Weiran Xu


2023

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Generative Zero-Shot Prompt Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Inverse Prompting
Xuefeng Li | Liwen Wang | Guanting Dong | Keqing He | Jinzheng Zhao | Hao Lei | Jiachi Liu | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling aims to transfer knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing models either encode slot descriptions and examples or design handcrafted question templates using heuristic rules, suffering from poor generalization capability or robustness. In this paper, we propose a generative zero-shot prompt learning framework for cross-domain slot filling, both improving generalization and robustness than previous work. Besides, we introduce a novel inverse prompting strategy to distinguish different slot types to avoid the multiple prediction problem, and an efficient prompt tuning strategy to boost higher performance only training fewer prompt parameters. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, especially huge improvements (+13.44% F1) on the unseen slots.

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Value type: the bridge to a better DST model
Gao Qixiang | Mingyang Sun | Yutao Mou | Chen Zeng | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Value type of the slots can provide lots of useful information for DST tasks. However, it has been ignored in most previous works. In this paper, we propose a new framework for DST task based on these value types. Firstly, we extract the type of token from each turn. Specifically, we divide the slots in the dataset into 9 categories according to the type of slot value, and then train a Ner model to extract the corresponding type-entity from each turn of conversation according to the token. Secondly, we improve the attention mode which is integrated into value type information between the slot and the conversation history to help each slot pay more attention to the turns that contain the same value type. Meanwhile, we introduce a sampling strategy to integrate these types into the attention formula, which decrease the error of Ner model. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive experiment on two multi-domain task-oriented conversation datasets, MultiWOZ 2.1 and MultiWOZ 2.4. The ablation experimental results show that our method is effective on both datasets, which verify the necessity of considering the type of slot value.

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APP: Adaptive Prototypical Pseudo-Labeling for Few-shot OOD Detection
Pei Wang | Keqing He | Yutao Mou | Xiaoshuai Song | Yanan Wu | Jingang Wang | Yunsen Xian | Xunliang Cai | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents from user queries is essential for a task-oriented dialogue system. Previous OOD detection studies generally work on the assumption that plenty of labeled IND intents exist. In this paper, we focus on a more practical few-shot OOD setting where there are only a few labeled IND data and massive unlabeled mixed data that may belong to IND or OOD. The new scenario carries two key challenges: learning discriminative representations using limited IND data and leveraging unlabeled mixed data. Therefore, we propose an adaptive prototypical pseudo-labeling(APP) method for few-shot OOD detection, including a prototypical OOD detection framework (ProtoOOD) to facilitate low-resourceOOD detection using limited IND data, and an adaptive pseudo-labeling method to produce high-quality pseudo OOD and IND labels. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for few-shot OOD detection.

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Continual Generalized Intent Discovery: Marching Towards Dynamic and Open-world Intent Recognition
Xiaoshuai Song | Yutao Mou | Keqing He | Yueyan Qiu | Jinxu Zhao | Pei Wang | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

In a practical dialogue system, users may input out-of-domain (OOD) queries. The Generalized Intent Discovery (GID) task aims to discover OOD intents from OOD queries and extend them to the in-domain (IND) classifier. However, GID only considers one stage of OOD learning, and needs to utilize the data in all previous stages for joint training, which limits its wide application in reality. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Continual Generalized Intent Discovery (CGID), which aims to continuously and automatically discover OOD intents from dynamic OOD data streams and then incrementally add them to the classifier with almost no previous data, thus moving towards dynamic intent recognition in an open world. Next, we propose a method called Prototype-guided Learning with Replay and Distillation (PLRD) for CGID, which bootstraps new intent discovery through class prototypes and balances new and old intents through data replay and feature distillation. Finally, we conduct detailed experiments and analysis to verify the effectiveness of PLRD and understand the key challenges of CGID for future research.

