Deren Lei


2021

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Extract, Denoise and Enforce: Evaluating and Improving Concept Preservation for Text-to-Text Generation
Yuning Mao | Wenchang Ma | Deren Lei | Jiawei Han | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Prior studies on text-to-text generation typically assume that the model could figure out what to attend to in the input and what to include in the output via seq2seq learning, with only the parallel training data and no additional guidance. However, it remains unclear whether current models can preserve important concepts in the source input, as seq2seq learning does not have explicit focus on the concepts and commonly used evaluation metrics also treat them equally important as other tokens. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis that studies whether current seq2seq models, especially pre-trained language models, are good enough for preserving important input concepts and to what extent explicitly guiding generation with the concepts as lexical constraints is beneficial. We answer the above questions by conducting extensive analytical experiments on four representative text-to-text generation tasks. Based on the observations, we then propose a simple yet effective framework to automatically extract, denoise, and enforce important input concepts as lexical constraints. This new method performs comparably or better than its unconstrained counterpart on automatic metrics, demonstrates higher coverage for concept preservation, and receives better ratings in the human evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/morningmoni/EDE.

2020

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Learning Collaborative Agents with Rule Guidance for Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Deren Lei | Gangrong Jiang | Xiaotao Gu | Kexuan Sun | Yuning Mao | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Walk-based models have shown their advantages in knowledge graph (KG) reasoning by achieving decent performance while providing interpretable decisions. However, the sparse reward signals offered by the KG during a traversal are often insufficient to guide a sophisticated walk-based reinforcement learning (RL) model. An alternate approach is to use traditional symbolic methods (e.g., rule induction), which achieve good performance but can be hard to generalize due to the limitation of symbolic representation. In this paper, we propose RuleGuider, which leverages high-quality rules generated by symbolic-based methods to provide reward supervision for walk-based agents. Experiments on benchmark datasets shows that RuleGuider clearly improves the performance of walk-based models without losing interpretability.

2019

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Imposing Label-Relational Inductive Bias for Extremely Fine-Grained Entity Typing
Wenhan Xiong | Jiawei Wu | Deren Lei | Mo Yu | Shiyu Chang | Xiaoxiao Guo | William Yang Wang
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)

Existing entity typing systems usually exploit the type hierarchy provided by knowledge base (KB) schema to model label correlations and thus improve the overall performance. Such techniques, however, are not directly applicable to more open and practical scenarios where the type set is not restricted by KB schema and includes a vast number of free-form types. To model the underlying label correlations without access to manually annotated label structures, we introduce a novel label-relational inductive bias, represented by a graph propagation layer that effectively encodes both global label co-occurrence statistics and word-level similarities. On a large dataset with over 10,000 free-form types, the graph-enhanced model equipped with an attention-based matching module is able to achieve a much higher recall score while maintaining a high-level precision. Specifically, it achieves a 15.3% relative F1 improvement and also less inconsistency in the outputs. We further show that a simple modification of our proposed graph layer can also improve the performance on a conventional and widely-tested dataset that only includes KB-schema types.

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Deep Reinforcement Learning with Distributional Semantic Rewards for Abstractive Summarization
Siyao Li | Deren Lei | Pengda Qin | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been a commonly-used strategy for the abstractive summarization task to address both the exposure bias and non-differentiable task issues. However, the conventional reward Rouge-L simply looks for exact n-grams matches between candidates and annotated references, which inevitably makes the generated sentences repetitive and incoherent. In this paper, instead of Rouge-L, we explore the practicability of utilizing the distributional semantics to measure the matching degrees. With distributional semantics, sentence-level evaluation can be obtained, and semantically-correct phrases can also be generated without being limited to the surface form of the reference sentences. Human judgments on Gigaword and CNN/Daily Mail datasets show that our proposed distributional semantics reward (DSR) has distinct superiority in capturing the lexical and compositional diversity of natural language.