This paper focuses on detecting clickbait posts on the Web. These posts often use eye-catching disinformation in mixed modalities to mislead users to click for profit. That affects the user experience and thus would be blocked by content provider. To escape detection, malicious creators use tricks to add some irrelevant non-bait content into bait posts, dressing them up as legal to fool the detector. This content often has biased relations with non-bait labels, yet traditional detectors tend to make predictions based on simple co-occurrence rather than grasping inherent factors that lead to malicious behavior. This spurious bias would easily cause misjudgments. To address this problem, we propose a new debiased method based on causal inference. We first employ a set of features in multiple modalities to characterize the posts. Considering these features are often mixed up with unknown biases, we then disentangle three kinds of latent factors from them, including the invariant factor that indicates intrinsic bait intention; the causal factor which reflects deceptive patterns in a certain scenario, and non-causal noise. By eliminating the noise that causes bias, we can use invariant and causal factors to build a robust model with good generalization ability. Experiments on three popular datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.

BERT and TFIDF features excel in capturing rich semantics and important words, respectively. Since most existing clustering methods are solely based on the BERT model, they often fall short in utilizing keyword information, which, however, is very useful in clustering short texts. In this paper, we propose a **CO**-**T**raining **C**lustering (**COTC**) framework to make use of the collective strengths of BERT and TFIDF features. Specifically, we develop two modules responsible for the clustering of BERT and TFIDF features, respectively. We use the deep representations and cluster assignments from the TFIDF module outputs to guide the learning of the BERT module, seeking to align them at both the representation and cluster levels. Reversely, we also use the BERT module outputs to train the TFIDF module, thus leading to the mutual promotion. We then show that the alternating co-training framework can be placed under a unified joint training objective, which allows the two modules to be connected tightly and the training signals to be propagated efficiently. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms current SOTA methods significantly.

This paper focuses on answering subjective questions about products. Different from the factoid question with a single answer span, this subjective one involves multiple viewpoints. For example, the question of ‘how the phone’s battery is?’ not only involves facts of battery capacity but also contains users’ opinions on the battery’s pros and cons. A good answer should be able to integrate these heterogeneous and even inconsistent viewpoints, which is formalized as a subjective induction QA task. For this task, the data distributions are often imbalanced across different product domains. It is hard for traditional methods to work well without considering the shift of domain patterns. To address this problem, we propose a novel domain-adaptive model. Concretely, for each sample in the source and target domain, we first retrieve answer-related knowledge and represent them independently. To facilitate knowledge transferring, we then disentangle the representations into domain-invariant and domain-specific latent factors. Moreover, we develop an adversarial discriminator with contrastive learning to reduce the impact of out-of-domain bias. Based on learned latent vectors in a target domain, we yield multi-perspective summaries as inductive answers. Experiments on popular datasets show the effectiveness of our method.

This paper proposes a new task of commonsense question generation, which aims to yield deep-level and to-the-point questions from the text. Their answers need to reason over disjoint relevant contexts and external commonsense knowledge, such as encyclopedic facts and causality. The knowledge may not be explicitly mentioned in the text but is used by most humans for problem-shooting. Such complex reasoning with hidden contexts involves deep semantic understanding. Thus, this task has great application value, such as making high-quality quizzes in advanced exams. Due to the lack of modeling complexity, existing methods may produce shallow questions that can be answered by simple word matching. To address these challenges, we propose a new QG model by simultaneously considering asking contents, expressive ways, and answering complexity. We first retrieve text-related commonsense context. Then we disentangle the key factors that control questions in terms of reasoning content and verbalized way. Independence priors and constraints are imposed to facilitate disentanglement. We further develop a discriminator to promote the deep results by considering their answering complexity. Through adversarial inference, we learn the latent factors from data. By sampling the expressive factor from the data distributions, diverse questions can be yielded. Evaluations of two typical data sets show the effectiveness of our approach.

Efficient document retrieval heavily relies on the technique of semantic hashing, which learns a binary code for every document and employs Hamming distance to evaluate document distances. However, existing semantic hashing methods are mostly established on outdated TFIDF features, which obviously do not contain lots of important semantic information about documents. Furthermore, the Hamming distance can only be equal to one of several integer values, significantly limiting its representational ability for document distances. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose to leverage BERT embeddings to perform efficient retrieval based on the product quantization technique, which will assign for every document a real-valued codeword from the codebook, instead of a binary code as in semantic hashing. Specifically, we first transform the original BERT embeddings via a learnable mapping and feed the transformed embedding into a probabilistic product quantization module to output the assigned codeword. The refining and quantizing modules can be optimized in an end-to-end manner by minimizing the probabilistic contrastive loss. A mutual information maximization based method is further proposed to improve the representativeness of codewords, so that documents can be quantized more accurately. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines.

