Yujiu Yang


2023

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Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Conversational Concept Flows
Siheng Li | Wangjie Jiang | Pengda Si | Cheng Yang | Qiu Yao | Jinchao Zhang | Jie Zhou | Yujiu Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Human conversations contain natural and reasonable topic shifts, reflected as the concept flows across utterances. Previous researches prove that explicitly modeling concept flows with a large commonsense knowledge graph effectively improves response quality. However, we argue that there exists a gap between the knowledge graph and the conversation. The knowledge graph has limited commonsense knowledge and ignores the characteristics of natural conversations. Thus, many concepts and relations in conversations are not included. To bridge this gap, we propose to enhance dialogue generation with conversational concept flows. Specifically, we extract abundant concepts and relations from natural conversations and build a new conversation-aware knowledge graph. In addition, we design a novel relation-aware graph encoder to capture the concept flows guided by the knowledge graph. Experimental results on the large-scale Reddit conversation dataset indicate that our method performs better than strong baselines, andfurther analysis verifies the effectiveness of each component. All our code and data will be publicly available after acceptance.

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ICA-Proto: Iterative Cross Alignment Prototypical Network for Incremental Few-Shot Relation Classification
Wangjie Jiang | Zhihao Ye | Bang Liu | Ruihui Zhao | Jianguang Zheng | Mengyao Li | Zhiyong Li | Yujiu Yang | Yefeng Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

In the task of incremental few-shot relation classification, model performance is always limited by the incompatibility between the base feature embedding space and the novel feature embedding space. To tackle the issue, we propose a novel model named ICA-Proto: Iterative Cross Alignment prototypical network. Specifically, we incorporate the query representation into the encoding of novel prototypes and utilize the query-aware prototypes to update the query representation at the same time. Further, we implement the above process iteratively to achieve more interaction. In addition, a novel prototype quadruplet loss is designed to regulate the spatial distributions of embedding space, so as to make it easier for the relation classification. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that ICA-Proto significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline model.

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NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation
Siheng Li | Yichun Yin | Cheng Yang | Wangjie Jiang | Yiwei Li | Zesen Cheng | Lifeng Shang | Xin Jiang | Qun Liu | Yujiu Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. However, news grounded conversation has long been stymied by the lack of well-designed task definition and scarce data. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Proactive News Grounded Conversation, in which a dialogue system can proactively lead the conversation based on some key topics of the news. In addition, both information-seeking and chit-chat scenarios are included realistically, where the user may ask a series of questions about the news details or express their opinions and be eager to chat. To further develop this novel task, we collect a human-to-human Chinese dialogue dataset NewsDialogues, which includes 1K conversations with a total of 14.6K utterances and detailed annotations for target topics and knowledge spans. Furthermore, we propose a method named Predict-Generate-Rank, consisting of a generator for grounded knowledge prediction and response generation, and a ranker for the ranking of multiple responses to alleviate the exposure bias. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and further present several key findings and challenges to prompt future research.

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Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions
Xinyu Zhu | Cheng Yang | Bei Chen | Siheng Li | Jian-Guang Lou | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs’ inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs’ superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to 14.5% over strong baselines.

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Specialist or Generalist? Instruction Tuning for Specific NLP Tasks
Chufan Shi | Yixuan Su | Cheng Yang | Yujiu Yang | Deng Cai
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method for transforming LLMs into such generalist models, their performance still lags behind specialist models trained exclusively for specific tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating broadcoverage generalist instruction tuning can contribute to building a specialist model. We hypothesize that its efficacy depends on task specificity and skill requirements. Our experiments assess four target tasks with distinct coverage levels, revealing that integrating generalist instruction tuning consistently enhances model performance when the task coverage is broad. The effect is particularly pronounced when the amount of task-specific training data is limited. Further investigation into three target tasks focusing on different capabilities demonstrates that generalist instruction tuning improves understanding and reasoning abilities. However, for tasks requiring factual knowledge, generalist data containing hallucinatory information may negatively affect the model’s performance. Overall, our work provides a systematic guide for developing specialist models with general instruction tuning.

