Yuan Fang


2024

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Context-Aware Adapter Tuning for Few-Shot Relation Learning in Knowledge Graphs
Liu Ran | Zhongzhou Liu | Xiaoli Li | Yuan Fang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are instrumental in various real-world applications, yet they often suffer from incompleteness due to missing relations. To predict instances for novel relations with limited training examples, few-shot relation learning approaches have emerged, utilizing techniques such as meta-learning. However, the assumption is that novel relations in meta-testing and base relations in meta-training are independently and identically distributed, which may not hold in practice. To address the limitation, we propose RelAdapter, a context-aware adapter for few-shot relation learning in KGs designed to enhance the adaptation process in meta-learning. First, RelAdapter is equipped with a lightweight adapter module that facilitates relation-specific, tunable adaptation of meta-knowledge in a parameter-efficient manner. Second, RelAdapter is enriched with contextual information about the target relation, enabling enhanced adaptation to each distinct relation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark KGs validate the superiority of RelAdapter over state-of-the-art methods.

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A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding
Jinggui Liang | Yuxia Wu | Yuan Fang | Hao Fei | Lizi Liao
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In the rapidly evolving field of conversational AI, Ontology Expansion (OnExp) is crucial for enhancing the adaptability and robustness of conversational agents. Traditional models rely on static, predefined ontologies, limiting their ability to handle new and unforeseen user needs. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques in OnExp for conversational understanding. It categorizes the existing literature into three main areas: (1) New Intent Discovery, (2) New Slot-Value Discovery, and (3) Joint OnExp. By examining the methodologies, benchmarks, and challenges associated with these areas, we highlight several emerging frontiers in OnExp to improve agent performance in real-world scenarios and discuss their corresponding challenges. This survey aspires to be a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, promoting further exploration and innovation in this crucial domain.

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AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization
Sheng Yang | Yurong Wu | Yan Gao | Zineng Zhou | Bin Benjamin Zhu | Xiaodi Sun | Jian-Guang Lou | Zhiming Ding | Anbang Hu | Yuan Fang | Yunsong Li | Junyan Chen | Linjun Yang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Prompt engineering is very important to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). When dealing with complex issues, prompt engineers tend to distill multiple patterns from examples and inject relevant solutions to optimize the prompts, achieving satisfying results. However, existing automatic prompt optimization techniques are only limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. In this paper, we present AMPO, an automatic prompt optimization method that can iteratively develop a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. Our goal is to explore a novel way of structuring prompts with multi-branches to better handle multiple patterns in complex tasks, for which we introduce three modules: Pattern Recognition, Branch Adjustment, and Branch Pruning. In experiments across five tasks, AMPO consistently achieves the best results. Additionally, our approach demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to our adoption of a minimal search strategy.

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SIBO: A Simple Booster for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Zhihao Wen | Jie Zhang | Yuan Fang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Fine-tuning all parameters of large language models (LLMs) necessitates substantial computational power and extended time. Latest advancements in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques, such as Adapter tuning and LoRA, allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of these LLMs. Concurrently, it has been noted that the issue of over-smoothing diminishes the effectiveness of these Transformer-based LLMs, resulting in suboptimal performances in downstream tasks. In this paper, we present SIBO, which is a SImple BOoster to enhance PEFT, by injecting an initial residual. SIBO is straightforward and readily extensible to a range of state-of-the-art PEFT techniques to alleviate over-smoothing and enhance performance. Extensive experiments on 22 benchmark datasets demonstrate that SIBO significantly enhances the performance of various strong baselines, achieving up to 15.7% and 23.5% improvement over existing PEFT methods on the arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks, respectively.

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Class Name Guided Out-of-Scope Intent Classification
Chandan Gautam | Sethupathy Parameswaran | Aditya Kane | Yuan Fang | Savitha Ramasamy | Suresh Sundaram | Sunil Kumar Sahu | Xiaoli Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

2014

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Entity Linking on Microblogs with Spatial and Temporal Signals
Yuan Fang | Ming-Wei Chang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 2

Microblogs present an excellent opportunity for monitoring and analyzing world happenings. Given that words are often ambiguous, entity linking becomes a crucial step towards understanding microblogs. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of entity linking on microblogs. We first observe that spatiotemporal (i.e., spatial and temporal) signals play a key role, but they are not utilized in existing approaches. Thus, we propose a novel entity linking framework that incorporates spatiotemporal signals through a weakly supervised process. Using entity annotations on real-world data, our experiments show that the spatiotemporal model improves F1 by more than 10 points over existing systems. Finally, we present a qualitative study to visualize the effectiveness of our approach.