Börje Karlsson


2023

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TACR: A Table Alignment-based Cell Selection Method for HybridQA
Jian Wu | Yicheng Xu | Yan Gao | Jian-Guang Lou | Börje Karlsson | Manabu Okumura
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Hybrid Question-Answering (HQA), which targets reasoning over tables and passages linked from table cells, has witnessed significant research in recent years. A common challenge in HQA and other passage-table QA datasets is that it is generally unrealistic to iterate over all table rows, columns, and linked passages to retrieve evidence. Such a challenge made it difficult for previous studies to show their reasoning ability in retrieving answers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Table-alignment-based Cell-selection and Reasoning model (TACR) for hybrid text and table QA, evaluated on the HybridQA and WikiTableQuestions datasets. In evidence retrieval, we design a table-question-alignment enhanced cell-selection method to retrieve fine-grained evidence. In answer reasoning, we incorporate a QA module that treats the row containing selected cells as context. Experimental results over the HybridQA and WikiTableQuestions (WTQ) datasets show that TACR achieves state-of-the-art results on cell selection and outperforms fine-grained evidence retrieval baselines on HybridQA, while achieving competitive performance on WTQ. We also conducted a detailed analysis to demonstrate that being able to align questions to tables in the cell-selection stage can result in important gains from experiments of over 90% table row and column selection accuracy, meanwhile also improving output explainability.

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CoLaDa: A Collaborative Label Denoising Framework for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition
Tingting Ma | Qianhui Wu | Huiqiang Jiang | Börje Karlsson | Tiejun Zhao | Chin-Yew Lin
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) aims to train an NER system that generalizes well to a target language by leveraging labeled data in a given source language. Previous work alleviates the data scarcity problem by translating source-language labeled data or performing knowledge distillation on target-language unlabeled data. However, these methods may suffer from label noise due to the automatic labeling process. In this paper, we propose CoLaDa, a Collaborative Label Denoising Framework, to address this problem. Specifically, we first explore a model-collaboration-based denoising scheme that enables models trained on different data sources to collaboratively denoise pseudo labels used by each other. We then present an instance-collaboration-based strategy that considers the label consistency of each token’s neighborhood in the representation space for denoising. Experiments on different benchmark datasets show that the proposed CoLaDa achieves superior results compared to previous methods, especially when generalizing to distant languages.

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Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text
Qianhui Wu | Huiqiang Jiang | Haonan Yin | Börje Karlsson | Chin-Yew Lin
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Self-supervised representation learning has proved to be a valuable component for out-of-distribution (OoD) detection with only the texts of in-distribution (ID) examples. These approaches either train a language model from scratch or fine-tune a pre-trained language model using ID examples, and then take the perplexity output by the language model as OoD scores. In this paper, we analyze the complementary characteristic of both methods and propose a multi-level knowledge distillation approach that integrates their strengths while mitigating their limitations. Specifically, we use a fine-tuned model as the teacher to teach a randomly initialized student model on the ID examples. Besides the prediction layer distillation, we present a similarity-based intermediate layer distillation method to thoroughly explore the representation space of the teacher model. In this way, the learned student can better represent the ID data manifold while gaining a stronger ability to map OoD examples outside the ID data manifold with the regularization inherited from pre-training. Besides, the student model sees only ID examples during parameter learning, further promoting more distinguishable features for OoD detection. We conduct extensive experiments over multiple benchmark datasets, i.e., CLINC150, SST, ROSTD, 20 NewsGroups, and AG News; showing that the proposed method yields new state-of-the-art performance. We also explore its application as an AIGC detector to distinguish answers generated by ChatGPT and human experts. It is observed that our model exceeds human evaluators in the pair-expert task on the Human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus.

2022

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TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Base
Yiheng Shu | Zhiwei Yu | Yuhan Li | Börje Karlsson | Tingting Ma | Yuzhong Qu | Chin-Yew Lin
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple scenarios. However, KBQA remains challenging, especially regarding coverage and generalization settings. This is due to two main factors: i) understanding the semantics of both questions and relevant knowledge from the KB; ii) generating executable logical forms with both semantic and syntactic correctness. In this paper, we present a new KBQA model, TIARA, which addresses those issues by applying multi-grained retrieval to help the PLM focus on the most relevant KB context, viz., entities, exemplary logical forms, and schema items. Moreover, constrained decoding is used to control the output space and reduce generation errors. Experiments over important benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. TIARA outperforms previous SOTA, including those using PLMs or oracle entity annotations, by at least 4.1 and 1.1 F1 points on GrailQA and WebQuestionsSP, respectively. Specifically on GrailQA, TIARA outperforms previous models in all categories, with an improvement of 4.7 F1 points in zero-shot generalization.

2021

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AdvPicker: Effectively Leveraging Unlabeled Data via Adversarial Discriminator for Cross-Lingual NER
Weile Chen | Huiqiang Jiang | Qianhui Wu | Börje Karlsson | Yi Guan
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)

Neural methods have been shown to achieve high performance in Named Entity Recognition (NER), but rely on costly high-quality labeled data for training, which is not always available across languages. While previous works have shown that unlabeled data in a target language can be used to improve cross-lingual model performance, we propose a novel adversarial approach (AdvPicker) to better leverage such data and further improve results. We design an adversarial learning framework in which an encoder learns entity domain knowledge from labeled source-language data and better shared features are captured via adversarial training - where a discriminator selects less language-dependent target-language data via similarity to the source language. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets well demonstrate that the proposed method benefits strongly from this data selection process and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods; without requiring any additional external resources (e.g., gazetteers or via machine translation).

2020

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Single-/Multi-Source Cross-Lingual NER via Teacher-Student Learning on Unlabeled Data in Target Language
Qianhui Wu | Zijia Lin | Börje Karlsson | Jian-Guang Lou | Biqing Huang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

To better tackle the named entity recognition (NER) problem on languages with little/no labeled data, cross-lingual NER must effectively leverage knowledge learned from source languages with rich labeled data. Previous works on cross-lingual NER are mostly based on label projection with pairwise texts or direct model transfer. However, such methods either are not applicable if the labeled data in the source languages is unavailable, or do not leverage information contained in unlabeled data in the target language. In this paper, we propose a teacher-student learning method to address such limitations, where NER models in the source languages are used as teachers to train a student model on unlabeled data in the target language. The proposed method works for both single-source and multi-source cross-lingual NER. For the latter, we further propose a similarity measuring method to better weight the supervision from different teacher models. Extensive experiments for 3 target languages on benchmark datasets well demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for both single-source and multi-source cross-lingual NER.