Shuai Pang


2020

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Mention Extraction and Linking for SQL Query Generation
Jianqiang Ma | Zeyu Yan | Shuai Pang | Yang Zhang | Jianping Shen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

On the WikiSQL benchmark, state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems typically take a slot- filling approach by building several dedicated models for each type of slots. Such modularized systems are not only complex but also of limited capacity for capturing inter-dependencies among SQL clauses. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel extraction-linking approach, where a unified extractor recognizes all types of slot mentions appearing in the question sentence before a linker maps the recognized columns to the table schema to generate executable SQL queries. Trained with automatically generated annotations, the proposed method achieves the first place on the WikiSQL benchmark.

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FASTMATCH: Accelerating the Inference of BERT-based Text Matching
Shuai Pang | Jianqiang Ma | Zeyu Yan | Yang Zhang | Jianping Shen
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown state-of-the-art accuracies in text matching. When being applied to IR (or QA), the BERT-based matching models need to online calculate the representations and interactions for all query-candidate pairs. The high inference cost has prohibited the deployments of BERT-based matching models in many practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel BERT-based text matching model, in which the representations and the interactions are decoupled. Then, the representations of the candidates can be calculated and stored offline, and directly retrieved during the online matching phase. To conduct the interactions and generate final matching scores, a lightweight attention network is designed. Experiments based on several large scale text matching datasets show that the proposed model, called FASTMATCH, can achieve up to 100X speed-up to BERT and RoBERTa at the online matching phase, while keeping more up to 98.7% of the performance.