Cunxiang Wang


2023

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Exploiting Abstract Meaning Representation for Open-Domain Question Answering
Cunxiang Wang | Zhikun Xu | Qipeng Guo | Xiangkun Hu | Xuefeng Bai | Zheng Zhang | Yue Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

The Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) task involves retrieving and subsequently generating answers from fine-grained relevant passages within a database. Current systems leverage Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to model the relationship between questions and passages. However, the diversity in surface form expressions can hinder the model’s ability to capture accurate correlations, especially within complex contexts. Therefore, we utilize Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to assist the model in understanding complex semantic information. We introduce a method known as Graph-as-Token (GST) to incorporate AMRs into PLMs. Results from Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQ) demonstrate that our GST method can significantly improve performance, resulting in up to 2.44/3.17 Exact Match score improvements on NQ/TQ respectively. Furthermore, our method enhances robustness and outperforms alternative Graph Neural Network (GNN) methods for integrating AMRs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ semantic graphs in ODQA.

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RFiD: Towards Rational Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering
Cunxiang Wang | Haofei Yu | Yue Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems necessitate a reader model capable of generating answers by simultaneously referring to multiple passages. Although representative models like Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) have been proposed to address this challenge, these systems can inadvertently rely on spurious features instead of genuine causal relationships between the question and the passages to generate answers. To counter this problem, we introduce the Rational Fusion-in-Decoder (RFiD) model. Our model leverages the encoders of FiD to differentiate between causal relationships and spurious features, subsequently guiding the decoder to generate answers informed by this discernment. Experimental results on two ODQA datasets, Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQ), demonstrate that our model surpasses previous methods, achieving improvements of up to 1.5 and 0.7 in Exact Match scores on NQ, and exhibits an enhanced ability to identify causal relationships.

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TRAMS: Training-free Memory Selection for Long-range Language Modeling
Haofei Yu | Cunxiang Wang | Yue Zhang | Wei Bi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

The Transformer architecture is crucial for numerous AI models, but it still faces challenges in long-range language modeling. Though several specific transformer architectures have been designed to tackle issues of long-range dependencies, existing methods like Transformer-XL are plagued by a high percentage of ineffective memories. In this study, we present a plug-and-play strategy, known as TRAining-free Memory Selection (TRAMS), that selects tokens participating in attention calculation based on one simple metric. This strategy allows us to keep tokens that are likely to have a high attention score with the current queries and ignore the other ones. We have tested our approach on the word-level benchmark (WikiText-103) and the character-level benchmark (enwik8), and the results indicate an improvement without having additional training or adding additional parameters.

2021

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Can Generative Pre-trained Language Models Serve As Knowledge Bases for Closed-book QA?
Cunxiang Wang | Pai Liu | Yue 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)

Recent work has investigated the interesting question using pre-trained language models (PLMs) as knowledge bases for answering open questions. However, existing work is limited in using small benchmarks with high test-train overlaps. We construct a new dataset of closed-book QA using SQuAD, and investigate the performance of BART. Experiments show that it is challenging for BART to remember training facts in high precision, and also challenging to answer closed-book questions even if relevant knowledge is retained. Some promising directions are found, including decoupling the knowledge memorizing process and the QA finetune process, forcing the model to recall relevant knowledge when question answering.

2020

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SemEval-2020 Task 4: Commonsense Validation and Explanation
Cunxiang Wang | Shuailong Liang | Yili Jin | Yilong Wang | Xiaodan Zhu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

In this paper, we present SemEval-2020 Task 4, Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE), which includes three subtasks, aiming to evaluate whether a system can distinguish a natural language statement that makes sense to humans from one that does not, and provide the reasons. Specifically, in our first subtask, the participating systems are required to choose from two natural language statements of similar wording the one that makes sense and the one does not. The second subtask additionally asks a system to select the key reason from three options why a given statement does not make sense. In the third subtask, a participating system needs to generate the reason automatically. 39 teams submitted their valid systems to at least one subtask. For Subtask A and Subtask B, top-performing teams have achieved results closed to human performance. However, for Subtask C, there is still a considerable gap between system and human performance. The dataset used in our task can be found at https://github.com/wangcunxiang/SemEval2020-Task4-Commonsense-Validation-and-Explanation.

2019

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Does it Make Sense? And Why? A Pilot Study for Sense Making and Explanation
Cunxiang Wang | Shuailong Liang | Yue Zhang | Xiaonan Li | Tian Gao
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Introducing common sense to natural language understanding systems has received increasing research attention. It remains a fundamental question on how to evaluate whether a system has the sense-making capability. Existing benchmarks measure common sense knowledge indirectly or without reasoning. In this paper, we release a benchmark to directly test whether a system can differentiate natural language statements that make sense from those that do not make sense. In addition, a system is asked to identify the most crucial reason why a statement does not make sense. We evaluate models trained over large-scale language modeling tasks as well as human performance, showing that there are different challenges for system sense-making.