Jeff Pan


2024

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Archer: A Human-Labeled Text-to-SQL Dataset with Arithmetic, Commonsense and Hypothetical Reasoning
Danna Zheng | Mirella Lapata | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present Archer, a challenging bilingual text-to-SQL dataset specific to complex reasoning, including arithmetic, commonsense and hypothetical reasoning. It contains 1,042 English questions and 1,042 Chinese questions, along with 521 unique SQL queries, covering 20 English databases across 20 domains. Notably, this dataset demonstrates a significantly higher level of complexity compared to existing publicly available datasets. Our evaluation shows that Archer challenges the capabilities of current state-of-the-art models, with a high-ranked model on the Spider leaderboard achieving only 6.73% execution accuracy on Archer test set. Thus, Archer presents a significant challenge for future research in this field.

2023

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Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Entity Typing over Knowledge Graphs
Zhiwei Hu | Victor Basulto | Zhiliang Xiang | Ru Li | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge graph entity typing (KGET) aims at inferring plausible types of entities in knowledge graphs. Existing approaches to KGET focus on how to better encode the knowledge provided by the neighbors and types of an entity into its representation. However, they ignore the semantic knowledge provided by the way in which types can be clustered together. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Multi-view Contrastive Learning for knowledge graph Entity Typing MCLET, which effectively encodes the coarse-grained knowledge provided by clusters into entity and type embeddings. MCLET is composed of three modules: i) Multi-view Generation and Encoder module, which encodes structured information from entity-type, entity-cluster and cluster-type views; ii) Cross-view Contrastive Learning module, which encourages different views to collaboratively improve view-specific representations of entities and types; iii) Entity Typing Prediction module, which integrates multi-head attention and a Mixture-of-Experts strategy to infer missing entity types. Extensive experiments show the strong performance of MCLET compared to the state-of-the-art

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FastRAT: Fast and Efficient Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing
Pavlos Vougiouklis | Nikos Papasarantopoulos | Danna Zheng | David Tuckey | Chenxin Diao | Zhili Shen | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Retrieval Augmented Generation with Rich Answer Encoding
Wenyu Huang | Mirella Lapata | Pavlos Vougiouklis | Nikos Papasarantopoulos | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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BUCA: A Binary Classification Approach to Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering
Jie He | Simon U | Victor Gutierrez-Basulto | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Unsupervised commonsense reasoning (UCR) is becoming increasingly popular as the construction of commonsense reasoning datasets is expensive, and they are inevitably limited in their scope. A popular approach to UCR is to fine-tune language models with external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs), but this usually requires a large number of training examples. In this paper, we propose to transform the downstream multiple choice question answering task into a simpler binary classification task by ranking all candidate answers according to their reasonableness. To this end, for training the model, we convert the knowledge graph triples into reasonable and unreasonable texts. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach on various multiple choice question answering benchmarks. Furthermore, compared with existing UCR approaches using KGs, ours is less data hungry.

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Trigger-Argument based Explanation for Event Detection
Yong Guan | Jiaoyan Chen | Freddy Lecue | Jeff Pan | Juanzi Li | Ru Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Event Detection (ED) is a critical task that aims to identify events of certain types in plain text. Neural models have achieved great success on ED, thus coming with a desire for higher interpretability. Existing works mainly exploit words or phrases of the input text to explain models’ inner mechanisms. However, for ED, the event structure, comprising of an event trigger and a set of arguments, are more enlightening clues to explain model behaviors. To this end, we propose a Trigger-Argument based Explanation method (TAE), which can utilize event structure knowledge to uncover a faithful interpretation for the existing ED models at neuron level. Specifically, we design group, sparsity, support mechanisms to construct the event structure from structuralization, compactness, and faithfulness perspectives. We evaluate our model on the large-scale MAVEN and the widely-used ACE 2005 datasets, and observe that TAE is able to reveal the process by which the model predicts. Experimental results also demonstrate that TAE can not only improve the interpretability on standard evaluation metrics, but also effectively facilitate the human understanding.

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Instances and Labels: Hierarchy-aware Joint Supervised Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Multi-Label Text Classification
Simon Chi Lok Yu | Jie He | Victor Basulto | Jeff Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Hierarchical multi-label text classification (HMTC) aims at utilizing a label hierarchy in multi-label classification. Recent approaches to HMTC deal with the problem of imposing an overconstrained premise on the output space by using contrastive learning on generated samples in a semi-supervised manner to bring text and label embeddings closer. However, the generation of samples tends to introduce noise as it ignores the correlation between similar samples in the same batch. One solution to this issue is supervised contrastive learning, but it remains an underexplored topic in HMTC due to its complex structured labels. To overcome this challenge, we propose **HJCL**, a **H**ierarchy-aware **J**oint Supervised **C**ontrastive **L**earning method that bridges the gap between supervised contrastive learning and HMTC. Specifically, we employ both instance-wise and label-wise contrastive learning techniques and carefully construct batches to fulfill the contrastive learning objective. Extensive experiments on four multi-path HMTC datasets demonstrate that HJCLachieves promising results and the effectiveness of Contrastive Learning on HMTC. Code and data are available at https://github.com/simonucl/HJCL.

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Improving Sequential Model Editing with Fact Retrieval
Xiaoqi Han | Ru Li | Hongye Tan | Wang Yuanlong | Qinghua Chai | Jeff Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

The task of sequential model editing is to fix erroneous knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) efficiently, precisely and continuously. Although existing methods can deal with a small number of modifications, these methods experience a performance decline or require additional annotated data, when the number of edits increases. In this paper, we propose a Retrieval Augmented Sequential Model Editing framework (RASE) that leverages factual information to enhance editing generalization and to guide the identification of edits by retrieving related facts from the fact-patch memory we constructed. Our main findings are: (i) State-of-the-art models can hardly correct massive mistakes stably and efficiently; (ii) Even if we scale up to thousands of edits, RASE can significantly enhance editing generalization and maintain consistent performance and efficiency; (iii) RASE can edit large-scale PLMs and increase the performance of different editors. Moreover, it can integrate with ChatGPT and further improve performance. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/sev777/RASE.

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Code-Switching with Word Senses for Pretraining in Neural Machine Translation
Vivek Iyer | Edoardo Barba | Alexandra Birch | Jeff Pan | Roberto Navigli
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Lexical ambiguity is a significant and pervasive challenge in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), with many state-of-the-art (SOTA) NMT systems struggling to handle polysemous words (Campolungo et al., 2022). The same holds for the NMT pretraining paradigm of denoising synthetic “code-switched” text (Pan et al., 2021; Iyer et al., 2023), where word senses are ignored in the noising stage – leading to harmful sense biases in the pretraining data that are subsequently inherited by the resulting models. In this work, we introduce Word Sense Pretraining for Neural Machine Translation (WSP-NMT) - an end-to-end approach for pretraining multilingual NMT models leveraging word sense-specific information from Knowledge Bases. Our experiments show significant improvements in overall translation quality. Then, we show the robustness of our approach to scale to various challenging data and resource-scarce scenarios and, finally, report fine-grained accuracy improvements on the DiBiMT disambiguation benchmark. Our studies yield interesting and novel insights into the merits and challenges of integrating word sense information and structured knowledge in multilingual pretraining for NMT.

2022

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Transformer-based Entity Typing in Knowledge Graphs
Zhiwei Hu | Victor Gutierrez-Basulto | Zhiliang Xiang | Ru Li | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We investigate the knowledge graph entity typing task which aims at inferring plausible entity types. In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based Entity Typing (TET) approach, effectively encoding the content of neighbours of an entity by means of a transformer mechanism. More precisely, TET is composed of three different mechanisms: a local transformer allowing to infer missing entity types by independently encoding the information provided by each of its neighbours; a global transformer aggregating the information of all neighbours of an entity into a single long sequence to reason about more complex entity types; and a context transformer integrating neighbours content in a differentiated way through information exchange between neighbour pairs, while preserving the graph structure. Furthermore, TET uses information about class membership of types to semantically strengthen the representation of an entity. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TET compared to the state-of-the-art.

2016

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Passing a USA National Bar Exam: a First Corpus for Experimentation
Biralatei Fawei | Adam Wyner | Jeff Pan
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

Bar exams provide a key watershed by which legal professionals demonstrate their knowledge of the law and its application. Passing the bar entitles one to practice the law in a given jurisdiction. The bar provides an excellent benchmark for the performance of legal information systems since passing the bar would arguably signal that the system has acquired key aspects of legal reason on a par with a human lawyer. The paper provides a corpus and experimental results with material derived from a real bar exam, treating the problem as a form of textual entailment from the question to an answer. The providers of the bar exam material set the Gold Standard, which is the answer key. The experiments carried out using the ‘out of the box’ the Excitement Open Platform for textual entailment. The results and evaluation show that the tool can identify wrong answers (non-entailment) with a high F1 score, but it performs poorly in identifying the correct answer (entailment). The results provide a baseline performance measure against which to evaluate future improvements. The reasons for the poor performance are examined, and proposals are made to augment the tool in the future. The corpus facilitates experimentation by other researchers.