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DemoNSF: A Multi-task Demonstration-based Generative Framework for Noisy Slot Filling Task
Guanting Dong | Tingfeng Hui | Zhuoma GongQue | Jinxu Zhao | Daichi Guo | Gang Zhao | Keqing He | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Recently, prompt-based generative frameworks have shown impressive capabilities in sequence labeling tasks. However, in practical dialogue scenarios, relying solely on simplistic templates and traditional corpora presents a challenge for these methods in generalizing to unknown input perturbations. To address this gap, we propose a multi-task demonstration-based generative framework for noisy slot filling, named DemoNSF. Specifically, we introduce three noisy auxiliary tasks, namely noisy recovery (NR), random mask (RM), and hybrid discrimination (HD), to implicitly capture semantic structural information of input perturbations at different granularities. In the downstream main task, we design a noisy demonstration construction strategy for the generative framework, which explicitly incorporates task-specific information and perturbed distribution during training and inference. Experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that DemoNSF outperforms all baseline methods and achieves strong generalization. Further analysis provides empirical guidance for the practical application of generative frameworks. Our code is released at https://github.com/dongguanting/Demo-NSF.

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Semantic Parsing by Large Language Models for Intricate Updating Strategies of Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking
Yuxiang Wu | Guanting Dong | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking (DST) addresses the challenge of acquiring and annotating task-oriented dialogues, which can be time-consuming and costly. However, DST extends beyond simple slot-filling and requires effective updating strategies for tracking dialogue state as conversations progress. In this paper, we propose ParsingDST, a new In-Context Learning (ICL) method, to introduce additional intricate updating strategies in zero-shot DST. Our approach reformulates the DST task by leveraging powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and translating the original dialogue text to JSON through semantic parsing as an intermediate state. We also design a novel framework that includes more modules to ensure the effectiveness of updating strategies in the text-to-JSON process. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot DST methods on MultiWOZ, exhibiting significant improvements in Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) and slot accuracy compared to existing ICL methods.

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Large Language Models Meet Open-World Intent Discovery and Recognition: An Evaluation of ChatGPT
Xiaoshuai Song | Keqing He | Pei Wang | Guanting Dong | Yutao Mou | Jingang Wang | Yunsen Xian | Xunliang Cai | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The tasks of out-of-domain (OOD) intent discovery and generalized intent discovery (GID) aim to extend a closed intent classifier to open-world intent sets, which is crucial to task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Previous methods address them by fine-tuning discriminative models. Recently, although some studies has been exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT to various downstream tasks, it is still unclear for the ability of ChatGPT to discover and incrementally extent OOD intents. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate ChatGPT on OOD intent discovery and GID, and then outline the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT. Overall, ChatGPT exhibits consistent advantages under zero-shot settings, but is still at a disadvantage compared to fine-tuned models. More deeply, through a series of analytical experiments, we summarize and discuss the challenges faced by LLMs including clustering, domain-specific understanding, and cross-domain in-context learning scenarios. Finally, we provide empirical guidance for future directions to address these challenges.

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FutureTOD: Teaching Future Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue
Weihao Zeng | Keqing He | Yejie Wang | Chen Zeng | Jingang Wang | Yunsen Xian | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue representations capabilities.

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Decoupling Pseudo Label Disambiguation and Representation Learning for Generalized Intent Discovery
Yutao Mou | Xiaoshuai Song | Keqing He | Chen Zeng | Pei Wang | Jingang Wang | Yunsen Xian | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Generalized intent discovery aims to extend a closed-set in-domain intent classifier to an open-world intent set including in-domain and out-of-domain intents. The key challenges lie in pseudo label disambiguation and representation learning. Previous methods suffer from a coupling of pseudo label disambiguation and representation learning, that is, the reliability of pseudo labels relies on representation learning, and representation learning is restricted by pseudo labels in turn. In this paper, we propose a decoupled prototype learning framework (DPL) to decouple pseudo label disambiguation and representation learning. Specifically, we firstly introduce prototypical contrastive representation learning (PCL) to get discriminative representations. And then we adopt a prototype-based label disambiguation method (PLD) to obtain pseudo labels. We theoretically prove that PCL and PLD work in a collaborative fashion and facilitate pseudo label disambiguation. Experiments and analysis on three benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method.

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Seen to Unseen: Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation
Weihao Zeng | Lulu Zhao | Keqing He | Ruotong Geng | Jingang Wang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Existing controllable dialogue generation work focuses on the single-attribute control and lacks generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. In this paper, we explore the compositional generalization for multi-attribute controllable dialogue generation where a model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. We propose a prompt-based disentangled controllable dialogue generation model, DCG. It learns attribute concept composition by generating attribute-oriented prompt vectors and uses a disentanglement loss to disentangle different attributes for better generalization. Besides, we design a unified reference-free evaluation framework for multiple attributes with different levels of granularities. Experiment results on two benchmarks prove the effectiveness of our method and the evaluation metric.