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MvP: Multi-view Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction
Zhibin Gou | Qingyan Guo | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Generative methods greatly promote aspect-based sentiment analysis via generating a sequence of sentiment elements in a specified format. However, existing studies usually predict sentiment elements in a fixed order, which ignores the effect of the interdependence of the elements in a sentiment tuple and the diversity of language expression on the results. In this work, we propose Multi-view Prompting (MVP) that aggregates sentiment elements generated in different orders, leveraging the intuition of human-like problem-solving processes from different views. Specifically, MVP introduces element order prompts to guide the language model to generate multiple sentiment tuples, each with a different element order, and then selects the most reasonable tuples by voting. MVP can naturally model multi-view and multi-task as permutations and combinations of elements, respectively, outperforming previous task-specific designed methods on multiple ABSA tasks with a single model. Extensive experiments show that MVP significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance on 10 datasets of 4 benchmark tasks, and performs quite effectively in low-resource settings. Detailed evaluation verified the effectiveness, flexibility, and cross-task transferability of MVP.

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Solving Math Word Problems via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models
Xinyu Zhu | Junjie Wang | Lin Zhang | Yuxiang Zhang | Yongfeng Huang | Ruyi Gan | Jiaxing Zhang | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) bring new opportunities to challenging problems, especially those that need high-level intelligence, such as the math word problem (MWPs). However, directly applying existing PLMs to MWPs can fail as the generation process lacks sufficient supervision and thus lacks fast adaptivity as humans. We notice that human reasoning has a dual reasoning framework that consists of an immediate reaction system (system 1) and a delicate reasoning system (system 2), where the entire reasoning is determined by their interaction. This inspires us to develop a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving MWPs, called Cooperative Reasoning (CoRe), resulting in a human-like reasoning architecture with system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier. In our approach, the generator is responsible for generating reasoning paths, and the verifiers are used to supervise the evaluation in order to obtain reliable feedback for the generator. We evaluate our CoRe framework on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieve decent improvement over state-of-the-art methods, up to 9.6% increase over best baselines.

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AutoConv: Automatically Generating Information-seeking Conversations with Large Language Models
Siheng Li | Cheng Yang | Yichun Yin | Xinyu Zhu | Zesen Cheng | Lifeng Shang | Xin Jiang | Qun Liu | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Information-seeking conversation, which aims to help users gather information through conversation, has achieved great progress in recent years. However, the research is still stymied by the scarcity of training data. To alleviate this problem, we propose AutoConv for synthetic conversation generation, which takes advantage of the few-shot learning ability and generation capacity of large language models (LLM). Specifically, we formulate the conversation generation problem as a language modeling task, then finetune an LLM with a few human conversations to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and use it for generating synthetic conversations with high quality. Experimental results on two frequently-used datasets verify that AutoConv has substantial improvements over strong baselines and alleviates the dependence on human annotation. In addition, we also provide several analysis studies to promote future research.

2022

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IIGROUP Submissions for WMT22 Word-Level AutoCompletion Task
Cheng Yang | Siheng Li | Chufan Shi | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper presents IIGroup’s submission to the WMT22 Word-Level AutoCompletion(WLAC) Shared Task in four language directions. We propose to use a Generate-then-Rerank framework to solve this task. More specifically, the generator is used to generate candidate words and recall as many positive candidates as possible. To facilitate the training process of the generator, we propose a span-level mask prediction task. Once we get the candidate words, we take the top-K candidates and feed them into the reranker. The reranker is used to select the most confident candidate. The experimental results in four language directions demonstrate the effectiveness of our systems. Our systems achieve competitive performance ranking 1st in English to Chinese subtask and 2nd in Chinese to English subtask.

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EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents
Mao Yan Chen | Siheng Li | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In empathetic conversations, humans express their empathy to others with empathetic intents. However, most existing empathetic conversational methods suffer from a lack of empathetic intents, which leads to monotonous empathy. To address the bias of the empathetic intents distribution between empathetic dialogue models and humans, we propose a novel model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent empathetic intents, EmpHi for short. Precisely, EmpHi learns the distribution of potential empathetic intents with a discrete latent variable, then combines both implicit and explicit intent representation to generate responses with various empathetic intents. Experiments show that EmpHi outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on both automatic and human evaluation. Moreover, the case studies demonstrate the high interpretability and outstanding performance of our model.

