Min Li


2024

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Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
Simone Conia | Daniel Lee | Min Li | Umar Farooq Minhas | Saloni Potdar | Yunyao Li
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Translating text that contains entity names is a challenging task, as cultural-related references can vary significantly across languages. These variations may also be caused by transcreation, an adaptation process that entails more than transliteration and word-for-word translation. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-cultural translation on two fronts: (i) we introduce XC-Translate, the first large-scale, manually-created benchmark for machine translation that focuses on text that contains potentially culturally-nuanced entity names, and (ii) we propose KG-MT, a novel end-to-end method to integrate information from a multilingual knowledge graph into a neural machine translation model by leveraging a dense retrieval mechanism. Our experiments and analyses show that current machine translation systems and large language models still struggle to translate texts containing entity names, whereas KG-MT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin, obtaining a 129% and 62% relative improvement compared to NLLB-200 and GPT-4, respectively.

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AutoCAP: Towards Automatic Cross-lingual Alignment Planning for Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought
Yongheng Zhang | Qiguang Chen | Min Li | Wanxiang Che | Libo Qin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Cross-lingual chain-of-thought can effectively complete reasoning tasks across languages, which gains increasing attention.Recently, dominant approaches in the literature improve cross-lingual alignment capabilities by integrating reasoning knowledge from different languages. Despite achieving excellent performance, current methods still have two main challenges: (1) Manual language specification: They still highly rely on manually selecting the languages to integrate, severely affecting their generalizability; (2) Static weight allocation: Current methods simply integrate all languages equally. In fact, different language reasoning paths should have different weights to achieve better complementation and integration. Motivated by this, we introduce an Automatic Cross-lingual Alignment Planning (AutoCAP) for zero-shot chain-of-thought to address the above challenges. The core of AutoCAP consists of two components: (1) Automatic Language Selection Prompting to guide LLMs to select appropriate languages and (2) Automatic Weight Allocation Prompting to automatically allocate alignment weight scores to each reasoning path. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks reveal that AutoCAP achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous methods that required manual effort.

2023

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HFMRE: Constructing Huffman Tree in Bags to Find Excellent Instances for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction
Min Li | Cong Shao | Gang Li | Mingle Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Since the introduction of distantly supervised relation extraction methods, numerous approaches have been developed, the most representative of which is multi-instance learning (MIL). To find reliable features that are most representative of multi-instance bags, aggregation strategies such as AVG (average), ONE (at least one), and ATT (sentence-level attention) are commonly used. These strategies tend to train third-party vectors to select sentence-level features, leaving it to the third party to decide/identify what is noise, ignoring the intrinsic associations that naturally exist from sentence to sentence. In this paper, we propose the concept of circular cosine similarity, which is used to explicitly show the intrinsic associations between sentences within a bag. We also consider the previous methods to be a crude denoising process as they are interrupted and do not have a continuous noise detection procedure. Following this consideration, we implement a relation extraction framework (HFMRE) that relies on the Huffman tree, where sentences are considered as leaf nodes and circular cosine similarity are considered as node weights. HFMRE can continuously and iteratively discriminate noise and aggregated features during the construction of the Huffman tree, eventually finding an excellent instance that is representative of a bag-level feature. The experiments demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our method, outperforming previously advanced baselines on the popular DSRE datasets.

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Increasing Coverage and Precision of Textual Information in Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
Simone Conia | Min Li | Daniel Lee | Umar Minhas | Ihab Ilyas | Yunyao Li
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent work in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision has been using textual information – e.g., entity names and descriptions – available in knowledge graphs to ground neural models to high-quality structured data. However, when it comes to non-English languages, the quantity and quality of textual information are comparatively scarce. To address this issue, we introduce the novel task of automatic Knowledge Graph Completion (KGE) and perform a thorough investigation on bridging the gap in both the quantity and quality of textual information between English and non-English languages. More specifically, we: i) bring to light the problem of increasing multilingual coverage and precision of entity names and descriptions in Wikidata; ii) demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods, namely, Machine Translation (MT), Web Search (WS), and Large Language Models (LLMs), struggle with this task; iii) present M-NTA, a novel unsupervised approach that combines MT, WS, and LLMs to generate high-quality textual information; and, iv) study the impact of increasing multilingual coverage and precision of non-English textual information in Entity Linking, Knowledge Graph Completion, and Question Answering. As part of our effort towards better multilingual knowledge graphs, we also introduce WikiKGE-10, the first human-curated benchmark to evaluate KGE approaches in 10 languages across 7 language families.

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End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions
Libo Qin | Wenbo Pan | Qiguang Chen | Lizi Liao | Zhou Yu | Yue Zhang | Wanxiang Che | Min Li
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this research field; (2) New taxonomy: we first introduce a unified perspective for EToD, including (i) Modularly EToD and (ii) Fully EToD; (3) New Frontiers: we discuss some potential frontier areas as well as the corresponding challenges, hoping to spur breakthrough research in EToD field; (4) Abundant resources: we build a public website, where EToD researchers could directly access the recent progress. We hope this work can serve as a thorough reference for the EToD research community.

2022

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MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games
Xiaofeng Qi | Chao Li | Zhongping Liang | Jigang Liu | Cheng Zhang | Yuanxin Wei | Lin Yuan | Guang Yang | Lanxiao Huang | Min Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games. Event commentary is important for battles in MOBA games, which is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis. The system takes real-time match statistics and events as input, and an effective transform method is designed to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space. This paper presents the general framework and implementation details of the proposed system, and provides experimental results on large-scale real-world match data.

2018

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DIMSIM: An Accurate Chinese Phonetic Similarity Algorithm Based on Learned High Dimensional Encoding
Min Li | Marina Danilevsky | Sara Noeman | Yunyao Li
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Phonetic similarity algorithms identify words and phrases with similar pronunciation which are used in many natural language processing tasks. However, existing approaches are designed mainly for Indo-European languages and fail to capture the unique properties of Chinese pronunciation. In this paper, we propose a high dimensional encoded phonetic similarity algorithm for Chinese, DIMSIM. The encodings are learned from annotated data to separately map initial and final phonemes into n-dimensional coordinates. Pinyin phonetic similarities are then calculated by aggregating the similarities of initial, final and tone. DIMSIM demonstrates a 7.5X improvement on mean reciprocal rank over the state-of-the-art phonetic similarity approaches.

2009

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A Cascade Approach to Extracting Medication Events
Jon Patrick | Min Li
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2009