Xuefeng Bai


2023

pdf bib
Exploiting Abstract Meaning Representation for Open-Domain Question Answering
Cunxiang Wang | Zhikun Xu | Qipeng Guo | Xiangkun Hu | Xuefeng Bai | Zheng Zhang | Yue Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

The Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) task involves retrieving and subsequently generating answers from fine-grained relevant passages within a database. Current systems leverage Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to model the relationship between questions and passages. However, the diversity in surface form expressions can hinder the model’s ability to capture accurate correlations, especially within complex contexts. Therefore, we utilize Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to assist the model in understanding complex semantic information. We introduce a method known as Graph-as-Token (GST) to incorporate AMRs into PLMs. Results from Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQ) demonstrate that our GST method can significantly improve performance, resulting in up to 2.44/3.17 Exact Match score improvements on NQ/TQ respectively. Furthermore, our method enhances robustness and outperforms alternative Graph Neural Network (GNN) methods for integrating AMRs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ semantic graphs in ODQA.

pdf bib
CCL23-Eval 任务2系统报告:WestlakeNLP,基于生成式大语言模型的中文抽象语义表示解析(System Report for CCL23-Eval Task 2: WestlakeNLP, Investigating Generative Large Language Models for Chinese AMR Parsing)
Wenyang Gao (高文炀) | Xuefeng Bai (白雪峰) | Yue Zhang (张岳)
Proceedings of the 22nd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: Evaluations)

“本文介绍了我们在第二十二届中文计算语言学大会中文抽象语义表示解析评测任务中提交的参赛系统。中文抽象语义表示(Chinese Abstract Meaning Representa-tion,CAMR)不仅以图的方式表示句子的语义,还保证了概念对齐和关系对齐。近期,生成式大规模语言模型在诸多自然语言处理任务上展现了优秀的生成能力和泛化能力。受此启发,我们选择微调Baichuan-7B模型来以端到端的形式从文本直接生成序列化的CAMR。实验结果表明,我们的系统能够在不依赖于词性、依存句法信息以及复杂规则的前提下取得了同现有方法可比的性能。”

pdf bib
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation
Yulong Chen | Huajian Zhang | Yijie Zhou | Xuefeng Bai | Yueguan Wang | Ming Zhong | Jianhao Yan | Yafu Li | Judy Li | Xianchao Zhu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Most existing cross-lingual summarization (CLS) work constructs CLS corpora by simply and directly translating pre-annotated summaries from one language to another, which can contain errors from both summarization and translation processes. To address this issue, we propose ConvSumX, a cross-lingual conversation summarization benchmark, through a new annotation schema that explicitly considers source input context. ConvSumX consists of 2 sub-tasks under different real-world scenarios, with each covering 3 language directions. We conduct thorough analysis on ConvSumX and 3 widely-used manually annotated CLS corpora and empirically find that ConvSumX is more faithful towards input text. Additionally, based on the same intuition, we propose a 2-Step method, which takes both conversation and summary as input to simulate human annotation process. Experimental results show that 2-Step method surpasses strong baselines on ConvSumX under both automatic and human evaluation. Analysis shows that both source input text and summary are crucial for modeling cross-lingual summaries.

2022

pdf bib
The Cross-lingual Conversation Summarization Challenge
Yulong Chen | Ming Zhong | Xuefeng Bai | Naihao Deng | Jing Li | Xianchao Zhu | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Natural Language Generation: Generation Challenges

We propose the shared task of cross-lingual conversation summarization, ConvSumX Challenge, opening new avenues for researchers to investigate solutions that integrate conversation summarization and machine translation. This task can be particularly useful due to the emergence of online meetings and conferences. We use a new benchmark, covering 2 real-world scenarios and 3 language directions, including a low-resource language, for evaluation. We hope that ConvSumX can motivate research to go beyond English and break the barrier for non-English speakers to benefit from recent advances of conversation summarization.

pdf bib
Graph Pre-training for AMR Parsing and Generation
Xuefeng Bai | Yulong Chen | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract meaning representation (AMR) highlights the core semantic information of text in a graph structure. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have advanced tasks of AMR parsing and AMR-to-text generation, respectively. However, PLMs are typically pre-trained on textual data, thus are sub-optimal for modeling structural knowledge. To this end, we investigate graph self-supervised training to improve the structure awareness of PLMs over AMR graphs. In particular, we introduce two graph auto-encoding strategies for graph-to-graph pre-training and four tasks to integrate text and graph information during pre-training. We further design a unified framework to bridge the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning tasks. Experiments on both AMR parsing and AMR-to-text generation show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to consider pre-training on semantic graphs.

pdf bib
Semantic-based Pre-training for Dialogue Understanding
Xuefeng Bai | Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Pre-trained language models have made great progress on dialogue tasks. However, these models are typically trained on surface dialogue text, thus are proven to be weak in understanding the main semantic meaning of a dialogue context. We investigate Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) as explicit semantic knowledge for pre-training models to capture the core semantic information in dialogues during pre-training. In particular, we propose a semantic-based pre-training framework that extends the standard pre-training framework (Devlin et al.,2019) by three tasks for learning 1) core semantic units, 2) semantic relations and 3) the overall semantic representation according to AMR graphs. Experiments on the understanding of both chit-chats and task-oriented dialogues show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage a deep semantic representation for dialogue pre-training.

pdf bib
Cross-domain Generalization for AMR Parsing
Xuefeng Bai | Sen Yang | Leyang Cui | Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to predict an AMR graph from textual input. Recently, there has been notable growth in AMR parsing performance. However, most existing work focuses on improving the performance in the specific domain, ignoring the potential domain dependence of AMR parsing systems. To address this, we extensively evaluate five representative AMR parsers on five domains and analyze challenges to cross-domain AMR parsing. We observe that challenges to cross-domain AMR parsing mainly arise from the distribution shift of words and AMR concepts. Based on our observation, we investigate two approaches to reduce the domain distribution divergence of text and AMR features, respectively. Experimental results on two out-of-domain test sets show the superiority of our method.

2021

pdf bib
Semantic Representation for Dialogue Modeling
Xuefeng Bai | Yulong Chen | Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Although neural models have achieved competitive results in dialogue systems, they have shown limited ability in representing core semantics, such as ignoring important entities. To this end, we exploit Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to help dialogue modeling. Compared with the textual input, AMR explicitly provides core semantic knowledge and reduces data sparsity. We develop an algorithm to construct dialogue-level AMR graphs from sentence-level AMRs and explore two ways to incorporate AMRs into dialogue systems. Experimental results on both dialogue understanding and response generation tasks show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage a formal semantic representation into neural dialogue modeling.

2020

pdf bib
Online Back-Parsing for AMR-to-Text Generation
Xuefeng Bai | Linfeng Song | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

AMR-to-text generation aims to recover a text containing the same meaning as an input AMR graph. Current research develops increasingly powerful graph encoders to better represent AMR graphs, with decoders based on standard language modeling being used to generate outputs. We propose a decoder that back predicts projected AMR graphs on the target sentence during text generation. As the result, our outputs can better preserve the input meaning than standard decoders. Experiments on two AMR benchmarks show the superiority of our model over the previous state-of-the-art system based on graph Transformer.