With the need of fast retrieval speed and small memory footprint, document hashing has been playing a crucial role in large-scale information retrieval. To generate high-quality hashing code, both semantics and neighborhood information are crucial. However, most existing methods leverage only one of them or simply combine them via some intuitive criteria, lacking a theoretical principle to guide the integration process. In this paper, we encode the neighborhood information with a graph-induced Gaussian distribution, and propose to integrate the two types of information with a graph-driven generative model. To deal with the complicated correlations among documents, we further propose a tree-structured approximation method for learning. Under the approximation, we prove that the training objective can be decomposed into terms involving only singleton or pairwise documents, enabling the model to be trained as efficiently as uncorrelated ones. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed model for simultaneously preserving semantic and neighborhood information.

Existing unsupervised document hashing methods are mostly established on generative models. Due to the difficulties of capturing long dependency structures, these methods rarely model the raw documents directly, but instead to model the features extracted from them (e.g. bag-of-words (BOG), TFIDF). In this paper, we propose to learn hash codes from BERT embeddings after observing their tremendous successes on downstream tasks. As a first try, we modify existing generative hashing models to accommodate the BERT embeddings. However, little improvement is observed over the codes learned from the old BOG or TFIDF features. We attribute this to the reconstruction requirement in the generative hashing, which will enforce irrelevant information that is abundant in the BERT embeddings also compressed into the codes. To remedy this issue, a new unsupervised hashing paradigm is further proposed based on the mutual information (MI) maximization principle. Specifically, the method first constructs appropriate global and local codes from the documents and then seeks to maximize their mutual information. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is able to generate hash codes that outperform existing ones learned from BOG features by a substantial margin.

Network embedding has recently emerged as a promising technique to embed nodes of a network into low-dimensional vectors. While fairly successful, most existing works focus on the embedding techniques for static networks. But in practice, there are many networks that are evolving over time and hence are dynamic, e.g., the social networks. To address this issue, a high-order spatio-temporal embedding model is developed to track the evolutions of dynamic networks. Specifically, an activeness-aware neighborhood embedding method is first proposed to extract the high-order neighborhood information at each given timestamp. Then, an embedding prediction framework is further developed to capture the temporal correlations, in which the attention mechanism is employed instead of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for its efficiency in computing and flexibility in modeling. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets from three different areas. It is shown that the proposed method outperforms all the baselines by a substantial margin for the tasks of dynamic link prediction and node classification, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods on tracking the evolutions of dynamic networks.

This paper focuses on generating multi-hop reasoning questions from the raw text in a low resource circumstance. Such questions have to be syntactically valid and need to logically correlate with the answers by deducing over multiple relations on several sentences in the text. Specifically, we first build a multi-hop generation model and guide it to satisfy the logical rationality by the reasoning chain extracted from a given text. Since the labeled data is limited and insufficient for training, we propose to learn the model with the help of a large scale of unlabeled data that is much easier to obtain. Such data contains rich expressive forms of the questions with structural patterns on syntax and semantics. These patterns can be estimated by the neural hidden semi-Markov model using latent variables. With latent patterns as a prior, we can regularize the generation model and produce the optimal results. Experimental results on the HotpotQA data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Moreover, we apply the generated results to the task of machine reading comprehension and achieve significant performance improvements.

Generating fluent and informative responses is of critical importance for task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing pipeline approaches generally predict multiple dialogue acts first and use them to assist response generation. There are at least two shortcomings with such approaches. First, the inherent structures of multi-domain dialogue acts are neglected. Second, the semantic associations between acts and responses are not taken into account for response generation. To address these issues, we propose a neural co-generation model that generates dialogue acts and responses concurrently. Unlike those pipeline approaches, our act generation module preserves the semantic structures of multi-domain dialogue acts and our response generation module dynamically attends to different acts as needed. We train the two modules jointly using an uncertainty loss to adjust their task weights adaptively. Extensive experiments are conducted on the large-scale MultiWOZ dataset and the results show that our model achieves very favorable improvement over several state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluations.

This paper focuses on the topic of inferential machine comprehension, which aims to fully understand the meanings of given text to answer generic questions, especially the ones needed reasoning skills. In particular, we first encode the given document, question and options in a context aware way. We then propose a new network to solve the inference problem by decomposing it into a series of attention-based reasoning steps. The result of the previous step acts as the context of next step. To make each step can be directly inferred from the text, we design an operational cell with prior structure. By recursively linking the cells, the inferred results are synthesized together to form the evidence chain for reasoning, where the reasoning direction can be guided by imposing structural constraints to regulate interactions on the cells. Moreover, a termination mechanism is introduced to dynamically determine the uncertain reasoning depth, and the network is trained by reinforcement learning. Experimental results on 3 popular data sets, including MCTest, RACE and MultiRC, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.