2021

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MIRTT: Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers for Visual Question Answering
Junjie Wang | Yatai Ji | Jiaqi Sun | Yujiu Yang | Tetsuya Sakai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), existing bilinear methods focus on the interaction between images and questions. As a result, the answers are either spliced into the questions or utilized as labels only for classification. On the other hand, trilinear models such as the CTI model efficiently utilize the inter-modality information between answers, questions, and images, while ignoring intra-modality information. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new trilinear interaction framework called MIRTT (Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers), incorporating the attention mechanisms for capturing inter-modality and intra-modality relationships. Moreover, we design a two-stage workflow where a bilinear model reduces the free-form, open-ended VQA problem into a multiple-choice VQA problem. Furthermore, to obtain accurate and generic multimodal representations, we pre-train MIRTT with masked language prediction. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Visual7W Telling task and VQA-1.0 Multiple Choice task and outperforms bilinear baselines on the VQA-2.0, TDIUC and GQA datasets.

2020

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HGCN4MeSH: Hybrid Graph Convolution Network for MeSH Indexing
Miaomiao Yu | Yujiu Yang | Chenhui Li
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Recently deep learning has been used in Medical subject headings (MeSH) indexing to reduce the time and monetary cost by manual annotation, including DeepMeSH, TextCNN, etc. However, these models still suffer from failing to capture the complex correlations between MeSH terms. To this end, we introduce Graph Convolution Network (GCN) to learn the relationship between these terms, and present a novel Hybrid Graph Convolution Net for MeSH index (HGCN4MeSH). Basically, we utilize two BiGRUs to learn the embedding representation of the abstract and the title of the MeSH index text respectively. At the same time, we establish the adjacency matrix of MeSH terms based on the co-occurrence relationships in Corpus, which is easy to apply for GCN representation learning. On the basis of learning the mixed representation, the prediction problem of the MeSH index keywords is transformed into an extreme multi-label classification problem after the attention layer operation. Experimental results on two datasets show that HGCN4MeSH is competitive compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

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DT-QDC: A Dataset for Question Comprehension in Online Test
Sijin Wu | Yujiu Yang | Nicholas Yung | Zhengchen Shen | Zeyang Lei
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

With the transformation of education from the traditional classroom environment to online education and assessment, it is more and more important to accurately assess the difficulty of questions than ever. As teachers may not be able to follow the student’s performance and learning behavior closely, a well-defined method to measure the difficulty of questions to guide learning is necessary. In this paper, we explore the concept of question difficulty and provide our new Chinese DT-QDC dataset. This is currently the largest and only Chinese question dataset, and it also has enriched attributes and difficulty labels. Additional attributes such as keywords, chapter, and question type would allow models to understand questions more precisely. We proposed the MTMS-BERT and ORMS-BERT, which can improve the judgment of difficulty from different views. The proposed methods outperforms different baselines by 7.79% on F1-score and 15.92% on MAE, 28.26% on MSE on the new DT-QDC dataset, laying the foundation for the question difficulty comprehension task.

2018

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Multi-glance Reading Model for Text Understanding
Pengcheng Zhu | Yujiu Yang | Wenqiang Gao | Yi Liu
Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

In recent years, a variety of recurrent neural networks have been proposed, e.g LSTM. However, existing models only read the text once, it cannot describe the situation of repeated reading in reading comprehension. In fact, when reading or analyzing a text, we may read the text several times rather than once if we couldn’t well understand it. So, how to model this kind of the reading behavior? To address the issue, we propose a multi-glance mechanism (MGM) for modeling the habit of reading behavior. In the proposed framework, the actual reading process can be fully simulated, and then the obtained information can be consistent with the task. Based on the multi-glance mechanism, we design two types of recurrent neural network models for repeated reading: Glance Cell Model (GCM) and Glance Gate Model (GGM). Visualization analysis of the GCM and the GGM demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-glance mechanisms. Experiments results on the large-scale datasets show that the proposed methods can achieve better performance.

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A Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network for Sentiment Classification
Zeyang Lei | Yujiu Yang | Min Yang | Yi Liu
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Deep learning approaches for sentiment classification do not fully exploit sentiment linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network (MEAN) to alleviate the problem by integrating three kinds of sentiment linguistic knowledge (e.g., sentiment lexicon, negation words, intensity words) into the deep neural network via attention mechanisms. By using various types of sentiment resources, MEAN utilizes sentiment-relevant information from different representation sub-spaces, which makes it more effective to capture the overall semantics of the sentiment, negation and intensity words for sentiment prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that MEAN has robust superiority over strong competitors.

2012

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Latent Community Discovery with Network Regularization for Core Actors Clustering
Guangxu Xun | Yujiu Yang | Liangwei Wang | Wenhuang Liu
Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters