Xiangjue Dong


2023

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PromptAttack: Probing Dialogue State Trackers with Adversarial Prompts
Xiangjue Dong | Yun He | Ziwei Zhu | James Caverlee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

A key component of modern conversational systems is the Dialogue State Tracker (or DST), which models a user’s goals and needs. Toward building more robust and reliable DSTs, we introduce a prompt-based learning approach to automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. Two key characteristics of this approach are: (i) it only needs the output of the DST with no need for model parameters, and (ii) it can learn to generate natural language utterances that can target any DST. Through experiments over state-of-the-art DSTs, the proposed framework leads to the greatest reduction in accuracy and the best attack success rate while maintaining good fluency and a low perturbation ratio. We also show how much the generated adversarial examples can bolster a DST through adversarial training. These results indicate the strength of prompt-based attacks on DSTs and leave open avenues for continued refinement.

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Co2PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning
Xiangjue Dong | Ziwei Zhu | Zhuoer Wang | Maria Teleki | James Caverlee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Pre-trained Language Models are widely used in many important real-world applications. However, recent studies show that these models can encode social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biases in downstream applications. To address this challenge, we propose Co2PT, an efficient and effective *debias-while-prompt tuning* method for mitigating biases via counterfactual contrastive prompt tuning on downstream tasks. Our experiments conducted on three extrinsic bias benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Co2PT on bias mitigation during the prompt tuning process and its adaptability to existing upstream debiased language models. These findings indicate the strength of Co2PT and provide promising avenues for further enhancement in bias mitigation on downstream tasks.

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Closed-book Question Generation via Contrastive Learning
Xiangjue Dong | Jiaying Lu | Jianling Wang | James Caverlee
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Question Generation (QG) is a fundamental NLP task for many downstream applications. Recent studies on open-book QG, where supportive answer-context pairs are provided to models, have achieved promising progress. However, generating natural questions under a more practical closed-book setting that lacks these supporting documents still remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a new QG model for this closed-book setting that is designed to better understand the semantics of long-form abstractive answers and store more information in its parameters through contrastive learning and an answer reconstruction module. Through experiments, we validate the proposed QG model on both public datasets and a new WikiCQA dataset. Empirical results show that the proposed QG model outperforms baselines in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. In addition, we show how to leverage the proposed model to improve existing question-answering systems. These results further indicate the effectiveness of our QG model for enhancing closed-book question-answering tasks.

2020

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Transformer-based Context-aware Sarcasm Detection in Conversation Threads from Social Media
Xiangjue Dong | Changmao Li | Jinho D. Choi
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Figurative Language Processing

We present a transformer-based sarcasm detection model that accounts for the context from the entire conversation thread for more robust predictions. Our model uses deep transformer layers to perform multi-head attentions among the target utterance and the relevant context in the thread. The context-aware models are evaluated on two datasets from social media, Twitter and Reddit, and show 3.1% and 7.0% improvements over their baselines. Our best models give the F1-scores of 79.0% and 75.0% for the Twitter and Reddit datasets respectively, becoming one of the highest performing systems among 36 participants in this shared task.

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XD at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Ensemble Approach to Offensive Language Identification in Social Media Using Transformer Encoders
Xiangjue Dong | Jinho D. Choi
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper presents six document classification models using the latest transformer encoders and a high-performing ensemble model for a task of offensive language identification in social media. For the individual models, deep transformer layers are applied to perform multi-head attentions. For the ensemble model, the utterance representations taken from those individual models are concatenated and fed into a linear decoder to make the final decisions. Our ensemble model outperforms the individual models and shows up to 8.6% improvement over the individual models on the development set. On the test set, it achieves macro-F1 of 90.9% and becomes one of the high performing systems among 85 participants in the sub-task A of this shared task. Our analysis shows that although the ensemble model significantly improves the accuracy on the development set, the improvement is not as evident on the test set.

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Benchmarking of Transformer-Based Pre-Trained Models on Social Media Text Classification Datasets
Yuting Guo | Xiangjue Dong | Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi | Abeed Sarker | Cecile Paris | Diego Mollá Aliod
Proceedings of the 18th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Free text data from social media is now widely used in natural language processing research, and one of the most common machine learning tasks performed on this data is classification. Generally speaking, performances of supervised classification algorithms on social media datasets are lower than those on texts from other sources, but recently-proposed transformer-based models have considerably improved upon legacy state-of-the-art systems. Currently, there is no study that compares the performances of different variants of transformer-based models on a wide range of social media text classification datasets. In this paper, we benchmark the performances of transformer-based pre-trained models on 25 social media text classification datasets, 6 of which are health-related. We compare three pre-trained language models, RoBERTa-base, BERTweet and ClinicalBioBERT in terms of classification accuracy. Our experiments show that RoBERTa-base and BERTweet perform comparably on most datasets, and considerably better than ClinicalBioBERT, even on health-related datasets.