Yong Zhu


2022

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Learn and Review: Enhancing Continual Named Entity Recognition via Reviewing Synthetic Samples
Yu Xia | Quan Wang | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu | Wenhao Wu | Sujian Li | Dai Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Traditional methods for named entity recognition (NER) classify mentions into a fixed set of pre-defined entity types. However, in many real-world scenarios, new entity types are incrementally involved. To investigate this problem, continual learning is introduced for NER. However, the existing method depends on the relevance between tasks and is prone to inter-type confusion. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework Learn-and-Review (L&R) for continual NER under the type-incremental setting to alleviate the above issues. Specifically, for the learning stage, we distill the old knowledge from teacher to a student on the current dataset. For the reviewing stage, we first generate synthetic samples of old types to augment the dataset. Then, we further distill new knowledge from the above student and old knowledge from the teacher to get an enhanced student on the augmented dataset. This stage has the following advantages: (1) The synthetic samples mitigate the gap between the old and new task and thus enhance the further distillation; (2) Different types of entities are jointly seen during training which alleviates the inter-type confusion. Experimental results show that L&R outperforms the state-of-the-art method on CoNLL-03 and OntoNotes-5.0.

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Complex Evolutional Pattern Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Zixuan Li | Saiping Guan | Xiaolong Jin | Weihua Peng | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu | Long Bai | Wei Li | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) is a sequence of KGs corresponding to different timestamps. TKG reasoning aims to predict potential facts in the future given the historical KG sequences. One key of this task is to mine and understand evolutional patterns of facts from these sequences. The evolutional patterns are complex in two aspects, length-diversity and time-variability. Existing models for TKG reasoning focus on modeling fact sequences of a fixed length, which cannot discover complex evolutional patterns that vary in length. Furthermore, these models are all trained offline, which cannot well adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns from then on. Thus, we propose a new model, called Complex Evolutional Network (CEN), which uses a length-aware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to handle evolutional patterns of different lengths via an easy-to-difficult curriculum learning strategy. Besides, we propose to learn the model under the online setting so that it can adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CEN obtains substantial performance improvement under both the traditional offline and the proposed online settings.

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EmRel: Joint Representation of Entities and Embedded Relations for Multi-triple Extraction
Benfeng Xu | Quan Wang | Yajuan Lyu | Yabing Shi | Yong Zhu | Jie Gao | Zhendong Mao
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Multi-triple extraction is a challenging task due to the existence of informative inter-triple correlations, and consequently rich interactions across the constituent entities and relations. While existing works only explore entity representations, we propose to explicitly introduce relation representation, jointly represent it with entities, and novelly align them to identify valid triples.We perform comprehensive experiments on document-level relation extraction and joint entity and relation extraction along with ablations to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method.

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Dynamic Multistep Reasoning based on Video Scene Graph for Video Question Answering
Jianguo Mao | Wenbin Jiang | Xiangdong Wang | Zhifan Feng | Yajuan Lyu | Hong Liu | Yong Zhu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Existing video question answering (video QA) models lack the capacity for deep video understanding and flexible multistep reasoning. We propose for video QA a novel model which performs dynamic multistep reasoning between questions and videos. It creates video semantic representation based on the video scene graph composed of semantic elements of the video and semantic relations among these elements. Then, it performs multistep reasoning for better answer decision between the representations of the question and the video, and dynamically integrate the reasoning results. Experiments show the significant advantage of the proposed model against previous methods in accuracy and interpretability. Against the existing state-of-the-art model, the proposed model dramatically improves more than 4%/3.1%/2% on the three widely used video QA datasets, MSRVTT-QA, MSRVTT multi-choice, and TGIF-QA, and displays better interpretability by backtracing along with the attention mechanisms to the video scene graphs.

2021

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Link Prediction on N-ary Relational Facts: A Graph-based Approach
Quan Wang | Haifeng Wang | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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BDKG at MEDIQA 2021: System Report for the Radiology Report Summarization Task
Songtai Dai | Quan Wang | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

This paper presents our winning system at the Radiology Report Summarization track of the MEDIQA 2021 shared task. Radiology report summarization automatically summarizes radiology findings into free-text impressions. This year’s task emphasizes the generalization and transfer ability of participating systems. Our system is built upon a pre-trained Transformer encoder-decoder architecture, i.e., PEGASUS, deployed with an additional domain adaptation module to particularly handle the transfer and generalization issue. Heuristics like ensemble and text normalization are also used. Our system is conceptually simple yet highly effective, achieving a ROUGE-2 score of 0.436 on test set and ranked the 1st place among all participating systems.

2020

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Multi-view Classification Model for Knowledge Graph Completion
Wenbin Jiang | Mengfei Guo | Yufeng Chen | Ying Li | Jinan Xu | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Most previous work on knowledge graph completion conducted single-view prediction or calculation for candidate triple evaluation, based only on the content information of the candidate triples. This paper describes a novel multi-view classification model for knowledge graph completion, where multiple classification views are performed based on both content and context information for candidate triple evaluation. Each classification view evaluates the validity of a candidate triple from a specific viewpoint, based on the content information inside the candidate triple and the context information nearby the triple. These classification views are implemented by a unified neural network and the classification predictions are weightedly integrated to obtain the final evaluation. Experiments show that, the multi-view model brings very significant improvements over previous methods, and achieves the new state-of-the-art on two representative datasets. We believe that, the flexibility and the scalability of the multi-view classification model facilitates the introduction of additional information and resources for better performance.

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Knowledge-Enhanced Named Entity Disambiguation for Short Text
Zhifan Feng | Qi Wang | Wenbin Jiang | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Named entity disambiguation is an important task that plays the role of bridge between text and knowledge. However, the performance of existing methods drops dramatically for short text, which is widely used in actual application scenarios, such as information retrieval and question answering. In this work, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced method for named entity disambiguation. Considering the problem of information ambiguity and incompleteness for short text, two kinds of knowledge, factual knowledge graph and conceptual knowledge graph, are introduced to provide additional knowledge for the semantic matching between candidate entity and mention context. Our proposed method achieves significant improvement over previous methods on a large manually annotated short-text dataset, and also achieves the state-of-the-art on three standard datasets. The short-text dataset and the proposed model will be publicly available for research use.

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Event Extraction as Multi-turn Question Answering
Fayuan Li | Weihua Peng | Yuguang Chen | Quan Wang | Lu Pan | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Event extraction, which aims to identify event triggers of pre-defined event types and their arguments of specific roles, is a challenging task in NLP. Most traditional approaches formulate this task as classification problems, with event types or argument roles taken as golden labels. Such approaches fail to model rich interactions among event types and arguments of different roles, and cannot generalize to new types or roles. This work proposes a new paradigm that formulates event extraction as multi-turn question answering. Our approach, MQAEE, casts the extraction task into a series of reading comprehension problems, by which it extracts triggers and arguments successively from a given sentence. A history answer embedding strategy is further adopted to model question answering history in the multi-turn process. By this new formulation, MQAEE makes full use of dependency among arguments and event types, and generalizes well to new types with new argument roles. Empirical results on ACE 2005 shows that MQAEE outperforms current state-of-the-art, pushing the final F1 of argument extraction to 53.4% (+2.0%). And it also has a good generalization ability, achieving competitive performance on 13 new event types even if trained only with a few samples of them.

2019

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Multi-grained Attention with Object-level Grounding for Visual Question Answering
Pingping Huang | Jianhui Huang | Yuqing Guo | Min Qiao | Yong Zhu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Attention mechanisms are widely used in Visual Question Answering (VQA) to search for visual clues related to the question. Most approaches train attention models from a coarse-grained association between sentences and images, which tends to fail on small objects or uncommon concepts. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-grained attention method. It learns explicit word-object correspondence by two types of word-level attention complementary to the sentence-image association. Evaluated on the VQA benchmark, the multi-grained attention model achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art models. And the visualized attention maps demonstrate that addition of object-level groundings leads to a better understanding of the images and locates the attended objects more precisely.