Junhong Liu


2023

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Towards Effective Automatic Debt Collection with Persona Awareness
Tong Zhang | Junhong Liu | Chen Huang | Jia Liu | Hongru Liang | Zujie Wen | Wenqiang Lei
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Understanding debtor personas is crucial for collectors to empathize with debtors and develop more effective collection strategies. In this paper, we take the first step towards comprehensively investigating the significance of debtor personas and present a successful commercial practice on automatic debt collection agents. Specifically, we organize the debtor personas into a taxonomy and construct a persona-aware conversation dataset. Building upon it, we implement a simple yet effective persona-aware agent called PAD. After two-month online testing, PAD increases the recovery rate by 3.31% and collects an additional ~100K RMB. Our commercial practice brings inspiration to the debt collection industry by providing an effective automatic solution.

2022

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Improve Interpretability of Neural Networks via Sparse Contrastive Coding
Junhong Liu | Yijie Lin | Liang Jiang | Jia Liu | Zujie Wen | Xi Peng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Although explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has achieved remarkable developments in recent years, there are few efforts have been devoted to the following problems, namely, i) how to develop an explainable method that could explain the black-box in a model-agnostic way? and ii) how to improve the performance and interpretability of the black-box using such explanations instead of pre-collected important attributions? To explore the potential solution, we propose a model-agnostic explanation method termed as Sparse Contrastive Coding (SCC) and verify its effectiveness in text classification and natural language inference. In brief, SCC explains the feature attributions which characterize the importance of words based on the hidden states of each layer of the model. With such word-level explainability, SCC adaptively divides the input sentences into foregrounds and backgrounds in terms of task relevance. Through maximizing the similarity between the foregrounds and input sentences while minimizing the similarity between the backgrounds and input sentences, SSC employs a supervised contrastive learning loss to boost the interpretability and performance of the model. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method over five state-of-the-art methods in terms of interpretability and classification measurements. The code is available at https://pengxi.me.

2020

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Query Distillation: BERT-based Distillation for Ensemble Ranking
Wangshu Zhang | Junhong Liu | Zujie Wen | Yafang Wang | Gerard de Melo
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track

Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in the development of neural ranking networks, but also an increasingly heavy computational burden due to growing numbers of parameters and the adoption of model ensembles. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to balance the effectiveness and efficiency. However, it is not straightforward to apply KD to ranking problems. Ranking Distillation (RD) has been proposed to address this issue, but only shows effectiveness on recommendation tasks. We present a novel two-stage distillation method for ranking problems that allows a smaller student model to be trained while benefitting from the better performance of the teacher model, providing better control of the inference latency and computational burden. We design a novel BERT-based ranking model structure for list-wise ranking to serve as our student model. All ranking candidates are fed to the BERT model simultaneously, such that the self-attention mechanism can enable joint inference to rank the document list. Our experiments confirm the advantages of our method, not just with regard to the inference latency but also in terms of higher-quality rankings compared to the original teacher model.