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Xin Liu


2024

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Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations
Chunkit Chan | Cheng Jiayang | Weiqi Wang | Yuxin Jiang | Tianqing Fang | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT’s promising performance across various tasks, we proceed to carry out thorough evaluations on the whole test sets of 11 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based, and dialogue-based discourse relations. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we employ three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. Through our study, we discover that ChatGPT exhibits exceptional proficiency in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, albeit it may not possess the same level of expertise in identifying the temporal order between two events. While it is capable of identifying the majority of discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, the implicit discourse relation remains a formidable challenge. Concurrently, ChatGPT demonstrates subpar performance in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.

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AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph
Zhaowei Wang | Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Hongming Zhang | Sehyun Choi | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

Cognitive research indicates that abstraction ability is essential in human intelligence, which remains under-explored in language models. In this paper, we present AbsPyramid, a unified entailment graph of 221K textual descriptions of abstraction knowledge. While existing resources only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains, AbsPyramid collects abstract knowledge for three components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models in the open domain. Experimental results demonstrate that current LLMs face challenges comprehending abstraction knowledge in zero-shot and few-shot settings. By training on our rich abstraction knowledge, we find LLMs can acquire basic abstraction abilities and generalize to unseen events. In the meantime, we empirically show that our benchmark is comprehensive to enhance LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks.

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URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models
Bo Lv | Chen Tang | Yanan Zhang | Xin Liu | Ping Luo | Yue Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Prior research endeavors of the ensemble Large Language Models (LLMs) achieved great success by employing an individual language model (LM) rank before the text generation. However, the use of an individual LM ranker faces two primary challenges: (1) The time-intensive nature of the ranking process, stemming from the comparisons between models; (2) The issue of error propagation arising from the separate ranking and generation models within the framework. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose a novel ensemble framework, namely Unified Ranking and Generation (URG). URG represents an end-to-end framework that jointly ranks the outputs of LLMs and generates fine-grained fusion results, via utilizing a dedicated cross-attention-based module and noise mitigation training against irrelevant information stemming from bad ranking results. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework in both the ranking and generation tasks. With the close coordination of the ranking and generation modules, our end-to-end framework achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on these tasks, and exhibits substantial enhancements to any of the ensembled models.

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Enhanced Language Model Truthfulness with Learnable Intervention and Uncertainty Expression
Farima Fatahi Bayat | Xin Liu | H. Jagadish | Lu Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Large language models (LLMs) can generate long-form and coherent text, yet they often hallucinate facts, which undermines their reliability. To mitigate this issue, inference-time methods steer LLM representations toward the “truthful directions” previously learned for truth elicitation. However, applying these truthful directions with the same intensity fails to generalize across different query contexts. We propose LITO, a Learnable Intervention method for Truthfulness Optimization that automatically identifies the optimal intervention intensity tailored to each specific context. LITO explores a sequence of model generations based on increasing levels of intervention intensities. It selects the most accurate response or refuses to answer when the predictions are highly uncertain. Experiments on multiple LLMs and question-answering datasets demonstrate that LITO improves truthfulness while preserving task accuracy. The adaptive nature of LITO counters the limitations of one-size-fits-all intervention methods, maximizing truthfulness by reflecting the model’s internal knowledge only when it is confident. Our code is available at https://github.com/launchnlp/LITO.

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A Lifelong Multilingual Multi-granularity Semantic Alignment Approach via Maximum Co-occurrence Probability
Xin Liu | Hongwei Sun | Shaojie Dai | Bo Lv | Youcheng Pan | Hui Wang | Yue Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Cross-lingual pre-training methods mask and predict tokens in multilingual text to generalize diverse multilingual information. However, due to the lack of sufficient aligned multilingual resources in the pre-training process, these methods may not fully explore the multilingual correlation of masked tokens, resulting in the limitation of multilingual information interaction. In this paper, we propose a lifelong multilingual multi-granularity semantic alignment approach, which continuously extracts massive aligned linguistic units from noisy data via a maximum co-occurrence probability algorithm. Then, the approach releases a version of the multilingual multi-granularity semantic alignment resource, supporting seven languages, namely English, Czech, German, Russian, Romanian, Hindi and Turkish. Finally, we propose how to use this resource to improve the translation performance on WMT14 18 benchmarks in twelve directions. Experimental results show an average of 0.3 1.1 BLEU improvements in all translation benchmarks. The analysis and discussion also demonstrate the superiority and potential of the proposed approach. The resource used in this work will be publicly available.

