Inexhaustible web content carries abundant perceptible information beyond text. Unfortunately, most prior efforts in pre-trained Language Models (LMs) ignore such cyber-richness, while few of them only employ plain HTMLs, and crucial information in the rendered web, such as visual, layout, and style, are excluded. Intuitively, those perceptible web information can provide essential intelligence to facilitate content understanding tasks. This study presents an innovative Gestalt Enhanced Markup (GEM) Language Model inspired by Gestalt psychological theory for hosting heterogeneous visual information from the render tree into the language model without requiring additional visual input. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks, i.e., web question answering and web information extraction, validate GEM superiority.

Representation learning forms an essential building block in the development of natural language processing architectures. To date, mainstream approaches focus on learning textual information at the sentence- or document-level, unfortunately, overlooking the inter-document connections. This omission decreases the potency of downstream applications, particularly in multi-document settings. To address this issue, embeddings equipped with latent semantic and rich relatedness information are needed. In this paper, we propose SMRC², which extends representation learning to the multi-document level. Our model jointly learns latent semantic information from content and rich relatedness information from topological networks. Unlike previous studies, our work takes multi-document as input and integrates both semantic and relatedness information using a shared space via language model and graph structure. Our extensive experiments confirm the superiority and effectiveness of our approach. To encourage further research in scientific multi-literature representation learning, we will release our code and a new dataset from the biomedical domain.

Commercial news provide rich semantics and timely information for automated financial risk detection. However, unaffordable large-scale annotation as well as training data sparseness barrier the full exploitation of commercial news in risk detection. To address this problem, we propose a semi-supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network, STINMatch, along with a news-enterprise knowledge graph (NEKG) to endorse the risk detection enhancement. The proposed model incorporates a label correlation matrix and interactive consistency regularization techniques into the iterative joint learning framework of text and graph modules. The carefully designed framework takes full advantage of the labeled and unlabeled data as well as their interrelations, enabling deep label diffusion coordination between article-level semantics and label correlations following the topological structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and generalization ability of STINMatch.

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP) – a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.

Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient method, which learns soft prompts and conditions frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Though effective, prompt tuning under few-shot settings on the one hand heavily relies on a good initialization of soft prompts. On the other hand, it can easily overfit to few-shot training samples, thereby undermining generalizability. Existing works leverage pre-training or supervised meta-learning to initialize soft prompts but they fail to data-efficiently generalize to unseen downstream tasks. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a novel Self-sUpervised meta-Prompt learning framework with MEta-gradient Regularization for few-shot generalization (SUPMER). SUPMER leverages self-supervised meta-learning with a diverse set of well-designed meta-tasks to learn a universal prompt initialization for efficient adaptation using only unlabeled data. Additionally, it jointly meta-learns a gradient regularization function to transform raw gradients into a domain-generalizable direction, thus alleviating the problem of overfitting. Extensive experiments show that SUPMER achieves better performance for different few-shot downstream tasks, and also exhibits a stronger domain generalization ability. The code for SUPMER will be available at https://github.com/beepkh/SUPMER.

Visual Relation Extraction (VRE) is a powerful means of discovering relationships between entities within visually-rich documents. Existing methods often focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. The absence of global structure information may make the model struggle to learn long-range relations and easily predict conflicted results. To alleviate such limitations, we propose a GlObal Structure knowledge-guided relation Extraction (GOSE) framework. GOSE initiates by generating preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from a scanned image of the document. Subsequently, global structural knowledge is captured from the preceding iterative predictions, which are then incorporated into the representations of the entities. This “generate-capture-incorporate” cycle is repeated multiple times, allowing entity representations and global structure knowledge to be mutually reinforced. Extensive experiments validate that GOSE not only outperforms existing methods in the standard fine-tuning setting but also reveals superior cross-lingual learning capabilities; indeed, even yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting.

In the field of dialogue summarization, due to the lack of training data, it is often difficult for supervised summary generation methods to learn vital information from dialogue context with limited data. Several attempts on unsupervised summarization for text by leveraging semantic information solely or auto-encoder strategy (i.e., sentence compression), it however cannot be adapted to the dialogue scene due to the limited words in utterances and huge gap between the dialogue and its summary. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised strategy to address this challenge, which roots from the hypothetical foundation that a superior summary approximates a replacement of the original dialogue, and they are roughly equivalent for auxiliary (self-supervised) tasks, e.g., dialogue generation. The proposed strategy RepSum is applied to generate both extractive and abstractive summary with the guidance of the followed nˆth utterance generation and classification tasks. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Chatbot is increasingly thriving in different domains, however, because of unexpected discourse complexity and training data sparseness, its potential distrust hatches vital apprehension. Recently, Machine-Human Chatting Handoff (MHCH), predicting chatbot failure and enabling human-algorithm collaboration to enhance chatbot quality, has attracted increasing attention from industry and academia. In this study, we propose a novel model, Role-Selected Sharing Network (RSSN), which integrates both dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. Unlike prior efforts in dialog mining, by utilizing local user satisfaction as a bridge, global satisfaction detector and handoff predictor can effectively exchange critical information. Specifically, we decouple the relation and interaction between the two tasks by the role information after the shared encoder. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Court’s view generation is a novel but essential task for legal AI, aiming at improving the interpretability of judgment prediction results and enabling automatic legal document generation. While prior text-to-text natural language generation (NLG) approaches can be used to address this problem, neglecting the confounding bias from the data generation mechanism can limit the model performance, and the bias may pollute the learning outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentional and Counterfactual based Natural Language Generation (AC-NLG) method, consisting of an attentional encoder and a pair of innovative counterfactual decoders. The attentional encoder leverages the plaintiff’s claim and fact description as input to learn a claim-aware encoder from which the claim-related information in fact description can be emphasized. The counterfactual decoders are employed to eliminate the confounding bias in data and generate judgment-discriminative court’s views (both supportive and non-supportive views) by incorporating with a synergistic judgment predictive model. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method under both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.

