Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable achievements across various language tasks. To enhance the performance of LLMs in scientific literature services, we developed the scientific literature LLM (SciLit-LLM) through pre-training and supervised fine-tuning on scientific literature, building upon the iFLYTEK Spark LLM. Furthermore, we present a knowledge service system Spark Research Assistant (SparkRA) based on our SciLit-LLM. SparkRA is accessible online and provides three primary functions: literature investigation, paper reading, and academic writing. As of July 30, 2024, SparkRA has garnered over 50,000 registered users, with a total usage count exceeding 1.3 million.

Addressing the issues of who saying what to whom in multi-party conversations (MPCs) has recently attracted a lot of research attention. However, existing methods on MPC understanding typically embed interlocutors and utterances into sequential information flows, or utilize only the superficial of inherent graph structures in MPCs. To this end, we present a plug-and-play and lightweight method named graph-induced fine-tuning (GIFT) which can adapt various Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) for universal MPC understanding. In detail, the full and equivalent connections among utterances in regular Transformer ignore the sparse but distinctive dependency of an utterance on another in MPCs. To distinguish different relationships between utterances, four types of edges are designed to integrate graph-induced signals into attention mechanisms to refine PLMs originally designed for processing sequential texts. We evaluate GIFT by implementing it into three PLMs, and test the performance on three downstream tasks including addressee recognition, speaker identification and response selection. Experimental results show that GIFT can significantly improve the performance of three PLMs on three downstream tasks and two benchmarks with only 4 additional parameters per encoding layer, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on MPC understanding.

With the rise of the metaverse, immersive multimodal conversation has attracted more and more researchers’ attention. Multimodal contexts will become more important for human-computer interaction in the metaverse, especially in shopping domain. Unlike traditional conversation tasks, immersive multimodal conversation has challenges such as multimodal ambiguous candidate identification and multimodal coreference resolution, which makes it more difficult to dialog state tracking and response generation, as described in SIMMC 2.1 challenge, a part of DSTC11. In particular, as the number of objects in the scene increases, the difficulty will increase dramatically. We proposed a prompt-based multi-task learning Encoder-Decoder, in which different subtasks use different prompts to make the model tend to focus on the current subtask. We achieve the winner in ambiguous candidates indentification and runner-up in multimodal coreference resolution (MM-Coref), multimodal dialog state tracking (MM-DST) and assistant response generation. Our code and model are made publicly available at https://github.com/scutcyr/dstc11-simmc2.1-scut-bds-lab.

Intent recognition is critical for task-oriented dialogue systems. However, for emerging domains and new services, it is difficult to accurately identify the key intent of a conversation due to time-consuming data annotation and comparatively poor model transferability. Therefore, the automatic induction of dialogue intention is very important for intelligent dialogue systems. This paper presents our solution to Track 2 of Intent Induction from Conversations for Task-Oriented Dialogue at the Eleventh Dialogue System Technology Challenge (DSTC11). The essence of intention clustering lies in distinguishing the representation of different dialogue utterances. The key to automatic intention induction is that, for any given set of new data, the sentence representation obtained by the model can be well distinguished from different labels. Therefore, we propose a multi-stage coarse-to-fine contrastive learning model training scheme including unsupervised contrastive learning pre-training, supervised contrastive learning pre-training, and fine-tuning with joint contrastive learning and clustering to obtain a better dialogue utterance representation model for the clustering task. In the released DSTC11 Track 2 evaluation results, our proposed system ranked first on both of the two subtasks of this Track.

The Chinese text correction (CTC) focuses on detecting and correcting Chinese spelling errors and grammatical errors. Most existing datasets of Chinese spelling check (CSC) and Chinese grammatical error correction (GEC) are focused on a single sentence written by Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) learners. We find that errors caused by native speakers differ significantly from those produced by non-native speakers. These differences make it inappropriate to use the existing test sets directly to evaluate text correction systems for native speakers. Some errors also require the cross-sentence information to be identified and corrected. In this paper, we propose a cross-sentence Chinese text correction dataset for native speakers. Concretely, we manually annotated 1,500 texts written by native speakers. The dataset consists of 30,811 sentences and more than 1,000,000 Chinese characters. It contains four types of errors: spelling errors, redundant words, missing words, and word ordering errors. We also test some state-of-the-art models on the dataset. The experimental results show that even the model with the best performance is 20 points lower than humans, which indicates that there is still much room for improvement. We hope that the new dataset can fill the gap in cross-sentence text correction for native Chinese speakers.

