Yong Yu


2022

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LAFT: Cross-lingual Transfer for Text Generation by Language-Agnostic Finetuning
Xianze Wu | Zaixiang Zheng | Hao Zhou | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

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Nested Named Entity Recognition with Span-level Graphs
Juncheng Wan | Dongyu Ru | Weinan Zhang | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Span-based methods with the neural networks backbone have great potential for the nested named entity recognition (NER) problem. However, they face problems such as degenerating when positive instances and negative instances largely overlap. Besides, the generalization ability matters a lot in nested NER, as a large proportion of entities in the test set hardly appear in the training set. In this work, we try to improve the span representation by utilizing retrieval-based span-level graphs, connecting spans and entities in the training data based on n-gram features. Specifically, we build the entity-entity graph and span-entity graph globally based on n-gram similarity to integrate the information of similar neighbor entities into the span representation. To evaluate our method, we conduct experiments on three common nested NER datasets, ACE2004, ACE2005, and GENIA datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves general improvements on all three benchmarks (+0.30 ∼ 0.85 micro-F1), and obtains special superiority on low frequency entities (+0.56 ∼ 2.08 recall).

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PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation
Juncheng Wan | Jian Yang | Shuming Ma | Dongdong Zhang | Weinan Zhang | Yong Yu | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

While end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved impressive progress, noisy input usually leads models to become fragile and unstable. Generating adversarial examples as the augmented data has been proved to be useful to alleviate this problem. Existing methods for adversarial example generation (AEG) are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. In this paper, we propose a Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation (PAEG) framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model. Our method further improves the gradient-based word-level AEG method by adopting a phrase-level substitution strategy. We verify our method on three benchmarks, including LDC Chinese-English, IWSLT14 German-English, and WMT14 English-German tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves translation performance and robustness to noise compared to previous strong baselines.

2021

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Glancing Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation
Lihua Qian | Hao Zhou | Yu Bao | Mingxuan Wang | Lin Qiu | Weinan Zhang | Yong Yu | Lei Li
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)

Recent work on non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) aims at improving the efficiency by parallel decoding without sacrificing the quality. However, existing NAT methods are either inferior to Transformer or require multiple decoding passes, leading to reduced speedup. We propose the Glancing Language Model (GLM) for single-pass parallel generation models. With GLM, we develop Glancing Transformer (GLAT) for machine translation. With only single-pass parallel decoding, GLAT is able to generate high-quality translation with 8×-15× speedup. Note that GLAT does not modify the network architecture, which is a training method to learn word interdependency. Experiments on multiple WMT language directions show that GLAT outperforms all previous single pass non-autoregressive methods, and is nearly comparable to Transformer, reducing the gap to 0.25-0.9 BLEU points.

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Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction
Dongyu Ru | Changzhi Sun | Jiangtao Feng | Lin Qiu | Hao Zhou | Weinan Zhang | Yong Yu | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Document-level relation extraction aims to identify relations between entities in a whole document. Prior efforts to capture long-range dependencies have relied heavily on implicitly powerful representations learned through (graph) neural networks, which makes the model less transparent. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose LogiRE, a novel probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. LogiRE treats logic rules as latent variables and consists of two modules: a rule generator and a relation extractor. The rule generator is to generate logic rules potentially contributing to final predictions, and the relation extractor outputs final predictions based on the generated logic rules. Those two modules can be efficiently optimized with the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. By introducing logic rules into neural networks, LogiRE can explicitly capture long-range dependencies as well as enjoy better interpretation. Empirical results show that significantly outperforms several strong baselines in terms of relation performance and logical consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/rudongyu/LogiRE.

2020

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Active Sentence Learning by Adversarial Uncertainty Sampling in Discrete Space
Dongyu Ru | Jiangtao Feng | Lin Qiu | Hao Zhou | Mingxuan Wang | Weinan Zhang | Yong Yu | Lei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Active learning for sentence understanding aims at discovering informative unlabeled data for annotation and therefore reducing the demand for labeled data. We argue that the typical uncertainty sampling method for active learning is time-consuming and can hardly work in real-time, which may lead to ineffective sample selection. We propose adversarial uncertainty sampling in discrete space (AUSDS) to retrieve informative unlabeled samples more efficiently. AUSDS maps sentences into latent space generated by the popular pre-trained language models, and discover informative unlabeled text samples for annotation via adversarial attack. The proposed approach is extremely efficient compared with traditional uncertainty sampling with more than 10x speedup. Experimental results on five datasets show that AUSDS outperforms strong baselines on effectiveness.

2019

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Dynamically Fused Graph Network for Multi-hop Reasoning
Lin Qiu | Yunxuan Xiao | Yanru Qu | Hao Zhou | Lei Li | Weinan Zhang | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Text-based question answering (TBQA) has been studied extensively in recent years. Most existing approaches focus on finding the answer to a question within a single paragraph. However, many difficult questions require multiple supporting evidence from scattered text among two or more documents. In this paper, we propose Dynamically Fused Graph Network (DFGN), a novel method to answer those questions requiring multiple scattered evidence and reasoning over them. Inspired by human’s step-by-step reasoning behavior, DFGN includes a dynamic fusion layer that starts from the entities mentioned in the given query, explores along the entity graph dynamically built from the text, and gradually finds relevant supporting entities from the given documents. We evaluate DFGN on HotpotQA, a public TBQA dataset requiring multi-hop reasoning. DFGN achieves competitive results on the public board. Furthermore, our analysis shows DFGN produces interpretable reasoning chains.

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Exploring Diverse Expressions for Paraphrase Generation
Lihua Qian | Lin Qiu | Weinan Zhang | Xin Jiang | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Paraphrasing plays an important role in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as question answering, information retrieval and sentence simplification. Recently, neural generative models have shown promising results in paraphrase generation. However, prior work mainly focused on single paraphrase generation, while ignoring the fact that diversity is essential for enhancing generalization capability and robustness of downstream applications. Few works have been done to solve diverse paraphrase generation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach with two discriminators and multiple generators to generate a variety of different paraphrases. A reinforcement learning algorithm is applied to train our model. Our experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model not only gains a significant increase in diversity but also improves generation quality over several state-of-the-art baselines.

2018

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Label-Aware Double Transfer Learning for Cross-Specialty Medical Named Entity Recognition
Zhenghui Wang | Yanru Qu | Liheng Chen | Jian Shen | Weinan Zhang | Shaodian Zhang | Yimei Gao | Gen Gu | Ken Chen | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

We study the problem of named entity recognition (NER) from electronic medical records, which is one of the most fundamental and critical problems for medical text mining. Medical records which are written by clinicians from different specialties usually contain quite different terminologies and writing styles. The difference of specialties and the cost of human annotation makes it particularly difficult to train a universal medical NER system. In this paper, we propose a label-aware double transfer learning framework (La-DTL) for cross-specialty NER, so that a medical NER system designed for one specialty could be conveniently applied to another one with minimal annotation efforts. The transferability is guaranteed by two components: (i) we propose label-aware MMD for feature representation transfer, and (ii) we perform parameter transfer with a theoretical upper bound which is also label aware. We conduct extensive experiments on 12 cross-specialty NER tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that La-DTL provides consistent accuracy improvement over strong baselines. Besides, the promising experimental results on non-medical NER scenarios indicate that La-DTL is potential to be seamlessly adapted to a wide range of NER tasks.

2016

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Context-Dependent Sense Embedding
Lin Qiu | Kewei Tu | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2009

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Heterogeneous Transfer Learning for Image Clustering via the SocialWeb
Qiang Yang | Yuqiang Chen | Gui-Rong Xue | Wenyuan Dai | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP

2008

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Searching Questions by Identifying Question Topic and Question Focus
Huizhong Duan | Yunbo Cao | Chin-Yew Lin | Yong Yu
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT

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A Probabilistic Model for Fine-Grained Expert Search
Shenghua Bao | Huizhong Duan | Qi Zhou | Miao Xiong | Yunbo Cao | Yong Yu
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT

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Understanding and Summarizing Answers in Community-Based Question Answering Services
Yuanjie Liu | Shasha Li | Yunbo Cao | Chin-Yew Lin | Dingyi Han | Yong Yu
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008)