Since the release of the task, there are significant improvements over the baselines.

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Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Discourse Segmentation
Yizhong Wang | Sujian Li | Jingfeng Yang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Discourse segmentation, which segments texts into Elementary Discourse Units, is a fundamental step in discourse analysis. Previous discourse segmenters rely on complicated hand-crafted features and are not practical in actual use. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural segmenter based on BiLSTM-CRF framework. To improve its accuracy, we address the problem of data insufficiency by transferring a word representation model that is trained on a large corpus. We also propose a restricted self-attention mechanism in order to capture useful information within a neighborhood. Experiments on the RST-DT corpus show that our model is significantly faster than previous methods, while achieving new state-of-the-art performance.

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Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification
Yizhong Wang | Kai Liu | Jing Liu | Wei He | Yajuan Lyu | Hua Wu | Sujian Li | Haifeng Wang
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) on real web data usually requires the machine to answer a question by analyzing multiple passages retrieved by search engine. Compared with MRC on a single passage, multi-passage MRC is more challenging, since we are likely to get multiple confusing answer candidates from different passages. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end neural model that enables those answer candidates from different passages to verify each other based on their content representations. Specifically, we jointly train three modules that can predict the final answer based on three factors: the answer boundary, the answer content and the cross-passage answer verification. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the baseline by a large margin and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the English MS-MARCO dataset and the Chinese DuReader dataset, both of which are designed for MRC in real-world settings.

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Bag-of-Words as Target for Neural Machine Translation
Shuming Ma | Xu Sun | Yizhong Wang | Junyang Lin
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A sentence can be translated into more than one correct sentences. However, most of the existing neural machine translation models only use one of the correct translations as the targets, and the other correct sentences are punished as the incorrect sentences in the training stage. Since most of the correct translations for one sentence share the similar bag-of-words, it is possible to distinguish the correct translations from the incorrect ones by the bag-of-words. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses both the sentences and the bag-of-words as targets in the training stage, in order to encourage the model to generate the potentially correct sentences that are not appeared in the training set. We evaluate our model on a Chinese-English translation dataset, and experiments show our model outperforms the strong baselines by the BLEU score of 4.55.

2017

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A Two-Stage Parsing Method for Text-Level Discourse Analysis
Yizhong Wang | Sujian Li | Houfeng Wang
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Previous work introduced transition-based algorithms to form a unified architecture of parsing rhetorical structures (including span, nuclearity and relation), but did not achieve satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose that transition-based model is more appropriate for parsing the naked discourse tree (i.e., identifying span and nuclearity) due to data sparsity. At the same time, we argue that relation labeling can benefit from naked tree structure and should be treated elaborately with consideration of three kinds of relations including within-sentence, across-sentence and across-paragraph relations. Thus, we design a pipelined two-stage parsing method for generating an RST tree from text. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially on span and nuclearity identification.

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Tag-Enhanced Tree-Structured Neural Networks for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification
Yizhong Wang | Sujian Li | Jingfeng Yang | Xu Sun | Houfeng Wang
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Identifying implicit discourse relations between text spans is a challenging task because it requires understanding the meaning of the text. To tackle this task, recent studies have tried several deep learning methods but few of them exploited the syntactic information. In this work, we explore the idea of incorporating syntactic parse tree into neural networks. Specifically, we employ the Tree-LSTM model and Tree-GRU model, which is based on the tree structure, to encode the arguments in a relation. And we further leverage the constituent tags to control the semantic composition process in these tree-structured neural networks. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on PDTB corpus.

2016

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Towards Non-projective High-Order Dependency Parser
Wenjing Fang | Kenny Zhu | Yizhong Wang | Jia Tan
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

This paper presents a novel high-order dependency parsing framework that targets non-projective treebanks. It imitates how a human parses sentences in an intuitive way. At every step of the parse, it determines which word is the easiest to process among all the remaining words, identifies its head word and then folds it under the head word. Further, this work is flexible enough to be augmented with other parsing techniques.