Adversarial training (AT) as a regularization method has proved its effectiveness on various tasks. Though there are successful applications of AT on some NLP tasks, the distinguishing characteristics of NLP tasks have not been exploited. In this paper, we aim to apply AT on machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. Furthermore, we adapt AT for MRC tasks by proposing a novel adversarial training method called PQAT that perturbs the embedding matrix instead of word vectors. To differentiate the roles of passages and questions, PQAT uses additional virtual P/Q-embedding matrices to gather the global perturbations of words from passages and questions separately. We test the method on a wide range of MRC tasks, including span-based extractive RC and multiple-choice RC. The results show that adversarial training is effective universally, and PQAT further improves the performance.

Most pre-trained language models (PLMs) construct word representations at subword level with Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or its variations, by which OOV (out-of-vocab) words are almost avoidable. However, those methods split a word into subword units and make the representation incomplete and fragile. In this paper, we propose a character-aware pre-trained language model named CharBERT improving on the previous methods (such as BERT, RoBERTa) to tackle these problems. We first construct the contextual word embedding for each token from the sequential character representations, then fuse the representations of characters and the subword representations by a novel heterogeneous interaction module. We also propose a new pre-training task named NLM (Noisy LM) for unsupervised character representation learning. We evaluate our method on question answering, sequence labeling, and text classification tasks, both on the original datasets and adversarial misspelling test sets. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the performance and robustness of PLMs simultaneously.

Owing to the continuous efforts by the Chinese NLP community, more and more Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets become available. To add diversity in this area, in this paper, we propose a new task called Sentence Cloze-style Machine Reading Comprehension (SC-MRC). The proposed task aims to fill the right candidate sentence into the passage that has several blanks. We built a Chinese dataset called CMRC 2019 to evaluate the difficulty of the SC-MRC task. Moreover, to add more difficulties, we also made fake candidates that are similar to the correct ones, which requires the machine to judge their correctness in the context. The proposed dataset contains over 100K blanks (questions) within over 10K passages, which was originated from Chinese narrative stories. To evaluate the dataset, we implement several baseline systems based on the pre-trained models, and the results show that the state-of-the-art model still underperforms human performance by a large margin. We release the dataset and baseline system to further facilitate our community. Resources available through https://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2019

Human conversations contain many types of information, e.g., knowledge, common sense, and language habits. In this paper, we propose a conversational word embedding method named PR-Embedding, which utilizes the conversation pairs <post, reply> to learn word embedding. Different from previous works, PR-Embedding uses the vectors from two different semantic spaces to represent the words in post and reply. To catch the information among the pair, we first introduce the word alignment model from statistical machine translation to generate the cross-sentence window, then train the embedding on word-level and sentence-level. We evaluate the method on single-turn and multi-turn response selection tasks for retrieval-based dialog systems. The experiment results show that PR-Embedding can improve the quality of the selected response.

In this paper, we introduce TextBrewer, an open-source knowledge distillation toolkit designed for natural language processing. It works with different neural network models and supports various kinds of supervised learning tasks, such as text classification, reading comprehension, sequence labeling. TextBrewer provides a simple and uniform workflow that enables quick setting up of distillation experiments with highly flexible configurations. It offers a set of predefined distillation methods and can be extended with custom code. As a case study, we use TextBrewer to distill BERT on several typical NLP tasks. With simple configurations, we achieve results that are comparable with or even higher than the public distilled BERT models with similar numbers of parameters.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks, and consecutive variants have been proposed to further improve the performance of the pre-trained language models. In this paper, we target on revisiting Chinese pre-trained language models to examine their effectiveness in a non-English language and release the Chinese pre-trained language model series to the community. We also propose a simple but effective model called MacBERT, which improves upon RoBERTa in several ways, especially the masking strategy that adopts MLM as correction (Mac). We carried out extensive experiments on eight Chinese NLP tasks to revisit the existing pre-trained language models as well as the proposed MacBERT. Experimental results show that MacBERT could achieve state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks, and we also ablate details with several findings that may help future research. https://github.com/ymcui/MacBERT

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces our system at NLPTEA-2020 Task: Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED). CGED aims to diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are missing words (M), redundant words (R), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). Our system is built on the model of multi-layer bidirectional transformer encoder and ResNet is integrated into the encoder to improve the performance. We also explore two ensemble strategies including weighted averaging and stepwise ensemble selection from libraries of models to improve the performance of single model. In official evaluation, our system obtains the highest F1 scores at identification level and position level. We also recommend error corrections for specific error types and achieve the second highest F1 score at correction level.

