Zichao Yang


2023

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Composable Text Controls in Latent Space with ODEs
Guangyi Liu | Zeyu Feng | Yuan Gao | Zichao Yang | Xiaodan Liang | Junwei Bao | Xiaodong He | Shuguang Cui | Zhen Li | Zhiting Hu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Real-world text applications often involve composing a wide range of text control operations, such as editing the text w.r.t. an attribute, manipulating keywords and structure, and generating new text of desired properties. Prior work typically learns/finetunes a language model (LM) to perform individual or specific subsets of operations. Recent research has studied combining operations in a plug-and-play manner, often with costly search or optimization in the complex sequence space. This paper proposes a new efficient approach for composable text operations in the compact latent space of text. The low-dimensionality and differentiability of the text latent vector allow us to develop an efficient sampler based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) given arbitrary plug-in operators (e.g., attribute classifiers). By connecting pretrained LMs (e.g., GPT2) to the latent space through efficient adaption, we then decode the sampled vectors into desired text sequences. The flexible approach permits diverse control operators (sentiment, tense, formality, keywords, etc.) acquired using any relevant data from different domains. Experiments show that composing those operators within our approach manages to generate or edit high-quality text, substantially improving over previous methods in terms of generation quality and efficiency.

2022

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Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation
Guangyi Liu | Zichao Yang | Tianhua Tao | Xiaodan Liang | Junwei Bao | Zhen Li | Xiaodong He | Shuguang Cui | Zhiting Hu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss, which encourages an exact token-by-token match between a target sequence with a generated sequence. Such training objective is sub-optimal when the target sequence is not perfect, e.g., when the target sequence is corrupted with noises, or when only weak sequence supervision is available. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss (EISL), which computes the matching loss of a target n-gram with all n-grams in the generated sequence. EISL is designed to be robust to various noises and edits in the target sequences. Moreover, the EISL computation is essentially an approximate convolution operation with target n-grams as kernels, which is easy to implement and efficient to compute with existing libraries. To demonstrate the effectiveness of EISL, we conduct experiments on a wide range of tasks, including machine translation with noisy target sequences, unsupervised text style transfer with only weak training signals, and non-autoregressive generation with non-predefined generation order. Experimental results show our method significantly outperforms the common CE loss and other strong baselines on all the tasks. EISL has a simple API that can be used as a drop-in replacement of the CE loss: https://github.com/guangyliu/EISL.

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TreeMix: Compositional Constituency-based Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding
Le Zhang | Zichao Yang | Diyi Yang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Data augmentation is an effective approach to tackle over-fitting. Many previous works have proposed different data augmentations strategies for NLP, such as noise injection, word replacement, back-translation etc. Though effective, they missed one important characteristic of language–compositionality, meaning of a complex expression is built from its sub-parts. Motivated by this, we propose a compositional data augmentation approach for natural language understanding called TreeMix. Specifically, TreeMix leverages constituency parsing tree to decompose sentences into constituent sub-structures and the Mixup data augmentation technique to recombine them to generate new sentences. Compared with previous approaches, TreeMix introduces greater diversity to the samples generated and encourages models to learn compositionality of NLP data. Extensive experiments on text classification and SCAN demonstrate that TreeMix outperforms current state-of-the-art data augmentation methods.

2021

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Progressive Generation of Long Text with Pretrained Language Models
Bowen Tan | Zichao Yang | Maruan Al-Shedivat | Eric Xing | Zhiting Hu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Large-scale language models (LMs) pretrained on massive corpora of text, such as GPT-2, are powerful open-domain text generators. However, as our systematic examination reveals, it is still challenging for such models to generate coherent long passages of text (e.g., 1000 tokens), especially when the models are fine-tuned to the target domain on a small corpus. Previous planning-then-generation methods also fall short of producing such long text in various domains. To overcome the limitations, we propose a simple but effective method of generating text in a progressive manner, inspired by generating images from low to high resolution. Our method first produces domain-specific content keywords and then progressively refines them into complete passages in multiple stages. The simple design allows our approach to take advantage of pretrained LMs at each stage and effectively adapt to any target domain given only a small set of examples. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study with a broad set of evaluation metrics, and show that our approach significantly improves upon the fine-tuned large LMs and various planning-then-generation methods in terms of quality and sample efficiency. Human evaluation also validates that our model generations are more coherent.

2020

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Local Additivity Based Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised NER
Jiaao Chen | Zhenghui Wang | Ran Tian | Zichao Yang | Diyi Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the first stages in deep language understanding yet current NER models heavily rely on human-annotated data. In this work, to alleviate the dependence on labeled data, we propose a Local Additivity based Data Augmentation (LADA) method for semi-supervised NER, in which we create virtual samples by interpolating sequences close to each other. Our approach has two variations: Intra-LADA and Inter-LADA, where Intra-LADA performs interpolations among tokens within one sentence, and Inter-LADA samples different sentences to interpolate. Through linear additions between sampled training data, LADA creates an infinite amount of labeled data and improves both entity and context learning. We further extend LADA to the semi-supervised setting by designing a novel consistency loss for unlabeled data. Experiments conducted on two NER benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods over several strong baselines. We have publicly released our code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/LADA

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Data-to-Text Generation with Style Imitation
Shuai Lin | Wentao Wang | Zichao Yang | Xiaodan Liang | Frank F. Xu | Eric Xing | Zhiting Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Recent neural approaches to data-to-text generation have mostly focused on improving content fidelity while lacking explicit control over writing styles (e.g., sentence structures, word choices). More traditional systems use templates to determine the realization of text. Yet manual or automatic construction of high-quality templates is difficult, and a template acting as hard constraints could harm content fidelity when it does not match the record perfectly. We study a new way of stylistic control by using existing sentences as “soft” templates. That is, a model learns to imitate the writing style of any given exemplar sentence, with automatic adaptions to faithfully describe the record. The problem is challenging due to the lack of parallel data. We develop a neural approach that includes a hybrid attention-copy mechanism, learns with weak supervisions, and is enhanced with a new content coverage constraint. We conduct experiments in restaurants and sports domains. Results show our approach achieves stronger performance than a range of comparison methods. Our approach balances well between content fidelity and style control given exemplars that match the records to varying degrees.

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MixText: Linguistically-Informed Interpolation of Hidden Space for Semi-Supervised Text Classification
Jiaao Chen | Zichao Yang | Diyi Yang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper presents MixText, a semi-supervised learning method for text classification, which uses our newly designed data augmentation method called TMix. TMix creates a large amount of augmented training samples by interpolating text in hidden space. Moreover, we leverage recent advances in data augmentation to guess low-entropy labels for unlabeled data, hence making them as easy to use as labeled data. By mixing labeled, unlabeled and augmented data, MixText significantly outperformed current pre-trained and fined-tuned models and other state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods on several text classification benchmarks. The improvement is especially prominent when supervision is extremely limited. We have publicly released our code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/MixText.

2019

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Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation
Zhiting Hu | Haoran Shi | Bowen Tan | Wentao Wang | Zichao Yang | Tiancheng Zhao | Junxian He | Lianhui Qin | Di Wang | Xuezhe Ma | Zhengzhong Liu | Xiaodan Liang | Wanrong Zhu | Devendra Sachan | Eric Xing
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We introduce Texar, an open-source toolkit aiming to support the broad set of text generation tasks that transform any inputs into natural language, such as machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and so forth. With the design goals of modularity, versatility, and extensibility in mind, Texar extracts common patterns underlying the diverse tasks and methodologies, creates a library of highly reusable modules and functionalities, and allows arbitrary model architectures and algorithmic paradigms. In Texar, model architecture, inference, and learning processes are properly decomposed. Modules at a high concept level can be freely assembled or plugged in/swapped out. Texar is thus particularly suitable for researchers and practitioners to do fast prototyping and experimentation. The versatile toolkit also fosters technique sharing across different text generation tasks. Texar supports both TensorFlow and PyTorch, and is released under Apache License 2.0 at https://www.texar.io.

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Let’s Make Your Request More Persuasive: Modeling Persuasive Strategies via Semi-Supervised Neural Nets on Crowdfunding Platforms
Diyi Yang | Jiaao Chen | Zichao Yang | Dan Jurafsky | Eduard Hovy
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)

Modeling what makes a request persuasive - eliciting the desired response from a reader - is critical to the study of propaganda, behavioral economics, and advertising. Yet current models can’t quantify the persuasiveness of requests or extract successful persuasive strategies. Building on theories of persuasion, we propose a neural network to quantify persuasiveness and identify the persuasive strategies in advocacy requests. Our semi-supervised hierarchical neural network model is supervised by the number of people persuaded to take actions and partially supervised at the sentence level with human-labeled rhetorical strategies. Our method outperforms several baselines, uncovers persuasive strategies - offering increased interpretability of persuasive speech - and has applications for other situations with document-level supervision but only partial sentence supervision.

2018

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Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolbox for Text Generation
Zhiting Hu | Zichao Yang | Tiancheng Zhao | Haoran Shi | Junxian He | Di Wang | Xuezhe Ma | Zhengzhong Liu | Xiaodan Liang | Lianhui Qin | Devendra Singh Chaplot | Bowen Tan | Xingjiang Yu | Eric Xing
Proceedings of Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)

We introduce Texar, an open-source toolkit aiming to support the broad set of text generation tasks. Different from many existing toolkits that are specialized for specific applications (e.g., neural machine translation), Texar is designed to be highly flexible and versatile. This is achieved by abstracting the common patterns underlying the diverse tasks and methodologies, creating a library of highly reusable modules and functionalities, and enabling arbitrary model architectures and various algorithmic paradigms. The features make Texar particularly suitable for technique sharing and generalization across different text generation applications. The toolkit emphasizes heavily on extensibility and modularized system design, so that components can be freely plugged in or swapped out. We conduct extensive experiments and case studies to demonstrate the use and advantage of the toolkit.

2017

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Reference-Aware Language Models
Zichao Yang | Phil Blunsom | Chris Dyer | Wang Ling
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We propose a general class of language models that treat reference as discrete stochastic latent variables. This decision allows for the creation of entity mentions by accessing external databases of referents (required by, e.g., dialogue generation) or past internal state (required to explicitly model coreferentiality). Beyond simple copying, our coreference model can additionally refer to a referent using varied mention forms (e.g., a reference to “Jane” can be realized as “she”), a characteristic feature of reference in natural languages. Experiments on three representative applications show our model variants outperform models based on deterministic attention and standard language modeling baselines.

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Neural Machine Translation with Recurrent Attention Modeling
Zichao Yang | Zhiting Hu | Yuntian Deng | Chris Dyer | Alex Smola
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

Knowing which words have been attended to in previous time steps while generating a translation is a rich source of information for predicting what words will be attended to in the future. We improve upon the attention model of Bahdanau et al. (2014) by explicitly modeling the relationship between previous and subsequent attention levels for each word using one recurrent network per input word. This architecture easily captures informative features, such as fertility and regularities in relative distortion. In experiments, we show our parameterization of attention improves translation quality.

2016

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Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification
Zichao Yang | Diyi Yang | Chris Dyer | Xiaodong He | Alex Smola | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Deep Neural Networks with Massive Learned Knowledge
Zhiting Hu | Zichao Yang | Ruslan Salakhutdinov | Eric Xing
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing