Ming Li


2023

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PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter
Haoyan Yang | Zhitao Li | Yong Zhang | Jianzong Wang | Ning Cheng | Ming Li | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) task employs the retrieval-augmented framework, composed of a retriever and generator. The generators formulate the answer based on the documents retrieved by the retriever. Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators is beneficial due to their advanced QA capabilities, but they are typically too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints while some of them are only accessible via APIs. To tackle this issue and further improve ReQA performance, we propose a trainable Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (PRCA), keeping the generator as a black box. Positioned between the retriever and generator in a Pluggable manner, PRCA refines the retrieved information by operating in a token-autoregressive strategy via maximizing rewards of the reinforcement learning phase. Our experiments validate PRCA’s effectiveness in enhancing ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% improvement to fit black-box LLMs into existing frameworks, demonstrating its considerable potential in the LLMs era.

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Semi-supervised News Discourse Profiling with Contrastive Learning
Ming Li | Ruihong Huang
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)

2021

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Don’t Change Me! User-Controllable Selective Paraphrase Generation
Mohan Zhang | Luchen Tan | Zihang Fu | Kun Xiong | Jimmy Lin | Ming Li | Zhengkai Tu
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

In the paraphrase generation task, source sentences often contain phrases that should not be altered. Which phrases, however, can be context dependent and can vary by application. Our solution to this challenge is to provide the user with explicit tags that can be placed around any arbitrary segment of text to mean “don’t change me!” when generating a paraphrase; the model learns to explicitly copy these phrases to the output. The contribution of this work is a novel data generation technique using distant supervision that allows us to start with a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model and fine-tune a paraphrase generator that exhibits this behavior, allowing user-controllable paraphrase generation. Additionally, we modify the loss during fine-tuning to explicitly encourage diversity in model output. Our technique is language agnostic, and we report experiments in English and Chinese.

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Multi-Task Dense Retrieval via Model Uncertainty Fusion for Open-Domain Question Answering
Minghan Li | Ming Li | Kun Xiong | Jimmy Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Multi-task dense retrieval models can be used to retrieve documents from a common corpus (e.g., Wikipedia) for different open-domain question-answering (QA) tasks. However, Karpukhin et al. (2020) shows that jointly learning different QA tasks with one dense model is not always beneficial due to corpus inconsistency. For example, SQuAD only focuses on a small set of Wikipedia articles while datasets like NQ and Trivia cover more entries, and joint training on their union can cause performance degradation. To solve this problem, we propose to train individual dense passage retrievers (DPR) for different tasks and aggregate their predictions during test time, where we use uncertainty estimation as weights to indicate how probable a specific query belongs to each expert’s expertise. Our method reaches state-of-the-art performance on 5 benchmark QA datasets, with up to 10% improvement in top-100 accuracy compared to a joint-training multi-task DPR on SQuAD. We also show that our method handles corpus inconsistency better than the joint-training DPR on a mixed subset of different QA datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/alexlimh/DPR_MUF.

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Unsupervised Chunking as Syntactic Structure Induction with a Knowledge-Transfer Approach
Anup Anand Deshmukh | Qianqiu Zhang | Ming Li | Jimmy Lin | Lili Mou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

In this paper, we address unsupervised chunking as a new task of syntactic structure induction, which is helpful for understanding the linguistic structures of human languages as well as processing low-resource languages. We propose a knowledge-transfer approach that heuristically induces chunk labels from state-of-the-art unsupervised parsing models; a hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN) learns from such induced chunk labels to smooth out the noise of the heuristics. Experiments show that our approach largely bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised chunking.

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Semantics of the Unwritten: The Effect of End of Paragraph and Sequence Tokens on Text Generation with GPT2
He Bai | Peng Shi | Jimmy Lin | Luchen Tan | Kun Xiong | Wen Gao | Jie Liu | Ming Li
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop

The semantics of a text is manifested not only by what is read but also by what is not read. In this article, we will study how those implicit “not read” information such as end-of-paragraph () and end-of-sequence () affect the quality of text generation. Specifically, we find that the pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. Experimental results on English story generation show that can lead to higher BLEU scores and lower perplexity. We also conduct experiments on a self-collected Chinese essay dataset with Chinese-GPT2, a character level LM without and during pre-training. Experimental results show that the Chinese GPT2 can generate better essay endings with .