Recently, attempting to model texts as graph structure and introducing graph neural networks to deal with it has become a trend in many NLP research areas. In this paper, we investigate whether the graph structure is necessary for textual multi-hop reasoning. Our analysis is centered on HotpotQA. We construct a strong baseline model to establish that, with the proper use of pre-trained models, graph structure may not be necessary for textual multi-hop reasoning. We point out that both graph structure and adjacency matrix are task-related prior knowledge, and graph-attention can be considered as a special case of self-attention. Experiments demonstrate that graph-attention or the entire graph structure can be replaced by self-attention or Transformers.

In this paper, we propose an efficient Knowledge Constraint Fine-grained Entity Typing Annotation Tool, which further improves the entity typing process through entity linking together with some practical functions.

We consider the importance of different utterances in the context for selecting the response usually depends on the current query. In this paper, we propose the model TripleNet to fully model the task with the triple <context, query, response> instead of <context, response > in previous works. The heart of TripleNet is a novel attention mechanism named triple attention to model the relationships within the triple at four levels. The new mechanism updates the representation of each element based on the attention with the other two concurrently and symmetrically. We match the triple <C, Q, R> centered on the response from char to context level for prediction. Experimental results on two large-scale multi-turn response selection datasets show that the proposed model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Recently, distant supervision has gained great success on Fine-grained Entity Typing (FET). Despite its efficiency in reducing manual labeling efforts, it also brings the challenge of dealing with false entity type labels, as distant supervision assigns labels in a context-agnostic manner. Existing works alleviated this issue with partial-label loss, but usually suffer from confirmation bias, which means the classifier fit a pseudo data distribution given by itself. In this work, we propose to regularize distantly supervised models with Compact Latent Space Clustering (CLSC) to bypass this problem and effectively utilize noisy data yet. Our proposed method first dynamically constructs a similarity graph of different entity mentions; infer the labels of noisy instances via label propagation. Based on the inferred labels, mention embeddings are updated accordingly to encourage entity mentions with close semantics to form a compact cluster in the embedding space, thus leading to better classification performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that our CLSC model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art distantly supervised entity typing systems by a significant margin.

Despite of the recent success of collective entity linking (EL) methods, these “global” inference methods may yield sub-optimal results when the “all-mention coherence” assumption breaks, and often suffer from high computational cost at the inference stage, due to the complex search space. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution, called Dynamic Context Augmentation (DCA), for collective EL, which requires only one pass through the mentions in a document. DCA sequentially accumulates context information to make efficient, collective inference, and can cope with different local EL models as a plug-and-enhance module. We explore both supervised and reinforcement learning strategies for learning the DCA model. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our model with different learning settings, base models, decision orders and attention mechanisms.

Though the community has made great progress on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task, most of the previous works are solving English-based MRC problems, and there are few efforts on other languages mainly due to the lack of large-scale training data. In this paper, we propose Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) task for the languages other than English. Firstly, we present several back-translation approaches for CLMRC task which is straightforward to adopt. However, to exactly align the answer into source language is difficult and could introduce additional noise. In this context, we propose a novel model called Dual BERT, which takes advantage of the large-scale training data provided by rich-resource language (such as English) and learn the semantic relations between the passage and question in bilingual context, and then utilize the learned knowledge to improve reading comprehension performance of low-resource language. We conduct experiments on two Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets CMRC 2018 and DRCD. The results show consistent and significant improvements over various state-of-the-art systems by a large margin, which demonstrate the potentials in CLMRC task. Resources available: https://github.com/ymcui/Cross-Lingual-MRC

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. In this paper, we introduce a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities in this area. The dataset is composed by near 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. We also annotated a challenge set which contains the questions that need comprehensive understanding and multi-sentence inference throughout the context. We present several baseline systems as well as anonymous submissions for demonstrating the difficulties in this dataset. With the release of the dataset, we hosted the Second Evaluation Workshop on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC 2018). We hope the release of the dataset could further accelerate the Chinese machine reading comprehension research. Resources are available: https://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2018