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EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs
Cheng Jiayang | Lin Qiu | Chunkit Chan | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song | Zheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Narrative reasoning relies on the understanding of eventualities in story contexts, which requires a wealth of background world knowledge. To help machines leverage such knowledge, existing solutions can be categorized into two groups. Some focus on implicitly modeling eventuality knowledge by pretraining language models (LMs) with eventuality-aware objectives. However, this approach breaks down knowledge structures and lacks interpretability. Others explicitly collect world knowledge of eventualities into structured eventuality-centric knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing research on leveraging these knowledge sources for free-texts is limited. In this work, we propose an initial comprehensive framework called EventGround, which aims to tackle the problem of grounding free-texts to eventuality-centric KGs for contextualized narrative reasoning. We identify two critical problems in this direction: the event representation and sparsity problems. We provide simple yet effective parsing and partial information extraction methods to tackle these problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baseline models when combined with graph neural network (GNN) or large language model (LLM) based graph reasoning models. Our framework, incorporating grounded knowledge, achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing interpretable evidence.

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Scale-VAE: Preventing Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoder
Tianbao Song | Jingbo Sun | Xin Liu | Weiming Peng
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model that gains great popularity for its capability in density estimation and representation learning. However, when employing a strong autoregressive generation network, VAE tends to converge to a degenerate local optimum known as posterior collapse. In this paper, we propose a model named Scale-VAE to solve this problem. Scale-VAE does not force the KL term to be larger than a positive constant, but aims to make the latent variables easier to be exploited by the generation network. Specifically, each dimension of the mean for the approximate posterior distribution is multiplied by a factor to keep that dimension discriminative across data instances. The same factors are used for all data instances so as not to change the relative relationship between the posterior distributions. Latent variables from the scaled-up posteriors are fed into the generation network, but the original posteriors are still used to calculate the KL term. In this way, Scale-VAE can solve the posterior collapse problem with a training cost similar to or even lower than the basic VAE. Experimental results show that Scale-VAE outperforms state-of-the-art models in density estimation, representation learning, and consistency of the latent space, and is competitive with other models in generation.

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TAeKD: Teacher Assistant Enhanced Knowledge Distillation for Closed-Source Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Bo Lv | Xin Liu | Kaiwen Wei | Ping Luo | Yue Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Knowledge Distillation (KD) serves as an efficient method for transferring language knowledge from open-source large language models (LLMs) to more computationally efficient models. However, challenges arise when attempting to apply vanilla KD methods to transfer knowledge from closed-source Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) models based on LLMs. In this scenario, the soft labels and training data are not accessible, making it difficult to achieve effective knowledge transfer. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Teacher Assistant enhanced Knowledge Distillation (TAeKD) method to augment the knowledge transfer capacity from closed-source MNMT models. Specifically, TAeKD designs a fusion model that integrates translation outputs from multiple closed-source models to generate soft labels and training samples. Furthermore, a quality assessment learning mechanism is introduced to enhance the generalization of the fusion model and elevate the quality of the fusion data used to train the student model. To facilitate research on knowledge transfer from MNMT models, we also introduce FuseData, a benchmark consisting of a blend of translations from multiple closed-source systems. The experimental results show that TAeKD outperforms the previous state-of-the-art KD methods on both WMT22 and FLORES-101 test sets.

