Hongyin Luo


2023

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Search Augmented Instruction Learning
Hongyin Luo | Tianhua Zhang | Yung-Sung Chuang | Yuan Gong | Yoon Kim | Xixin Wu | Helen Meng | James Glass
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. In this work, we propose search-augmented instruction learning (SAIL), which grounds the language generation and instruction following abilities on complex search results generated by in-house and external search engines. With an instruction tuning corpus, we collect search results for each training case from different search APIs and domains, and construct a new search-grounded training set containing (instruction, grounding information, response) triplets. We then fine-tune the LLaMA-7B model on the constructed training set. Since the collected results contain unrelated and disputing languages, the model needs to learn to ground on trustworthy search results, filter out distracting passages, and generate the target response. The search result-denoising process entails explicit trustworthy information selection and multi-hop reasoning, since the retrieved passages might be informative but not contain the instruction-following answer. Experiments show that the fine-tuned SAIL-7B model has a strong instruction-following ability, and it performs significantly better on transparency-sensitive tasks, including open-ended question answering and fact checking.

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ConvRGX: Recognition, Generation, and Extraction for Self-trained Conversational Question Answering
Tianhua Zhang | Liping Tang | Wei Fang | Hongyin Luo | Xixin Wu | Helen Meng | James Glass
Proceedings of the Third DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

Collecting and constructing human-annotated corpora for training conversational question-answering (CQA) models has recently been shown to be inefficient and costly. To solve this problem, previous works have proposed training QA models with automatically generated QA data. In this work, we extend earlier studies on QA synthesis, and propose an efficient QA data generation algorithm under conversational settings. Our model recognizes potential dialogue topics, generates corresponding questions, and extracts answers from grounding passages. To improve the quality of generated QAs and downstream self-training of CQA models, we propose dropout and agreement-based QA selection methods. We conduct experiments on both data augmentation and domain adaptation settings. Experiments on the QuAC and Doc2Dial tasks show that the proposed method can significantly improve the quality of generated QA data, and also improves the accuracy of self-trained CQA models based on the constructed training corpora.

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Logic Against Bias: Textual Entailment Mitigates Stereotypical Sentence Reasoning
Hongyin Luo | James Glass
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Due to their similarity-based learning objectives, pretrained sentence encoders often internalize stereotypical assumptions that reflect the social biases that exist within their training corpora. In this paper, we describe several kinds of stereotypes concerning different communities that are present in popular sentence representation models, including pretrained next sentence prediction and contrastive sentence representation models. We compare such models to textual entailment models that learn language logic for a variety of downstream language understanding tasks. By comparing strong pretrained models based on text similarity with textual entailment learning, we conclude that the explicit logic learning with textual entailment can significantly reduce bias and improve the recognition of social communities, without an explicit de-biasing process.

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Entailment as Robust Self-Learner
Jiaxin Ge | Hongyin Luo | Yoon Kim | James Glass
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Entailment has been recognized as an important metric for evaluating natural language understanding (NLU) models, and recent studies have found that entailment pretraining benefits weakly supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we design a prompting strategy that formulates a number of different NLU tasks as contextual entailment. This approach improves the zero-shot adaptation of pretrained entailment models. Secondly, we notice that self-training entailment-based models with unlabeled data can significantly improve the adaptation performance on downstream tasks. To achieve more stable improvement, we propose the Simple Pseudo-Label Editing (SimPLE) algorithm for better pseudo-labeling quality in self-training. We also found that both pretrained entailment-based models and the self-trained models are robust against adversarial evaluation data. Experiments on binary and multi-class classification tasks show that SimPLE leads to more robust self-training results, indicating that the self-trained entailment models are more efficient and trustworthy than large language models on language understanding tasks.

2022

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Cooperative Self-training of Machine Reading Comprehension
Hongyin Luo | Shang-Wen Li | Mingye Gao | Seunghak Yu | James Glass
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Pretrained language models have significantly improved the performance of downstream language understanding tasks, including extractive question answering, by providing high-quality contextualized word embeddings. However, training question answering models still requires large amounts of annotated data for specific domains. In this work, we propose a cooperative self-training framework, RGX, for automatically generating more non-trivial question-answer pairs to improve model performance. RGX is built upon a masked answer extraction task with an interactive learning environment containing an answer entity Recognizer, a question Generator, and an answer eXtractor. Given a passage with a masked entity, the generator generates a question around the entity, and the extractor is trained to extract the masked entity with the generated question and raw texts. The framework allows the training of question generation and answering models on any text corpora without annotation. We further leverage a self-training technique to improve the performance of both question generation and answer extraction models. Experiment results show that RGX outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pretrained language models and transfer learning approaches on standard question-answering benchmarks, and yields the new SOTA performance under given model size and transfer learning settings.