Legal Tech is developed to help people with legal services and solve legal problems via machines. To achieve this, one of the key requirements for machines is to utilize legal knowledge and comprehend legal context. This can be fulfilled by natural language processing (NLP) techniques, for instance, text representation, text categorization, question answering (QA) and natural language inference, etc. To this end, we introduce a freely available Chinese Legal Tech system (IFlyLegal) that benefits from multiple NLP tasks. It is an integrated system that performs legal consulting, multi-way law searching, and legal document analysis by exploiting techniques such as deep contextual representations and various attention mechanisms. To our knowledge, IFlyLegal is the first Chinese legal system that employs up-to-date NLP techniques and caters for needs of different user groups, such as lawyers, judges, procurators, and clients. Since Jan, 2019, we have gathered 2,349 users and 28,238 page views (till June, 23, 2019).

This paper describes our system at NLPTEA-2018 Task #1: Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis. Grammatical Error Diagnosis is one of the most challenging NLP tasks, which is to locate grammar errors and tell error types. Our system is built on the model of bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with a conditional random field layer (BiLSTM-CRF) but integrates with several new features. First, richer features are considered in the BiLSTM-CRF model; second, a probabilistic ensemble approach is adopted; third, Template Matcher are used during a post-processing to bring in human knowledge. In official evaluation, our system obtains the highest F1 scores at identifying error types and locating error positions, the second highest F1 score at sentence level error detection. We also recommend error corrections for specific error types and achieve the best F1 performance among all participants.

Simile is a special type of metaphor, where comparators such as like and as are used to compare two objects. Simile recognition is to recognize simile sentences and extract simile components, i.e., the tenor and the vehicle. This paper presents a study of simile recognition in Chinese. We construct an annotated corpus for this research, which consists of 11.3k sentences that contain a comparator. We propose a neural network framework for jointly optimizing three tasks: simile sentence classification, simile component extraction and language modeling. The experimental results show that the neural network based approaches can outperform all rule-based and feature-based baselines. Both simile sentence classification and simile component extraction can benefit from multitask learning. The former can be solved very well, while the latter is more difficult.

Most existing approaches for zero pronoun resolution are heavily relying on annotated data, which is often released by shared task organizers. Therefore, the lack of annotated data becomes a major obstacle in the progress of zero pronoun resolution task. Also, it is expensive to spend manpower on labeling the data for better performance. To alleviate the problem above, in this paper, we propose a simple but novel approach to automatically generate large-scale pseudo training data for zero pronoun resolution. Furthermore, we successfully transfer the cloze-style reading comprehension neural network model into zero pronoun resolution task and propose a two-step training mechanism to overcome the gap between the pseudo training data and the real one. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art systems with an absolute improvements of 3.1% F-score on OntoNotes 5.0 data.

Discourse modes play an important role in writing composition and evaluation. This paper presents a study on the manual and automatic identification of narration,exposition, description, argument and emotion expressing sentences in narrative essays. We annotate a corpus to study the characteristics of discourse modes and describe a neural sequence labeling model for identification. Evaluation results show that discourse modes can be identified automatically with an average F1-score of 0.7. We further demonstrate that discourse modes can be used as features that improve automatic essay scoring (AES). The impacts of discourse modes for AES are also discussed.

Cloze-style reading comprehension is a representative problem in mining relationship between document and query. In this paper, we present a simple but novel model called attention-over-attention reader for better solving cloze-style reading comprehension task. The proposed model aims to place another attention mechanism over the document-level attention and induces “attended attention” for final answer predictions. One advantage of our model is that it is simpler than related works while giving excellent performance. In addition to the primary model, we also propose an N-best re-ranking strategy to double check the validity of the candidates and further improve the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed methods significantly outperform various state-of-the-art systems by a large margin in public datasets, such as CNN and Children’s Book Test.

Reading comprehension has embraced a booming in recent NLP research. Several institutes have released the Cloze-style reading comprehension data, and these have greatly accelerated the research of machine comprehension. In this work, we firstly present Chinese reading comprehension datasets, which consist of People Daily news dataset and Children’s Fairy Tale (CFT) dataset. Also, we propose a consensus attention-based neural network architecture to tackle the Cloze-style reading comprehension problem, which aims to induce a consensus attention over every words in the query. Experimental results show that the proposed neural network significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in several public datasets. Furthermore, we setup a baseline for Chinese reading comprehension task, and hopefully this would speed up the process for future research.