2022

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Entity-level Interaction via Heterogeneous Graph for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition
Gang Zhao | Guanting Dong | Yidong Shi | Haolong Yan | Weiran Xu | Si Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) faces two specific challenges: 1) How to capture useful entity-related visual information. 2) How to alleviate the interference of visual noise. Previous works have gained progress by improving interacting mechanisms or seeking for better visual features. However, existing methods neglect the integrity of entity semantics and conduct cross-modal interaction at token-level, which cuts apart the semantics of entities and makes non-entity tokens easily interfered with by irrelevant visual noise. Thus in this paper, we propose an end-to-end heterogeneous Graph-based Entity-level Interacting model (GEI) for MNER. GEI first utilizes a span detection subtask to obtain entity representations, which serve as the bridge between two modalities. Then, the heterogeneous graph interacting network interacts entity with object nodes to capture entity-related visual information, and fuses it into only entity-associated tokens to rid non-entity tokens of the visual noise. Experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code will be available at https://github.com/GangZhao98/GEI.

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Disentangling Confidence Score Distribution for Out-of-Domain Intent Detection with Energy-Based Learning
Yanan Wu | Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yutao Mou | Pei Wang | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a taskoriented dialog system. Traditional softmaxbased confidence scores are susceptible to the overconfidence issue. In this paper, we propose a simple but strong energy-based score function to detect OOD where the energy scores of OOD samples are higher than IND samples. Further, given a small set of labeled OOD samples, we introduce an energy-based margin objective for supervised OOD detection to explicitly distinguish OOD samples from INDs. Comprehensive experiments and analysis prove our method helps disentangle confidence score distributions of IND and OOD data.

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Semi-Supervised Knowledge-Grounded Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Weihao Zeng | Keqing He | Zechen Wang | Dayuan Fu | Guanting Dong | Ruotong Geng | Pei Wang | Jingang Wang | Chaobo Sun | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)

Recent advances in neural approaches greatly improve task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems which assist users to accomplish their goals. However, such systems rely on costly manually labeled dialogs which are not available in practical scenarios. In this paper, we present our models for Track 2 of the SereTOD 2022 challenge, which is the first challenge of building semisupervised and reinforced TOD systems on a large-scale real-world Chinese TOD dataset MobileCS. We build a knowledge-grounded dialog model to formulate dialog history and local KB as input and predict the system response. And we perform semi-supervised pretraining both on the labeled and unlabeled data. Our system achieves the first place both in the automatic evaluation and human interaction, especially with higher BLEU (+7.64) and Success (+13.6%) than the second place.

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Disentangled Knowledge Transfer for OOD Intent Discovery with Unified Contrastive Learning
Yutao Mou | Keqing He | Yanan Wu | Zhiyuan Zeng | Hong Xu | Huixing Jiang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Discovering Out-of-Domain(OOD) intents is essential for developing new skills in a task-oriented dialogue system. The key challenge is how to transfer prior IND knowledge to OOD clustering. Different from existing work based on shared intent representation, we propose a novel disentangled knowledge transfer method via a unified multi-head contrastive learning framework. We aim to bridge the gap between IND pre-training and OOD clustering. Experiments and analysis on two benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method.

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Distribution Calibration for Out-of-Domain Detection with Bayesian Approximation
Yanan Wu | Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yutao Mou | Pei Wang | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Out-of-Domain (OOD) detection is a key component in a task-oriented dialog system, which aims to identify whether a query falls outside the predefined supported intent set. Previous softmax-based detection algorithms are proved to be overconfident for OOD samples. In this paper, we analyze overconfident OOD comes from distribution uncertainty due to the mismatch between the training and test distributions, which makes the model can’t confidently make predictions thus probably causes abnormal softmax scores. We propose a Bayesian OOD detection framework to calibrate distribution uncertainty using Monte-Carlo Dropout. Our method is flexible and easily pluggable to existing softmax-based baselines and gains 33.33% OOD F1 improvements with increasing only 0.41% inference time compared to MSP. Further analyses show the effectiveness of Bayesian learning for OOD detection.