Clinical trials provide essential guidance for practicing Evidence-Based Medicine, though often accompanying with unendurable costs and risks. To optimize the design of clinical trials, we introduce a novel Clinical Trial Result Prediction (CTRP) task. In the CTRP framework, a model takes a PICO-formatted clinical trial proposal with its background as input and predicts the result, i.e. how the Intervention group compares with the Comparison group in terms of the measured Outcome in the studied Population. While structured clinical evidence is prohibitively expensive for manual collection, we exploit large-scale unstructured sentences from medical literature that implicitly contain PICOs and results as evidence. Specifically, we pre-train a model to predict the disentangled results from such implicit evidence and fine-tune the model with limited data on the downstream datasets. Experiments on the benchmark Evidence Integration dataset show that the proposed model outperforms the baselines by large margins, e.g., with a 10.7% relative gain over BioBERT in macro-F1. Moreover, the performance improvement is also validated on another dataset composed of clinical trials related to COVID-19.

In the past few years, audiences from different fields witness the achievements of sequence-to-sequence models (e.g., LSTM+attention, Pointer Generator Networks and Transformer) to enhance dialogue content generation. While content fluency and accuracy often serve as the major indicators for model training, dialogue logics, carrying critical information for some particular domains, are often ignored. Take customer service and court debate dialogue as examples, compatible logics can be observed across different dialogue instances, and this information can provide vital evidence for utterance generation. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture - Cross Copy Networks (CCN) to explore the current dialog context and similar dialogue instances’ logical structure simultaneously. Experiments with two tasks, court debate and customer service content generation, proved that the proposed algorithm is superior to existing state-of-art content generation models.

We propose a Semi-supervIsed GeNerative Active Learning (SIGNAL) model to address the imbalance, efficiency, and text camouflage problems of Chinese text spam detection task. A “self-diversity” criterion is proposed for measuring the “worthiness” of a candidate for annotation. A semi-supervised variational autoencoder with masked attention learning approach and a character variation graph-enhanced augmentation procedure are proposed for data augmentation. The preliminary experiment demonstrates the proposed SIGNAL model is not only sensitive to spam sample selection, but also can improve the performance of a series of conventional active learning models for Chinese spam detection task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate active learning and semi-supervised generative learning for text spam detection.

As an important research topic, customer service dialogue generation tends to generate generic seller responses by leveraging current dialogue information. In this study, we propose a novel and extensible dialogue generation method by leveraging sellers’ historical dialogue information, which can be both accessible and informative. By utilizing innovative historical dialogue representation learning and historical dialogue selection mechanism, the proposed model is capable of detecting most related responses from sellers’ historical dialogues, which can further enhance the current dialogue generation quality. Unlike prior dialogue generation efforts, we treat each seller’s historical dialogues as a list of Customer-Seller utterance pairs and allow the model to measure their different importance, and copy words directly from most relevant pairs. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach can generate high-quality responses that cater to specific sellers’ characteristics and exhibit consistent superiority over baselines on a real-world multi-turn customer service dialogue dataset.

Customers ask questions and customer service staffs answer their questions, which is the basic service model via multi-turn customer service (CS) dialogues on E-commerce platforms. Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis, namely satisfaction polarity classification (e.g., well satisfied, met and unsatisfied) and sentimental utterance identification (e.g., positive, neutral and negative). In this paper, we conduct a pilot study on the task of service satisfaction analysis (SSA) based on multi-turn CS dialogues. We propose an extensible Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (CAMIL) model to predict the sentiments of all the customer utterances and then aggregate those sentiments into service satisfaction polarity. After that, we propose a novel Context Clue Matching Mechanism (CCMM) to enhance the representations of all customer utterances with their matched context clues, i.e., sentiment and reasoning clues. We construct two CS dialogue datasets from a top E-commerce platform. Extensive experimental results are presented and contrasted against a few previous models to demonstrate the efficacy of our model.

The number of personal stories about sexual harassment shared online has increased exponentially in recent years. This is in part inspired by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Safecity is an online forum for people who experienced or witnessed sexual harassment to share their personal experiences. It has collected >10,000 stories so far. Sexual harassment occurred in a variety of situations, and categorization of the stories and extraction of their key elements will provide great help for the related parties to understand and address sexual harassment. In this study, we manually annotated those stories with labels in the dimensions of location, time, and harassers’ characteristics, and marked the key elements related to these dimensions. Furthermore, we applied natural language processing technologies with joint learning schemes to automatically categorize these stories in those dimensions and extract key elements at the same time. We also uncovered significant patterns from the categorized sexual harassment stories. We believe our annotated data set, proposed algorithms, and analysis will help people who have been harassed, authorities, researchers and other related parties in various ways, such as automatically filling reports, enlightening the public in order to prevent future harassment, and enabling more effective, faster action to be taken.

Recently, neural networks have shown promising results on Document-level Aspect Sentiment Classification (DASC). However, these approaches often offer little transparency w.r.t. their inner working mechanisms and lack interpretability. In this paper, to simulating the steps of analyzing aspect sentiment in a document by human beings, we propose a new Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approach to DASC. This approach incorporates clause selection and word selection strategies to tackle the data noise problem in the task of DASC. First, a high-level policy is proposed to select aspect-relevant clauses and discard noisy clauses. Then, a low-level policy is proposed to select sentiment-relevant words and discard noisy words inside the selected clauses. Finally, a sentiment rating predictor is designed to provide reward signals to guide both clause and word selection. Experimental results demonstrate the impressive effectiveness of the proposed approach to DASC over the state-of-the-art baselines.

The task of Chinese text spam detection is very challenging due to both glyph and phonetic variations of Chinese characters. This paper proposes a novel framework to jointly model Chinese variational, semantic, and contextualized representations for Chinese text spam detection task. In particular, a Variation Family-enhanced Graph Embedding (VFGE) algorithm is designed based on a Chinese character variation graph. The VFGE can learn both the graph embeddings of the Chinese characters (local) and the latent variation families (global). Furthermore, an enhanced bidirectional language model, with a combination gate function and an aggregation learning function, is proposed to integrate the graph and text information while capturing the sequential information. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both SMS and review datasets, to show the proposed method outperforms a series of state-of-the-art models for Chinese spam detection.

In the literature, existing studies on aspect sentiment classification (ASC) focus on individual non-interactive reviews. This paper extends the research to interactive reviews and proposes a new research task, namely Aspect Sentiment Classification towards Question-Answering (ASC-QA), for real-world applications. This new task aims to predict sentiment polarities for specific aspects from interactive QA style reviews. In particular, a high-quality annotated corpus is constructed for ASC-QA to facilitate corresponding research. On this basis, a Reinforced Bidirectional Attention Network (RBAN) approach is proposed to address two inherent challenges in ASC-QA, i.e., semantic matching between question and answer, and data noise. Experimental results demonstrate the great advantage of the proposed approach to ASC-QA against several state-of-the-art baselines.

Conventional solutions to automatic related work summarization rely heavily on human-engineered features. In this paper, we develop a neural data-driven summarizer by leveraging the seq2seq paradigm, in which a joint context-driven attention mechanism is proposed to measure the contextual relevance within full texts and a heterogeneous bibliography graph simultaneously. Our motivation is to maintain the topic coherency between a related work section and its target document, where both the textual and graphic contexts play a big role in characterizing the relationship among scientific publications accurately. Experimental results on a large dataset show that our approach achieves a considerable improvement over a typical seq2seq summarizer and five classical summarization baselines.

In an e-commerce environment, user-oriented question-answering (QA) text pair could carry rich sentiment information. In this study, we propose a novel task/method to address QA sentiment analysis. In particular, we create a high-quality annotated corpus with specially-designed annotation guidelines for QA-style sentiment classification. On the basis, we propose a three-stage hierarchical matching network to explore deep sentiment information in a QA text pair. First, we segment both the question and answer text into sentences and construct a number of [Q-sentence, A-sentence] units in each QA text pair. Then, by leveraging a QA bidirectional matching layer, the proposed approach can learn the matching vectors of each [Q-sentence, A-sentence] unit. Finally, we characterize the importance of the generated matching vectors via a self-matching attention layer. Experimental results, comparing with a number of state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrate the impressive effectiveness of the proposed approach for QA-style sentiment classification.

Question-Answer (QA) matching is a fundamental task in the Natural Language Processing community. In this paper, we first build a novel QA matching corpus with informal text which is collected from a product reviewing website. Then, we propose a novel QA matching approach, namely One vs. Many Matching, which aims to address the novel scenario where one question sentence often has an answer with multiple sentences. Furthermore, we improve our matching approach by employing both word-level and sentence-level attentions for solving the noisy problem in the informal text. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to question-answer matching.