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PrivLM-Bench: A Multi-level Privacy Evaluation Benchmark for Language Models
Haoran Li | Dadi Guo | Donghao Li | Wei Fan | Qi Hu | Xin Liu | Chunkit Chan | Duanyi Yao | Yuan Yao | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The rapid development of language models (LMs) brings unprecedented accessibility and usage for both models and users. On the one hand, powerful LMs achieve state-of-the-art performance over numerous downstream NLP tasks. On the other hand, more and more attention is paid to unrestricted model accesses that may bring malicious privacy risks of data leakage. To address these issues, many recent works propose privacy-preserving language models (PPLMs) with differential privacy (DP). Unfortunately, different DP implementations make it challenging for a fair comparison among existing PPLMs. In this paper, we present PrivLM-Bench, a multi-perspective privacy evaluation benchmark to empirically and intuitively quantify the privacy leakage of LMs. Instead of only reporting DP parameters, PrivLM-Bench sheds light on the neglected inference data privacy during actual usage. PrivLM-Bench first clearly defines multi-faceted privacy objectives. Then, PrivLM-Bench constructs a unified pipeline to perform private fine-tuning. Lastly, PrivLM-Bench performs existing privacy attacks on LMs with pre-defined privacy objectives as the empirical evaluation results. The empirical attack results are used to fairly and intuitively evaluate the privacy leakage of various PPLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets of GLUE for mainstream LMs.

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AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation
Zhaowei Wang | Wei Fan | Qing Zong | Hongming Zhang | Sehyun Choi | Tianqing Fang | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song | Ginny Wong | Simon See
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstraction ability is crucial in human intelligence, which can also benefit various tasks in NLP study. Existing work shows that LLMs are deficient in abstract ability, and how to improve it remains unexplored. In this work, we design the framework AbsInstruct to enhance LLMs’ abstraction ability through instruction tuning. The framework builds instructions with in-depth explanations to assist LLMs in capturing the underlying rationale of abstraction. Meanwhile, we introduce a plausibility estimator to select instructions that are more consistent with the abstraction knowledge of LLMs to be aligned. Then, our framework combines abstraction instructions with general-purpose ones to build a hybrid dataset. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that our framework can considerably enhance LLMs’ abstraction ability with strong generalization performance while maintaining their general instruction-following abilities.

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Advancing Abductive Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs through Complex Logical Hypothesis Generation
Jiaxin Bai | Yicheng Wang | Tianshi Zheng | Yue Guo | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abductive reasoning is the process of making educated guesses to provide explanations for observations. Although many applications require the use of knowledge for explanations, the utilization of abductive reasoning in conjunction with structured knowledge, such as a knowledge graph, remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the task of complex logical hypothesis generation, as an initial step towards abductive logical reasoning with KG. In this task, we aim to generate a complex logical hypothesis so that it can explain a set of observations. We find that the supervised trained generative model can generate logical hypotheses that are structurally closer to the reference hypothesis. However, when generalized to unseen observations, this training objective does not guarantee better hypothesis generation. To address this, we introduce the Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Graph (RLF-KG) method, which minimizes differences between observations and conclusions drawn from generated hypotheses according to the KG. Experiments show that, with RLF-KG’s assistance, the generated hypotheses provide better explanations, and achieve state-of-the-art results on three widely used KGs.

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CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Chunyang Li | Haochen Shi | Wenxuan Ding | Baixuan Xu | Zhaowei Wang | Jiaxin Bai | Xin Liu | Cheng Jiayang | Chunkit Chan | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The sequential process of conceptualization and instantiation is essential to generalizable commonsense reasoning as it allows the application of existing knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios. However, existing works tend to undervalue the step of instantiation and heavilyrely on pre-built concept taxonomies and human annotations to collect both types of knowledge, resulting in a lack of instantiated knowledge to complete reasoning, high cost, and limited scalability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CANDLE (ConceptuAlizationand INstantiation Distillation from Large Language ModEls), a distillation framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. By applying CANDLE to ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a), we construct a comprehensive knowledge base comprising six million conceptualizations and instantiated commonsense knowledge triples. Both types of knowledge are firmly rooted in the original ATOMIC dataset, and intrinsic evaluations demonstrate their exceptional quality and diversity. Empirical results indicate that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. Our data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CANDLE.