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Generalized Intent Discovery: Learning from Open World Dialogue System
Yutao Mou | Keqing He | Yanan Wu | Pei Wang | Jingang Wang | Wei Wu | Yi Huang | Junlan Feng | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Traditional intent classification models are based on a pre-defined intent set and only recognize limited in-domain (IND) intent classes. But users may input out-of-domain (OOD) queries in a practical dialogue system. Such OOD queries can provide directions for future improvement. In this paper, we define a new task, Generalized Intent Discovery (GID), which aims to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents. We hope to simultaneously classify a set of labeled IND intent classes while discovering and recognizing new unlabeled OOD types incrementally. We construct three public datasets for different application scenarios and propose two kinds of frameworks, pipeline-based and end-to-end for future work. Further, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future GID research.

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PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling
Guanting Dong | Daichi Guo | Liwen Wang | Xuefeng Li | Zechen Wang | Chen Zeng | Keqing He | Jinzheng Zhao | Hao Lei | Xinyue Cui | Yi Huang | Junlan Feng | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Most existing slot filling models tend to memorize inherent patterns of entities and corresponding contexts from training data. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable outputs when being exposed to spoken language perturbation or variation in practice. We propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for training perturbation-robust slot filling models. Specifically, we introduce two MLM-based training strategies to respectively learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution from unsupervised language perturbation corpus. Then, we transfer semantic knowledge learned from upstream training procedure into the original samples and filter generated data by consistency processing. These procedures aims to enhance the robustness of slot filling models. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms the previous basic methods and gains strong generalization while preventing the model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts.

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Revisit Overconfidence for OOD Detection: Reassigned Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Class-dependent Threshold
Yanan Wu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | QiXiang Gao | Zhiyuan Zeng | Fujia Zheng | Lulu Zhao | Huixing Jiang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is the overconfidence of neural models. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze overconfidence and classify it into two perspectives: over-confident OOD and in-domain (IND). Then according to intrinsic reasons, we respectively propose a novel reassigned contrastive learning (RCL) to discriminate IND intents for over-confident OOD and an adaptive class-dependent local threshold mechanism to separate similar IND and OOD intents for over-confident IND. Experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of our proposed method for both aspects of overconfidence issues.

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Domain-Oriented Prefix-Tuning: Towards Efficient and Generalizable Fine-tuning for Zero-Shot Dialogue Summarization
Lulu Zhao | Fujia Zheng | Weihao Zeng | Keqing He | Weiran Xu | Huixing Jiang | Wei Wu | Yanan Wu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The most advanced abstractive dialogue summarizers lack generalization ability on new domains and the existing researches for domain adaptation in summarization generally rely on large-scale pre-trainings. To explore the lightweight fine-tuning methods for domain adaptation of dialogue summarization, in this paper, we propose an efficient and generalizable Domain-Oriented Prefix-tuning model, which utilizes a domain word initialized prefix module to alleviate domain entanglement and adopts discrete prompts to guide the model to focus on key contents of dialogues and enhance model generalization. We conduct zero-shot experiments and build domain adaptation benchmarks on two multi-domain dialogue summarization datasets, TODSum and QMSum. Adequate experiments and qualitative analysis prove the effectiveness of our methods.

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Watch the Neighbors: A Unified K-Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning Framework for OOD Intent Discovery
Yutao Mou | Keqing He | Pei Wang | Yanan Wu | Jingang Wang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Discovering out-of-domain (OOD) intent is important for developing new skills in task-oriented dialogue systems. The key challenges lie in how to transfer prior in-domain (IND) knowledge to OOD clustering, as well as jointly learn OOD representations and cluster assignments. Previous methods suffer from in-domain overfitting problem, and there is a natural gap between representation learning and clustering objectives. In this paper, we propose a unified K-nearest neighbor contrastive learning framework to discover OOD intents. Specifically, for IND pre-training stage, we propose a KCL objective to learn inter-class discriminative features, while maintaining intra-class diversity, which alleviates the in-domain overfitting problem. For OOD clustering stage, we propose a KCC method to form compact clusters by mining true hard negative samples, which bridges the gap between clustering and representation learning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

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Exploiting domain-slot related keywords description for Few-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking
Gao Qixiang | Guanting Dong | Yutao Mou | Liwen Wang | Chen Zeng | Daichi Guo | Mingyang Sun | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Collecting dialogue data with domain-slot-value labels for dialogue state tracking (DST) could be a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on domain-slot related description to tackle the challenge of few-shot cross-domain DST. Specifically, we design an extraction module to extract domain-slot related verbs and nouns in the dialogue. Then, we integrates them into the description, which aims to prompt the model to identify the slot information. Furthermore, we introduce a random sampling strategy to improve the domain generalization ability of the model. We utilize a pre-trained model to encode contexts and description and generates answers with an auto-regressive manner. Experimental results show that our approaches substantially outperform the existing few-shot DST methods on MultiWOZ and gain strong improvements on the slot accuracy comparing to existing slot description methods.

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UniNL: Aligning Representation Learning with Scoring Function for OOD Detection via Unified Neighborhood Learning
Yutao Mou | Pei Wang | Keqing He | Yanan Wu | Jingang Wang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents from user queries is essential for avoiding wrong operations in task-oriented dialogue systems. The key challenge is how to distinguish in-domain (IND) and OOD intents. Previous methods ignore the alignment between representation learning and scoring function, limiting the OOD detection performance. In this paper, we propose a unified neighborhood learning framework (UniNL) to detect OOD intents. Specifically, we design a KNCL objective for representation learning, and introduce a KNN-based scoring function for OOD detection. We aim to align representation learning with scoring function. Experiments and analysis on two benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method.

2021

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Topic Embedding Regression Model and its Application to Financial Texts
Weiran Xu | Koji Eguchi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing

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Scheduled Dialog Policy Learning: An Automatic Curriculum Learning Framework for Task-oriented Dialog System
Sihong Liu | Jinchao Zhang | Keqing He | Weiran Xu | Jie Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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A Finer-grain Universal Dialogue Semantic Structures based Model For Abstractive Dialogue Summarization
Yuejie Lei | Fujia Zheng | Yuanmeng Yan | Keqing He | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Although abstractive summarization models have achieved impressive results on document summarization tasks, their performance on dialogue modeling is much less satisfactory due to the crude and straight methods for dialogue encoding. To address this question, we propose a novel end-to-end Transformer-based model FinDS for abstractive dialogue summarization that leverages Finer-grain universal Dialogue semantic Structures to model dialogue and generates better summaries. Experiments on the SAMsum dataset show that FinDS outperforms various dialogue summarization approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) ROUGE results. Finally, we apply FinDS to a more complex scenario, showing the robustness of our model. We also release our source code.

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Give the Truth: Incorporate Semantic Slot into Abstractive Dialogue Summarization
Lulu Zhao | Weihao Zeng | Weiran Xu | Jun Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Abstractive dialogue summarization suffers from a lots of factual errors, which are due to scattered salient elements in the multi-speaker information interaction process. In this work, we design a heterogeneous semantic slot graph with a slot-level mask cross-attention to enhance the slot features for more correct summarization. We also propose a slot-driven beam search algorithm in the decoding process to give priority to generating salient elements in a limited length by “filling-in-the-blanks”. Besides, an adversarial contrastive learning assisting the training process is introduced to alleviate the exposure bias. Experimental performance on different types of factual errors shows the effectiveness of our methods and human evaluation further verifies the results..

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Large-Scale Relation Learning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases with Pre-trained Language Models
Yuanmeng Yan | Rumei Li | Sirui Wang | Hongzhi Zhang | Zan Daoguang | Fuzheng Zhang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The key challenge of question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) is the inconsistency between the natural language questions and the reasoning paths in the knowledge base (KB). Recent graph-based KBQA methods are good at grasping the topological structure of the graph but often ignore the textual information carried by the nodes and edges. Meanwhile, pre-trained language models learn massive open-world knowledge from the large corpus, but it is in the natural language form and not structured. To bridge the gap between the natural language and the structured KB, we propose three relation learning tasks for BERT-based KBQA, including relation extraction, relation matching, and relation reasoning. By relation-augmented training, the model learns to align the natural language expressions to the relations in the KB as well as reason over the missing connections in the KB. Experiments on WebQSP show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, especially when the KB is incomplete.

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Gradient-Based Adversarial Factual Consistency Evaluation for Abstractive Summarization
Zhiyuan Zeng | Jiaze Chen | Weiran Xu | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural abstractive summarization systems have gained significant progress in recent years. However, abstractive summarization often produce inconsisitent statements or false facts. How to automatically generate highly abstract yet factually correct summaries? In this paper, we proposed an efficient weak-supervised adversarial data augmentation approach to form the factual consistency dataset. Based on the artificial dataset, we train an evaluation model that can not only make accurate and robust factual consistency discrimination but is also capable of making interpretable factual errors tracing by backpropagated gradient distribution on token embeddings. Experiments and analysis conduct on public annotated summarization and factual consistency datasets demonstrate our approach effective and reasonable.

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Bridge to Target Domain by Prototypical Contrastive Learning and Label Confusion: Re-explore Zero-Shot Learning for Slot Filling
Liwen Wang | Xuefeng Li | Jiachi Liu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling alleviates the data dependence in the case of data scarcity in the target domain, which has aroused extensive research. However, as most of the existing methods do not achieve effective knowledge transfer to the target domain, they just fit the distribution of the seen slot and show poor performance on unseen slot in the target domain. To solve this, we propose a novel approach based on prototypical contrastive learning with a dynamic label confusion strategy for zero-shot slot filling. The prototypical contrastive learning aims to reconstruct the semantic constraints of labels, and we introduce the label confusion strategy to establish the label dependence between the source domains and the target domain on-the-fly. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvement on the unseen slots, while also set new state-of-the-arts on slot filling task.

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Dynamically Disentangling Social Bias from Task-Oriented Representations with Adversarial Attack
Liwen Wang | Yuanmeng Yan | Keqing He | Yanan Wu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Representation learning is widely used in NLP for a vast range of tasks. However, representations derived from text corpora often reflect social biases. This phenomenon is pervasive and consistent across different neural models, causing serious concern. Previous methods mostly rely on a pre-specified, user-provided direction or suffer from unstable training. In this paper, we propose an adversarial disentangled debiasing model to dynamically decouple social bias attributes from the intermediate representations trained on the main task. We aim to denoise bias information while training on the downstream task, rather than completely remove social bias and pursue static unbiased representations. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method, both on the effect of debiasing and the main task performance.

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Adversarial Self-Supervised Learning for Out-of-Domain Detection
Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Hong Xu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents is crucial for the deployed task-oriented dialogue system. Previous unsupervised OOD detection methods only extract discriminative features of different in-domain intents while supervised counterparts can directly distinguish OOD and in-domain intents but require extensive labeled OOD data. To combine the benefits of both types, we propose a self-supervised contrastive learning framework to model discriminative semantic features of both in-domain intents and OOD intents from unlabeled data. Besides, we introduce an adversarial augmentation neural module to improve the efficiency and robustness of contrastive learning. Experiments on two public benchmark datasets show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines with a statistically significant margin.

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Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System
Yanan Wu | Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Hong Xu | Yuanmeng Yan | Huixing Jiang | Weiran Xu
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)

Existing slot filling models can only recognize pre-defined in-domain slot types from a limited slot set. In the practical application, a reliable dialogue system should know what it does not know. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Novel Slot Detection (NSD), in the task-oriented dialogue system. NSD aims to discover unknown or out-of-domain slot types to strengthen the capability of a dialogue system based on in-domain training data. Besides, we construct two public NSD datasets, propose several strong NSD baselines, and establish a benchmark for future work. Finally, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future directions.

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ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer
Yuanmeng Yan | Rumei Li | Sirui Wang | Fuzheng Zhang | Wei Wu | Weiran Xu
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)

Learning high-quality sentence representations benefits a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Though BERT-based pre-trained language models achieve high performance on many downstream tasks, the native derived sentence representations are proved to be collapsed and thus produce a poor performance on the semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. In this paper, we present ConSERT, a Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised SEntence Representation Transfer, that adopts contrastive learning to fine-tune BERT in an unsupervised and effective way. By making use of unlabeled texts, ConSERT solves the collapse issue of BERT-derived sentence representations and make them more applicable for downstream tasks. Experiments on STS datasets demonstrate that ConSERT achieves an 8% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art, even comparable to the supervised SBERT-NLI. And when further incorporating NLI supervision, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on STS tasks. Moreover, ConSERT obtains comparable results with only 1000 samples available, showing its robustness in data scarcity scenarios.

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Modeling Discriminative Representations for Out-of-Domain Detection with Supervised Contrastive Learning
Zhiyuan Zeng | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Zijun Liu | Yanan Wu | Hong Xu | Huixing Jiang | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is to learn discriminative semantic features. Traditional cross-entropy loss only focuses on whether a sample is correctly classified, and does not explicitly distinguish the margins between categories. In this paper, we propose a supervised contrastive learning objective to minimize intra-class variance by pulling together in-domain intents belonging to the same class and maximize inter-class variance by pushing apart samples from different classes. Besides, we employ an adversarial augmentation mechanism to obtain pseudo diverse views of a sample in the latent space. Experiments on two public datasets prove the effectiveness of our method capturing discriminative representations for OOD detection.

2020

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Adversarial Semantic Decoupling for Recognizing Open-Vocabulary Slots
Yuanmeng Yan | Keqing He | Hong Xu | Sihong Liu | Fanyu Meng | Min Hu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Open-vocabulary slots, such as file name, album name, or schedule title, significantly degrade the performance of neural-based slot filling models since these slots can take on values from a virtually unlimited set and have no semantic restriction nor a length limit. In this paper, we propose a robust adversarial model-agnostic slot filling method that explicitly decouples local semantics inherent in open-vocabulary slot words from the global context. We aim to depart entangled contextual semantics and focus more on the holistic context at the level of the whole sentence. Experiments on two public datasets show that our method consistently outperforms other methods with a statistically significant margin on all the open-vocabulary slots without deteriorating the performance of normal slots.

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Learning to Tag OOV Tokens by Integrating Contextual Representation and Background Knowledge
Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Neural-based context-aware models for slot tagging have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, the presence of OOV(out-of-vocab) words significantly degrades the performance of neural-based models, especially in a few-shot scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced slot tagging model to integrate contextual representation of input text and the large-scale lexical background knowledge. Besides, we use multi-level graph attention to explicitly model lexical relations. The experiments show that our proposed knowledge integration mechanism achieves consistent improvements across settings with different sizes of training data on two public benchmark datasets.

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Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Graph Structures and Topic Words
Lulu Zhao | Weiran Xu | Jun Guo
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recently, people have been beginning paying more attention to the abstractive dialogue summarization task. Since the information flows are exchanged between at least two interlocutors and key elements about a certain event are often spanned across multiple utterances, it is necessary for researchers to explore the inherent relations and structures of dialogue contents. However, the existing approaches often process the dialogue with sequence-based models, which are hard to capture long-distance inter-sentence relations. In this paper, we propose a Topic-word Guided Dialogue Graph Attention (TGDGA) network to model the dialogue as an interaction graph according to the topic word information. A masked graph self-attention mechanism is used to integrate cross-sentence information flows and focus more on the related utterances, which makes it better to understand the dialogue. Moreover, the topic word features are introduced to assist the decoding process. We evaluate our model on the SAMSum Corpus and Automobile Master Corpus. The experimental results show that our method outperforms most of the baselines.

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A Deep Generative Distance-Based Classifier for Out-of-Domain Detection with Mahalanobis Space
Hong Xu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Sihong Liu | Zijun Liu | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) input intents is critical in the task-oriented dialog system. Different from most existing methods that rely heavily on manually labeled OOD samples, we focus on the unsupervised OOD detection scenario where there are no labeled OOD samples except for labeled in-domain data. In this paper, we propose a simple but strong generative distance-based classifier to detect OOD samples. We estimate the class-conditional distribution on feature spaces of DNNs via Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA) to avoid over-confidence problems. And we use two distance functions, Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances, to measure the confidence score of whether a test sample belongs to OOD. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines.

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Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Adversarial Attack
Keqing He | Jinchao Zhang | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu | Cheng Niu | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Zero-shot slot filling has widely arisen to cope with data scarcity in target domains. However, previous approaches often ignore constraints between slot value representation and related slot description representation in the latent space and lack enough model robustness. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning with Adversarial Attack (CZSL-Adv) method for the cross-domain slot filling. The contrastive loss aims to map slot value contextual representations to the corresponding slot description representations. And we introduce an adversarial attack training strategy to improve model robustness. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both zero-shot and few-shot settings.