2020

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Two Birds, One Stone: A Simple, Unified Model for Text Generation from Structured and Unstructured Data
Hamidreza Shahidi | Ming Li | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A number of researchers have recently questioned the necessity of increasingly complex neural network (NN) architectures. In particular, several recent papers have shown that simpler, properly tuned models are at least competitive across several NLP tasks. In this work, we show that this is also the case for text generation from structured and unstructured data. We consider neural table-to-text generation and neural question generation (NQG) tasks for text generation from structured and unstructured data, respectively. Table-to-text generation aims to generate a description based on a given table, and NQG is the task of generating a question from a given passage where the generated question can be answered by a certain sub-span of the passage using NN models. Experimental results demonstrate that a basic attention-based seq2seq model trained with the exponential moving average technique achieves the state of the art in both tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/h-shahidi/2birds-gen.

2019

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Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features
Wei Yang | Luchen Tan | Chunwei Lu | Anqi Cui | Han Li | Xi Chen | Kun Xiong | Muzi Wang | Ming Li | Jian Pei | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)

Consumers dissatisfied with the normal dispute resolution process provided by an e-commerce company’s customer service agents have the option of escalating their complaints by filing grievances with a government authority. This paper tackles the challenge of monitoring ongoing text chat dialogues to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent, providing triage and prioritization for a separate pool of specialized agents specially trained to handle more complex situations. We describe a hybrid model that tackles this challenge by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. Experiments show that both components are complementary and contribute to overall recall, outperforming competitive baselines. A trial online deployment of our model demonstrates its business value in improving customer service.

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End-to-End Open-Domain Question Answering with BERTserini
Wei Yang | Yuqing Xie | Aileen Lin | Xingyu Li | Luchen Tan | Kun Xiong | Ming Li | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)

We demonstrate an end-to-end question answering system that integrates BERT with the open-source Anserini information retrieval toolkit. In contrast to most question answering and reading comprehension models today, which operate over small amounts of input text, our system integrates best practices from IR with a BERT-based reader to identify answers from a large corpus of Wikipedia articles in an end-to-end fashion. We report large improvements over previous results on a standard benchmark test collection, showing that fine-tuning pretrained BERT with SQuAD is sufficient to achieve high accuracy in identifying answer spans.

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End-to-End Neural Context Reconstruction in Chinese Dialogue
Wei Yang | Rui Qiao | Haocheng Qin | Amy Sun | Luchen Tan | Kun Xiong | Ming Li
Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI

We tackle the problem of context reconstruction in Chinese dialogue, where the task is to replace pronouns, zero pronouns, and other referring expressions with their referent nouns so that sentences can be processed in isolation without context. Following a standard decomposition of the context reconstruction task into referring expression detection and coreference resolution, we propose a novel end-to-end architecture for separately and jointly accomplishing this task. Key features of this model include POS and position encoding using CNNs and a novel pronoun masking mechanism. One perennial problem in building such models is the paucity of training data, which we address by augmenting previously-proposed methods to generate a large amount of realistic training data. The combination of more data and better models yields accuracy higher than the state-of-the-art method in coreference resolution and end-to-end context reconstruction.

2016

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Entity Disambiguation by Knowledge and Text Jointly Embedding
Wei Fang | Jianwen Zhang | Dilin Wang | Zheng Chen | Ming Li
Proceedings of the 20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

2010

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Measuring the Non-compositionality of Multiword Expressions
Fan Bu | Xiaoyan Zhu | Ming Li
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

2004

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Discovering Patterns to Extract Protein-Protein Interactions from Full Biomedical Texts
Minlie Huang | Xiaoyan Zhu | Donald G. Payan | Kunbin Qu | Ming Li
Proceedings of the International Joint Workshop on Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine and its Applications (NLPBA/BioNLP)