2023

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IBADR: an Iterative Bias-Aware Dataset Refinement Framework for Debiasing NLU models
Xiaoyue Wang | Xin Liu | Lijie Wang | Yaoxiang Wang | Jinsong Su | Hua Wu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

As commonly-used methods for debiasing natural language understanding (NLU) models, dataset refinement approaches heavily rely on manual data analysis, and thus maybe unable to cover all the potential biased features. In this paper, we propose IBADR, an Iterative Bias-Aware Dataset Refinement framework, which debiases NLU models without predefining biased features. We maintain an iteratively expanded sample pool. Specifically, at each iteration, we first train a shallow model to quantify the bias degree of samples in the pool. Then, we pair each sample with a bias indicator representing its bias degree, and use these extended samples to train a sample generator. In this way, this generator can effectively learn the correspondence relationship between bias indicators and samples. Furthermore, we employ the generator to produce pseudo samples with fewer biased features by feeding specific bias indicators. Finally, we incorporate the generated pseudo samples into the pool. Experimental results and in-depth analyses on two NLU tasks show that IBADR not only significantly outperforms existing dataset refinement approaches, achieving SOTA, but also is compatible with model-centric methods.

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Self-Consistent Narrative Prompts on Abductive Natural Language Inference
Chunkit Chan | Xin Liu | Tsz Ho Chan | Jiayang Cheng | Yangqiu Song | Ginny Wong | Simon See
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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DiscoPrompt: Path Prediction Prompt Tuning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Chunkit Chan | Xin Liu | Jiayang Cheng | Zihan Li | Yangqiu Song | Ginny Wong | Simon See
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is a sophisticated and challenging task to recognize the discourse relations between the arguments with the absence of discourse connectives. The sense labels for each discourse relation follow a hierarchical classification scheme in the annotation process (Prasad et al., 2008), forming a hierarchy structure. Most existing works do not well incorporate the hierarchy structure but focus on the syntax features and the prior knowledge of connectives in the manner of pure text classification. We argue that it is more effective to predict the paths inside the hierarchical tree (e.g., “Comparison -> Contrast -> however”) rather than flat labels (e.g., Contrast) or connectives (e.g., however). We propose a prompt-based path prediction method to utilize the interactive information and intrinsic senses among the hierarchy in IDRR. This is the first work that injects such structure information into pre-trained language models via prompt tuning, and the performance of our solution shows significant and consistent improvement against competitive baselines.

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FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery
Changlong Yu | Weiqi Wang | Xin Liu | Jiaxin Bai | Yangqiu Song | Zheng Li | Yifan Gao | Tianyu Cao | Bing Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Understanding users’ intentions in e-commerce platforms requires commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we present FolkScope, an intention knowledge graph construction framework, to reveal the structure of humans’ minds about purchasing items. As commonsense knowledge is usually ineffable and not expressed explicitly, it is challenging to perform information extraction. Thus, we propose a new approach that leverages the generation power of large language models (LLMs) and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the knowledge graph. LLMs first generate intention assertions via e-commerce specific prompts to explain shopping behaviors, where the intention can be an open reason or a predicate falling into one of 18 categories aligning with ConceptNet, e.g., IsA, MadeOf, UsedFor, etc. Then we annotate plausibility and typicality labels of sampled intentions as training data in order to populate human judgments to all automatic generations. Last, to structurize the assertions, we propose pattern mining and conceptualization to form more condensed and abstract knowledge. Extensive evaluations and study demonstrate that our constructed knowledge graph can well model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.

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Not The End of Story: An Evaluation of ChatGPT-Driven Vulnerability Description Mappings
Xin Liu | Yuan Tan | Zhenghang Xiao | Jianwei Zhuge | Rui Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

As the number of vulnerabilities increases day by day, security management requires more and more structured data. In addition to textual descriptions of vulnerabilities, security engineers must classify and assess vulnerabilities and clarify their associated techniques. Vulnerability Description Mapping (VDM) refers to mapping vulnerabilities to Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification, ATT&CK Techniques, and other classifications. Accurate VDM is necessary to reduce the pressure of security management and improve the speed of security emergency response. ChatGPT is the latest state-of-the-art closed-source conversational large language model (LLM), which performs excellently on many tasks. This paper explores the application of closed-source LLMs to real-world security management scenarios by evaluating ChatGPT’s performance on VDM tasks. The results show that although ChatGPT may be close to the level of human experts on some tasks, it still cannot replace the critical role of professional security engineers in vulnerability analysis. In a word, closed-source LLM is not the end of story.