2018

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Guiding Generation for Abstractive Text Summarization Based on Key Information Guide Network
Chenliang Li | Weiran Xu | Si Li | Sheng Gao
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Neural network models, based on the attentional encoder-decoder model, have good capability in abstractive text summarization. However, these models are hard to be controlled in the process of generation, which leads to a lack of key information. We propose a guiding generation model that combines the extractive method and the abstractive method. Firstly, we obtain keywords from the text by a extractive model. Then, we introduce a Key Information Guide Network (KIGN), which encodes the keywords to the key information representation, to guide the process of generation. In addition, we use a prediction-guide mechanism, which can obtain the long-term value for future decoding, to further guide the summary generation. We evaluate our model on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset. The experimental results show that our model leads to significant improvements.

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DSGAN: Generative Adversarial Training for Distant Supervision Relation Extraction
Pengda Qin | Weiran Xu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.

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Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Pengda Qin | Weiran Xu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Distant supervision has become the standard method for relation extraction. However, even though it is an efficient method, it does not come at no cost—The resulted distantly-supervised training samples are often very noisy. To combat the noise, most of the recent state-of-the-art approaches focus on selecting one-best sentence or calculating soft attention weights over the set of the sentences of one specific entity pair. However, these methods are suboptimal, and the false positive problem is still a key stumbling bottleneck for the performance. We argue that those incorrectly-labeled candidate sentences must be treated with a hard decision, rather than being dealt with soft attention weights. To do this, our paper describes a radical solution—We explore a deep reinforcement learning strategy to generate the false-positive indicator, where we automatically recognize false positives for each relation type without any supervised information. Unlike the removal operation in the previous studies, we redistribute them into the negative examples. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision comparing to state-of-the-art systems.

2017

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Combining Word-Level and Character-Level Representations for Relation Classification of Informal Text
Dongyun Liang | Weiran Xu | Yinge Zhao
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

Word representation models have achieved great success in natural language processing tasks, such as relation classification. However, it does not always work on informal text, and the morphemes of some misspelling words may carry important short-distance semantic information. We propose a hybrid model, combining the merits of word-level and character-level representations to learn better representations on informal text. Experiments on two dataset of relation classification, SemEval-2010 Task8 and a large-scale one we compile from informal text, show that our model achieves a competitive result in the former and state-of-the-art with the other.

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Neural Regularized Domain Adaptation for Chinese Word Segmentation
Zuyi Bao | Si Li | Weiran Xu | Sheng Gao
Proceedings of the 9th SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

For Chinese word segmentation, the large-scale annotated corpora mainly focus on newswire and only a handful of annotated data is available in other domains such as patents and literature. Considering the limited amount of annotated target domain data, it is a challenge for segmenters to learn domain-specific information while avoid getting over-fitted at the same time. In this paper, we propose a neural regularized domain adaptation method for Chinese word segmentation. The teacher networks trained in source domain are employed to regularize the training process of the student network by preserving the general knowledge. In the experiments, our neural regularized domain adaptation method achieves a better performance comparing to previous methods.

2016

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Bitext Name Tagging for Cross-lingual Entity Annotation Projection
Dongxu Zhang | Boliang Zhang | Xiaoman Pan | Xiaocheng Feng | Heng Ji | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Annotation projection is a practical method to deal with the low resource problem in incident languages (IL) processing. Previous methods on annotation projection mainly relied on word alignment results without any training process, which led to noise propagation caused by word alignment errors. In this paper, we focus on the named entity recognition (NER) task and propose a weakly-supervised framework to project entity annotations from English to IL through bitexts. Instead of directly relying on word alignment results, this framework combines advantages of rule-based methods and deep learning methods by implementing two steps: First, generates a high-confidence entity annotation set on IL side with strict searching methods; Second, uses this high-confidence set to weakly supervise the model training. The model is finally used to accomplish the projecting process. Experimental results on two low-resource ILs show that the proposed method can generate better annotations projected from English-IL parallel corpora. The performance of IL name tagger can also be improved significantly by training on the newly projected IL annotation set.

2010

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PRIS at Chinese Language Processing
Jiayue Zhang | Yichao Cai | Si Li | Weiran Xu | Jun Guo
CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing

2006

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POC-NLW Template for Chinese Word Segmentation
Bo Chen | Weiran Xu | Tao Peng | Jun Guo
Proceedings of the Fifth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing