Dingkun Long


2023

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Text Representation Distillation via Information Bottleneck Principle
Yanzhao Zhang | Dingkun Long | Zehan Li | Pengjun Xie
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have recently shown great success in text representation field. However, the high computational cost and high-dimensional representation of PLMs pose significant challenges for practical applications. To make models more accessible, an effective method is to distill large models into smaller representation models. In order to relieve the issue of performance degradation after distillation, we propose a novel Knowledge Distillation method called IBKD. This approach is motivated by the Information Bottleneck principle and aims to maximize the mutual information between the final representation of the teacher and student model, while simultaneously reducing the mutual information between the student model’s representation and the input data. This enables the student model to preserve important learned information while avoiding unnecessary information, thus reducing the risk of over-fitting. Empirical studies on two main downstream applications of text representation (Semantic Textual Similarity and Dense Retrieval tasks) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

2022

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Unsupervised Boundary-Aware Language Model Pretraining for Chinese Sequence Labeling
Peijie Jiang | Dingkun Long | Yanzhao Zhang | Pengjun Xie | Meishan Zhang | Min Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Boundary information is critical for various Chinese language processing tasks, such as word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Previous studies usually resorted to the use of a high-quality external lexicon, where lexicon items can offer explicit boundary information. However, to ensure the quality of the lexicon, great human effort is always necessary, which has been generally ignored. In this work, we suggest unsupervised statistical boundary information instead, and propose an architecture to encode the information directly into pre-trained language models, resulting in Boundary-Aware BERT (BABERT). We apply BABERT for feature induction of Chinese sequence labeling tasks. Experimental results on ten benchmarks of Chinese sequence labeling demonstrate that BABERT can provide consistent improvements on all datasets. In addition, our method can complement previous supervised lexicon exploration, where further improvements can be achieved when integrated with external lexicon information.

2021

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A Fine-Grained Domain Adaption Model for Joint Word Segmentation and POS Tagging
Peijie Jiang | Dingkun Long | Yueheng Sun | Meishan Zhang | Guangwei Xu | Pengjun Xie
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Domain adaption for word segmentation and POS tagging is a challenging problem for Chinese lexical processing. Self-training is one promising solution for it, which struggles to construct a set of high-quality pseudo training instances for the target domain. Previous work usually assumes a universal source-to-target adaption to collect such pseudo corpus, ignoring the different gaps from the target sentences to the source domain. In this work, we start from joint word segmentation and POS tagging, presenting a fine-grained domain adaption method to model the gaps accurately. We measure the gaps by one simple and intuitive metric, and adopt it to develop a pseudo target domain corpus based on fine-grained subdomains incrementally. A novel domain-mixed representation learning model is proposed accordingly to encode the multiple subdomains effectively. The whole process is performed progressively for both corpus construction and model training. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show that our method can gain significant improvements over a vary of baselines. Extensive analyses are performed to show the advantages of our final domain adaption model as well.

2020

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Hierarchy-Aware Global Model for Hierarchical Text Classification
Jie Zhou | Chunping Ma | Dingkun Long | Guangwei Xu | Ning Ding | Haoyu Zhang | Pengjun Xie | Gongshen Liu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Hierarchical text classification is an essential yet challenging subtask of multi-label text classification with a taxonomic hierarchy. Existing methods have difficulties in modeling the hierarchical label structure in a global view. Furthermore, they cannot make full use of the mutual interactions between the text feature space and the label space. In this paper, we formulate the hierarchy as a directed graph and introduce hierarchy-aware structure encoders for modeling label dependencies. Based on the hierarchy encoder, we propose a novel end-to-end hierarchy-aware global model (HiAGM) with two variants. A multi-label attention variant (HiAGM-LA) learns hierarchy-aware label embeddings through the hierarchy encoder and conducts inductive fusion of label-aware text features. A text feature propagation model (HiAGM-TP) is proposed as the deductive variant that directly feeds text features into hierarchy encoders. Compared with previous works, both HiAGM-LA and HiAGM-TP achieve significant and consistent improvements on three benchmark datasets.

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Coupling Distant Annotation and Adversarial Training for Cross-Domain Chinese Word Segmentation
Ning Ding | Dingkun Long | Guangwei Xu | Muhua Zhu | Pengjun Xie | Xiaobin Wang | Haitao Zheng
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Fully supervised neural approaches have achieved significant progress in the task of Chinese word segmentation (CWS). Nevertheless, the performance of supervised models always drops gravely if the domain shifts due to the distribution gap across domains and the out of vocabulary (OOV) problem. In order to simultaneously alleviate the issues, this paper intuitively couples distant annotation and adversarial training for cross-domain CWS. 1) We rethink the essence of “Chinese words” and design an automatic distant annotation mechanism, which does not need any supervision or pre-defined dictionaries on the target domain. The method could effectively explore domain-specific words and distantly annotate the raw texts for the target domain. 2) We further develop a sentence-level adversarial training procedure to perform noise reduction and maximum utilization of the source domain information. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets across various domains show the superiority and robustness of our model, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-arts cross-domain CWS methods.