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DSP: Discriminative Soft Prompts for Zero-Shot Entity and Relation Extraction
Bo Lv | Xin Liu | Shaojie Dai | Nayu Liu | Fan Yang | Ping Luo | Yue Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) for low-resource scenarios. Typically, prompt-based methods convert downstream tasks to cloze-style problems and map all labels to verbalizers.However, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, vanilla prompt-based methods may struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. In this work, we propose a novel Discriminate Soft Prompts (DSP) approach to take advantage of the prompt-based methods to strengthen the transmission of general knowledge. Specifically, we develop a discriminative prompt method, which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers.Furthermore, to improve the inference speed of the prompt-based methods, we design a soft prompt co-reference strategy, which leverages soft prompts to approximately refer to the vector representation of text tokens. The experimental results show that, our model outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed, and obtains a 7.5% average relation F1-score improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel.

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Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detection
Zheye Deng | Weiqi Wang | Zhaowei Wang | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (CSKGs) are crucial for commonsense reasoning, yet constructing them through human annotations can be costly. As a result, various automatic methods have been proposed to construct CSKG with larger semantic coverage. However, these unsupervised approaches introduce spurious noise that can lower the quality of the resulting CSKG, which cannot be tackled easily by existing denoising algorithms due to the unique characteristics of nodes and structures in CSKGs. To address this issue, we propose Gold (Global and Local-aware Denoising), a denoising framework for CSKGs that incorporates entity semantic information, global rules, and local structural information from the CSKG. Experiment results demonstrate that Gold outperforms all baseline methods in noise detection tasks on synthetic noisy CSKG benchmarks. Furthermore, we show that denoising a real-world CSKG is effective and even benefits the downstream zero-shot commonsense question-answering task. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/GOLD.

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CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering
Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Wenxuan Ding | Baixuan Xu | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song | Antoine Bosselut
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

The task of zero-shot commonsense question answering evaluates models on their capacity to reason about general scenarios beyond those presented in specific datasets. Existing approaches for tackling this task leverage external knowledge from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) by pre-training the model on synthetic QA pairs constructed from CSKBs. In these approaches, negative examples (distractors) are formulated by randomly sampling from CSKBs using fairly primitive keyword constraints. However, two bottlenecks limit these approaches: the inherent incompleteness of CSKBs limits the semantic coverage of synthetic QA pairs, and the lack of human annotations makes the sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. To tackle these limitations above, we propose Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner (CAR), a zero-shot commonsense question-answering framework that fully leverages the power of conceptualization. Specifically, CAR abstracts a commonsense knowledge triple to many higher-level instances, which increases the coverage of the CSKB and expands the ground-truth answer space, reducing the likelihood of selecting false negative distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAR more robustly generalizes to answering questions about zero-shot commonsense scenarios than existing methods, including large language models, such as GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Our code, data, and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAR.

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QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering
Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Baixuan Xu | Wenxuan Ding | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33% of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.

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BOLT: Fast Energy-based Controlled Text Generation with Tunable Biases
Xin Liu | Muhammad Khalifa | Lu Wang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Energy-based models (EBMs) have gained popularity for controlled text generation due to their high applicability to a wide range of constraints. However, sampling from EBMs is non-trivial, as it often requires a large number of iterations to converge to plausible text, which slows down the decoding process and makes it less practical for real-world applications. In this work, we propose BOLT, which relies on tunable biases to directly adjust the language model’s output logits. Unlike prior work, BOLT maintains the generator’s autoregressive nature to assert a strong control on token-wise conditional dependencies and overall fluency, and thus converges faster. When compared with state-of-the-arts on controlled generation tasks using both soft constraints (e.g., sentiment control) and hard constraints (e.g., keyword-guided topic control), BOLT demonstrates significantly improved efficiency and fluency. On sentiment control, BOLT is 7x faster than competitive baselines, and more fluent in 74.4% of the evaluation samples according to human judges.

2022

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Getting the Most out of Simile Recognition
Xiaoyue Wang | Linfeng Song | Xin Liu | Chulun Zhou | Hualin Zeng | Jinsong Su
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Simile recognition involves two subtasks: simile sentence classification that discriminates whether a sentence contains simile, and simile component extraction that locates the corresponding objects (i.e., tenors and vehicles).Recent work ignores features other than surface strings and suffers from the data hunger issue.We explore expressive features for this task to help achieve more effective data utilization.In particular, we study two types of features: 1) input-side features that include POS tags, dependency trees and word definitions, and 2) decoding features that capture the interdependence among various decoding decisions.We further construct a model named HGSR, which merges the input-side features as a heterogeneous graph and leverages decoding features via distillation.Experiments show that HGSR significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art systems and carefully designed baselines, verifying the effectiveness of introduced features. We will release our code upon paper acceptance.

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Complex Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Fast Fourier Transform
Huiru Xiao | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song | Ginny Wong | Simon See
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The choice of geometric space for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings can have significant effects on the performance of KG completion tasks. The hyperbolic geometry has been shown to capture the hierarchical patterns due to its tree-like metrics, which addressed the limitations of the Euclidean embedding models. Recent explorations of the complex hyperbolic geometry further improved the hyperbolic embeddings for capturing a variety of hierarchical structures. However, the performance of the hyperbolic KG embedding models for non-transitive relations is still unpromising, while the complex hyperbolic embeddings do not deal with multi-relations. This paper aims to utilize the representation capacity of the complex hyperbolic geometry in multi-relational KG embeddings. To apply the geometric transformations which account for different relations and the attention mechanism in the complex hyperbolic space, we propose to use the fast Fourier transform (FFT) as the conversion between the real and complex hyperbolic space. Constructing the attention-based transformations in the complex space is very challenging, while the proposed Fourier transform-based complex hyperbolic approaches provide a simple and effective solution. Experimental results show that our methods outperform the baselines, including the Euclidean and the real hyperbolic embedding models.

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MMChat: Multi-Modal Chat Dataset on Social Media
Yinhe Zheng | Guanyi Chen | Xin Liu | Jian Sun
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Incorporating multi-modal contexts in conversation is an important step for developing more engaging dialogue systems. In this work, we explore this direction by introducing MMChat: a large scale Chinese multi-modal dialogue corpus (32.4M raw dialogues and 120.84K filtered dialogues). Unlike previous corpora that are crowd-sourced or collected from fictitious movies, MMChat contains image-grounded dialogues collected from real conversations on social media, in which the sparsity issue is observed. Specifically, image-initiated dialogues in common communications may deviate to some non-image-grounded topics as the conversation proceeds. To better investigate this issue, we manually annotate 100K dialogues from MMChat and further filter the corpus accordingly, which yields MMChat-hf. We develop a benchmark model to address the sparsity issue in dialogue generation tasks by adapting the attention routing mechanism on image features. Experiments demonstrate the usefulness of incorporating image features and the effectiveness in handling the sparsity of image features.

2021

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Exploring Discourse Structures for Argument Impact Classification
Xin Liu | Jiefu Ou | Yangqiu Song | Xin Jiang
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)

Discourse relations among arguments reveal logical structures of a debate conversation. However, no prior work has explicitly studied how the sequence of discourse relations influence a claim’s impact. This paper empirically shows that the discourse relations between two arguments along the context path are essential factors for identifying the persuasive power of an argument. We further propose DisCOC to inject and fuse the sentence-level structural discourse information with contextualized features derived from large-scale language models. Experimental results and extensive analysis show that the attention and gate mechanisms that explicitly model contexts and texts can indeed help the argument impact classification task defined by Durmus et al. (2019), and discourse structures among the context path of the claim to be classified can further boost the performance.

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Bridging Subword Gaps in Pretrain-Finetune Paradigm for Natural Language Generation
Xin Liu | Baosong Yang | Dayiheng Liu | Haibo Zhang | Weihua Luo | Min Zhang | Haiying Zhang | Jinsong Su
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)

A well-known limitation in pretrain-finetune paradigm lies in its inflexibility caused by the one-size-fits-all vocabulary. This potentially weakens the effect when applying pretrained models into natural language generation (NLG) tasks, especially for the subword distributions between upstream and downstream tasks with significant discrepancy. Towards approaching this problem, we extend the vanilla pretrain-finetune pipeline with an extra embedding transfer step. Specifically, a plug-and-play embedding generator is introduced to produce the representation of any input token, according to pre-trained embeddings of its morphologically similar ones. Thus, embeddings of mismatch tokens in downstream tasks can also be efficiently initialized. We conduct experiments on a variety of NLG tasks under the pretrain-finetune fashion. Experimental results and extensive analyses show that the proposed strategy offers us opportunities to feel free to transfer the vocabulary, leading to more efficient and better performed downstream NLG models.

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Multi-hop Graph Convolutional Network with High-order Chebyshev Approximation for Text Reasoning
Shuoran Jiang | Qingcai Chen | Xin Liu | Baotian Hu | Lisai Zhang
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)

Graph convolutional network (GCN) has become popular in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks with its superiority in long-term and non-consecutive word interactions. However, existing single-hop graph reasoning in GCN may miss some important non-consecutive dependencies. In this study, we define the spectral graph convolutional network with the high-order dynamic Chebyshev approximation (HDGCN), which augments the multi-hop graph reasoning by fusing messages aggregated from direct and long-term dependencies into one convolutional layer. To alleviate the over-smoothing in high-order Chebyshev approximation, a multi-vote-based cross-attention (MVCAttn) with linear computation complexity is also proposed. The empirical results on four transductive and inductive NLP tasks and the ablation study verify the efficacy of the proposed model.

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Cross-lingual Transfer for Text Classification with Dictionary-based Heterogeneous Graph
Nuttapong Chairatanakul | Noppayut Sriwatanasakdi | Nontawat Charoenphakdee | Xin Liu | Tsuyoshi Murata
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

In cross-lingual text classification, it is required that task-specific training data in high-resource source languages are available, where the task is identical to that of a low-resource target language. However, collecting such training data can be infeasible because of the labeling cost, task characteristics, and privacy concerns. This paper proposes an alternative solution that uses only task-independent word embeddings of high-resource languages and bilingual dictionaries. First, we construct a dictionary-based heterogeneous graph (DHG) from bilingual dictionaries. This opens the possibility to use graph neural networks for cross-lingual transfer. The remaining challenge is the heterogeneity of DHG because multiple languages are considered. To address this challenge, we propose dictionary-based heterogeneous graph neural network (DHGNet) that effectively handles the heterogeneity of DHG by two-step aggregations, which are word-level and language-level aggregations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms pretrained models even though it does not access to large corpora. Furthermore, it can perform well even though dictionaries contain many incorrect translations. Its robustness allows the usage of a wider range of dictionaries such as an automatically constructed dictionary and crowdsourced dictionary, which are convenient for real-world applications.

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Leveraging Capsule Routing to Associate Knowledge with Medical Literature Hierarchically
Xin Liu | Qingcai Chen | Junying Chen | Wenxiu Zhou | Tingyu Liu | Xinlan Yang | Weihua Peng
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Integrating knowledge into text is a promising way to enrich text representation, especially in the medical field. However, undifferentiated knowledge not only confuses the text representation but also imports unexpected noises. In this paper, to alleviate this problem, we propose leveraging capsule routing to associate knowledge with medical literature hierarchically (called HiCapsRKL). Firstly, HiCapsRKL extracts two empirically designed text fragments from medical literature and encodes them into fragment representations respectively. Secondly, the capsule routing algorithm is applied to two fragment representations. Through the capsule computing and dynamic routing, each representation is processed into a new representation (denoted as caps-representation), and we integrate the caps-representations as information gain to associate knowledge with medical literature hierarchically. Finally, HiCapsRKL are validated on relevance prediction and medical literature retrieval test sets. The experimental results and analyses show that HiCapsRKLcan more accurately associate knowledge with medical literature than mainstream methods. In summary, HiCapsRKL can efficiently help selecting the most relevant knowledge to the medical literature, which may be an alternative attempt to improve knowledge-based text representation. Source code is released on GitHub.

2020

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MedWriter: Knowledge-Aware Medical Text Generation
Youcheng Pan | Qingcai Chen | Weihua Peng | Xiaolong Wang | Baotian Hu | Xin Liu | Junying Chen | Wenxiu Zhou
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

To exploit the domain knowledge to guarantee the correctness of generated text has been a hot topic in recent years, especially for high professional domains such as medical. However, most of recent works only consider the information of unstructured text rather than structured information of the knowledge graph. In this paper, we focus on the medical topic-to-text generation task and adapt a knowledge-aware text generation model to the medical domain, named MedWriter, which not only introduces the specific knowledge from the external MKG but also is capable of learning graph-level representation. We conduct experiments on a medical literature dataset collected from medical journals, each of which has a set of topic words, an abstract of medical literature and a corresponding knowledge graph from CMeKG. Experimental results demonstrate incorporating knowledge graph into generation model can improve the quality of the generated text and has robust superiority over the competitor methods.

2019

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A Variational Approach to Weakly Supervised Document-Level Multi-Aspect Sentiment Classification
Ziqian Zeng | Wenxuan Zhou | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
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)

In this paper, we propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification. Instead of using user-generated ratings or annotations provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as “supervision.” These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment polarity classifier to predict the sentiment polarity of each aspect given a document. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity, to the objective function, we can inject the sentiment polarity classifier to the objective via the variational lower bound. We can learn a sentiment polarity classifier by optimizing the lower bound. We show that our method can outperform weakly supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets and can be comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised method with hundreds of labels per aspect.

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Relation Discovery with Out-of-Relation Knowledge Base as Supervision
Yan Liang | Xin Liu | Jianwen Zhang | Yangqiu Song
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)

Unsupervised relation discovery aims to discover new relations from a given text corpus without annotated data. However, it does not consider existing human annotated knowledge bases even when they are relevant to the relations to be discovered. In this paper, we study the problem of how to use out-of-relation knowledge bases to supervise the discovery of unseen relations, where out-of-relation means that relations to discover from the text corpus and those in knowledge bases are not overlapped. We construct a set of constraints between entity pairs based on the knowledge base embedding and then incorporate constraints into the relation discovery by a variational auto-encoder based algorithm. Experiments show that our new approach can improve the state-of-the-art relation discovery performance by a large margin.

2018

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The BQ Corpus: A Large-scale Domain-specific Chinese Corpus For Sentence Semantic Equivalence Identification
Jing Chen | Qingcai Chen | Xin Liu | Haijun Yang | Daohe Lu | Buzhou Tang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper introduces the Bank Question (BQ) corpus, a Chinese corpus for sentence semantic equivalence identification (SSEI). The BQ corpus contains 120,000 question pairs from 1-year online bank custom service logs. To efficiently process and annotate questions from such a large scale of logs, this paper proposes a clustering based annotation method to achieve questions with the same intent. First, the deduplicated questions with the same answer are clustered into stacks by the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) based Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithm. Then, the annotators are asked to assign the clustered questions into different intent categories. Finally, the positive and negative question pairs for SSEI are selected in the same intent category and between different intent categories respectively. We also present six SSEI benchmark performance on our corpus, including state-of-the-art algorithms. As the largest manually annotated public Chinese SSEI corpus in the bank domain, the BQ corpus is not only useful for Chinese question semantic matching research, but also a significant resource for cross-lingual and cross-domain SSEI research. The corpus is available in public.

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LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus
Xin Liu | Qingcai Chen | Chong Deng | Huajun Zeng | Jing Chen | Dongfang Li | Buzhou Tang
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The lack of large-scale question matching corpora greatly limits the development of matching methods in question answering (QA) system, especially for non-English languages. To ameliorate this situation, in this paper, we introduce a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus (named LCQMC), which is released to the public1. LCQMC is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrase. How to collect a large number of question pairs in variant linguistic forms, which may present the same intent, is the key point for such corpus construction. In this paper, we first use a search engine to collect large-scale question pairs related to high-frequency words from various domains, then filter irrelevant pairs by the Wasserstein distance, and finally recruit three annotators to manually check the left pairs. After this process, a question matching corpus that contains 260,068 question pairs is constructed. In order to verify the LCQMC corpus, we split it into three parts, i.e., a training set containing 238,766 question pairs, a development set with 8,802 question pairs, and a test set with 12,500 question pairs, and test several well-known sentence matching methods on it. The experimental results not only demonstrate the good quality of LCQMC but also provide solid baseline performance for further researches on this corpus.

1999

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Experiments in translingual information retrieval using web-based MT and WordNet
Krzysztof Czuba | Xin Liu
Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages

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