Weijie Li


2024

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YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Self-Instruction Learning with Black-box Optimization for Semantic Textual Relatedness
Weijie Li | Jin Wang | Xuejie Zhang
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

This paper introduces a system designed for SemEval-2024 Task 1 that focuses on assessing Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR) between sentence pairs, including its multilingual version. STR, which evaluates the coherence of sentences, is distinct from Semantic Textual Similarity (STS). However, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ERNIE-Bot-turbo, typically trained on STS data, often struggle to differentiate between the two concepts. To address this, we developed a self-instruction method that enhances their performance distinguishing STR, particularly in cases with high STS but low STR. Beginning with a task description, the system generates new task instructions refined through human feedback. It then iteratively enhances these instructions by comparing them to the original and evaluating the differences. Utilizing the Large Language Models’ (LLMs) natural language comprehension abilities, the system aims to produce progressively optimized instructions based on the resulting scores. Through our optimized instructions, ERNIE-Bot-turbo exceeds the performance of conventional models,achieving a score enhancement of 4 to 7% on multilingual development datasets.

2022

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STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing
Zefeng Cai | Xiangyu Li | Binyuan Hui | Min Yang | Bowen Li | Binhua Li | Zheng Cao | Weijie Li | Fei Huang | Luo Si | Yongbin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

In this paper, we propose a novel SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing, which leverages contextual information to enrich natural language (NL) utterance and table schema representations for text-to-SQL conversations. Concretely, we propose two novel pre-training objectives which respectively explore the context-dependent interactions of NL utterances and SQL queries within each text-to-SQL conversation: (i) schema state tracking (SST) objective that tracks and explores the schema states of context-dependent SQL queries in the form of schema-states by predicting and updating the value of each schema slot during interaction; (ii) utterance dependency tracking (UDT) objective that employs weighted contrastive learning to pull together two semantically similar NL utterances and push away the representations of semantically dissimilar NL utterances within each conversation. In addition, we construct a high-quality large-scale context-dependent text-to-SQL conversation corpus to pre-train STAR. Extensive experiments show that STAR achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two downstream benchmarks (SParC and CoSQL), significantly outperforming previous pre-training methods and ranking first on the leaderboard. We believe the release of the constructed corpus, codebase and pre-trained STAR checkpoints would push forward the research in this area.