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DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings
Yung-Sung Chuang | Rumen Dangovski | Hongyin Luo | Yang Zhang | Shiyu Chang | Marin Soljacic | Shang-Wen Li | Scott Yih | Yoon Kim | James Glass
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We propose DiffCSE, an unsupervised contrastive learning framework for learning sentence embeddings. DiffCSE learns sentence embeddings that are sensitive to the difference between the original sentence and an edited sentence, where the edited sentence is obtained by stochastically masking out the original sentence and then sampling from a masked language model. We show that DiffSCE is an instance of equivariant contrastive learning, which generalizes contrastive learning and learns representations that are insensitive to certain types of augmentations and sensitive to other “harmful” types of augmentations. Our experiments show that DiffCSE achieves state-of-the-art results among unsupervised sentence representation learning methods, outperforming unsupervised SimCSE by 2.3 absolute points on semantic textual similarity tasks.

2021

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Mitigating Biases in Toxic Language Detection through Invariant Rationalization
Yung-Sung Chuang | Mingye Gao | Hongyin Luo | James Glass | Hung-yi Lee | Yun-Nung Chen | Shang-Wen Li
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021)

Automatic detection of toxic language plays an essential role in protecting social media users, especially minority groups, from verbal abuse. However, biases toward some attributes, including gender, race, and dialect, exist in most training datasets for toxicity detection. The biases make the learned models unfair and can even exacerbate the marginalization of people. Considering that current debiasing methods for general natural language understanding tasks cannot effectively mitigate the biases in the toxicity detectors, we propose to use invariant rationalization (InvRat), a game-theoretic framework consisting of a rationale generator and a predictor, to rule out the spurious correlation of certain syntactic patterns (e.g., identity mentions, dialect) to toxicity labels. We empirically show that our method yields lower false positive rate in both lexical and dialectal attributes than previous debiasing methods.

2020

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Knowledge Grounded Conversational Symptom Detection with Graph Memory Networks
Hongyin Luo | Shang-Wen Li | James Glass
Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

In this work, we propose a novel goal-oriented dialog task, automatic symptom detection. We build a system that can interact with patients through dialog to detect and collect clinical symptoms automatically, which can save a doctor’s time interviewing the patient. Given a set of explicit symptoms provided by the patient to initiate a dialog for diagnosing, the system is trained to collect implicit symptoms by asking questions, in order to collect more information for making an accurate diagnosis. After getting the reply from the patient for each question, the system also decides whether current information is enough for a human doctor to make a diagnosis. To achieve this goal, we propose two neural models and a training pipeline for the multi-step reasoning task. We also build a knowledge graph as additional inputs to further improve model performance. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the baseline by 4%, discovering 67% of implicit symptoms on average with a limited number of questions.

2019

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Improving Neural Language Models by Segmenting, Attending, and Predicting the Future
Hongyin Luo | Lan Jiang | Yonatan Belinkov | James Glass
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Common language models typically predict the next word given the context. In this work, we propose a method that improves language modeling by learning to align the given context and the following phrase. The model does not require any linguistic annotation of phrase segmentation. Instead, we define syntactic heights and phrase segmentation rules, enabling the model to automatically induce phrases, recognize their task-specific heads, and generate phrase embeddings in an unsupervised learning manner. Our method can easily be applied to language models with different network architectures since an independent module is used for phrase induction and context-phrase alignment, and no change is required in the underlying language modeling network. Experiments have shown that our model outperformed several strong baseline models on different data sets. We achieved a new state-of-the-art performance of 17.4 perplexity on the Wikitext-103 dataset. Additionally, visualizing the outputs of the phrase induction module showed that our model is able to learn approximate phrase-level structural knowledge without any annotation.

2018

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Learning Word Representations with Cross-Sentence Dependency for End-to-End Co-reference Resolution
Hongyin Luo | Jim Glass
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this work, we present a word embedding model that learns cross-sentence dependency for improving end-to-end co-reference resolution (E2E-CR). While the traditional E2E-CR model generates word representations by running long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks on each sentence of an input article or conversation separately, we propose linear sentence linking and attentional sentence linking models to learn cross-sentence dependency. Both sentence linking strategies enable the LSTMs to make use of valuable information from context sentences while calculating the representation of the current input word. With this approach, the LSTMs learn word embeddings considering knowledge not only from the current sentence but also from the entire input document. Experiments show that learning cross-sentence dependency enriches information contained by the word representations, and improves the performance of the co-reference resolution model compared with our baseline.

2015

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Online Learning of Interpretable Word Embeddings
Hongyin Luo | Zhiyuan Liu | Huanbo Luan | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing