Yue Wang


2023

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Towards Better Hierarchical Text Classification with Data Generation
Yue Wang | Dan Qiao | Juntao Li | Jinxiong Chang | Qishen Zhang | Zhongyi Liu | Guannan Zhang | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) focuses on classifying one text into multiple labels, which are organized as a hierarchical taxonomy. Due to its wide involution in realistic scenarios, HTC attracts long-term attention from both industry and academia. However, the high cost of hierarchical multi-label annotation makes HTC suffer from the data scarcity problem. In view of the difficulty in balancing the controllability of multiple structural labels and text diversity, automatically generating high-quality data for HTC is challenging and under-explored. To fill this blank, we propose a novel data generation framework tailored for HTC, which can achieve both label controllability and text diversity by extracting high-quality semantic-level and phrase-level hierarchical label information. Experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate that, compared with existing data augmentation methods, the data generated from our method can bring the most significant performance improvements of several strong HTC models. Extensive analysis confirms that the improvements yielded by our proposed method do correlate to the enhancement of label controllability and text diversity.

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G-SPEED: General SParse Efficient Editing MoDel
Haoke Zhang | Yue Wang | Juntao Li | Xiabing Zhou | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated incredible capabilities in understanding, generating, and manipulating languages. Through human-model interactions, LLMs can automatically understand human-issued instructions and output the expected contents, which can significantly increase working efficiency. In various types of real-world demands, editing-oriented tasks account for a considerable proportion, which involves an interactive process that entails the continuous refinement of existing texts to meet specific criteria. Due to the need for multi-round human-model interaction and the generation of complicated editing tasks, there is an emergent need for efficient general editing models. In this paper, we propose General SParse Efficient Editing MoDel (G-SPEED), which can fulfill diverse editing requirements through a single model while maintaining low computational costs. Specifically, we first propose a novel unsupervised text editing data clustering algorithm to deal with the data scarcity problem. Subsequently, we introduce a sparse editing model architecture to mitigate the inherently limited learning capabilities of small language models. The experimental outcomes indicate that G-SPEED, with its 508M parameters, can surpass LLMs equipped with 175B parameters. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Banner-Z/G-SPEED.

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CodeT5+: Open Code Large Language Models for Code Understanding and Generation
Yue Wang | Hung Le | Akhilesh Gotmare | Nghi Bui | Junnan Li | Steven Hoi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on vast source code have achieved prominent progress in code intelligence. However, existing code LLMs have two main limitations. First, they often adopt a specific architecture (encoder-only or decoder-only) or rely on a unified encoder-decoder network for different downstream tasks, lacking the flexibility to operate in the optimal architecture for a specific task. Secondly, they often employ a limited set of pretraining objectives which might not be relevant to some tasks and hence result in substantial performance degrade. To address these limitations, we propose “CodeT5+”, a family of encoder-decoder LLMs for code in which component modules can be flexibly combined to suit a wide range of code tasks. Such flexibility is enabled by our proposed mixture of pretraining objectives, which cover span denoising, contrastive learning, text-code matching, and causal LM pretraining tasks, on both unimodal and bimodal multilingual code corpora. Furthermore, we propose to initialize CodeT5+ with frozen off-the-shelf LLMs without training from scratch to efficiently scale up our models, and explore instruction-tuning to align with natural language instructions. We extensively evaluate CodeT5+ on over 20 code-related benchmarks in different settings, including zero-shot, finetuning, and instruction-tuning. We observe state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on various code-related tasks, and our instruction-tuned CodeT5+ 16B achieves new SoTA results of 35.0% pass@1 and 54.5% pass@10 on the HumanEval code generation task against other open code LLMs, even surpassing the OpenAI code-cushman-001 model.

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Towards Low-Resource Automatic Program Repair with Meta-Learning and Pretrained Language Models
Weishi Wang | Yue Wang | Steven Hoi | Shafiq Joty
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Automatic program repair (APR) has gained increasing attention as an essential technique in software development to reduce manual debugging efforts and boost developers’ productivity. Recent advances in deep learning (DL) based models have demonstrated promising results by learning from large-scale bug-fix examples in a data-driven manner. However, in practical scenarios, software bugs have an imbalanced distribution, and the fixing knowledge learned by APR models often only capture the patterns of frequent error types, making it inapplicable to handle the rare error types. To address this limitation, we investigate a novel task of low-resource APR, and propose Meta-APR, a new meta-learning framework integrated with code pretrained language models to generate fixes for low-resource bugs with limited training samples. Our Meta-APR learns better error-specific knowledge from high-resource bugs through efficient first-order meta-learning optimization, which allows for a faster adaptation to the target low-resource bugs. Besides, while we adopt CodeT5, a pretrained code-aware encoder-decoder Transformer, as the backbone model for Meta-APR, it is a model-agnostic framework that can be integrated with any neural models. Extensive experimental results on three benchmarks in various programming languages verify the superiority of our method over existing DL-based APR approaches.

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汉语语义构词的资源建设与计算评估(Construction of Chinese Semantic Word-Formation and its Computing Applications)
Yue Wang (王悦) | Yang Liu (刘扬) | Qiliang Liang (梁启亮) | Hansi Wang (王涵思)
Proceedings of the 22nd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

“汉语是一种意合型语言,汉语中语素的构词方式与规律是描述、理解词义的重要因素。关于语素构词的方式,语言学界有语法构词与语义构词这两种观点,其中,语义构词对语素间关系的表达更为深入。本文采取语义构词的路线,基于语言学视角,考虑汉语构词特点,提出了一套面向计算的语义构词结构体系,通过随机森林自动标注与人工校验相结合的方式,构建汉语语义构词知识库,并在词义生成的任务上对该资源进行计算评估。实验取得了良好的结果,基于语义构词知识库的词义生成BLEU值达25.07,较此前的语法构词提升了3.17%,初步验证了这种知识表示方法的有效性。该知识表示方法与资源建设将为人文领域和信息处理等多方面的应用提供新的思路与方案。”

2022

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Detect-Localize-Repair: A Unified Framework for Learning to Debug with CodeT5
Nghi Bui | Yue Wang | Steven C.H. Hoi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Automated software debugging is a crucial task for improving the productivity of software developers. Many neural-based techniques have been proven effective for debugging-related tasks such as bug localization and program repair (or bug fixing). However, these techniques often focus only on either one of them or approach them in a stage-wise manner, ignoring the mutual benefits between them. In this work, we propose a novel unified Detect-Localize-Repair framework based on a pretrained programming language model CodeT5 to seamlessly address these tasks, named CodeT5-DLR. Specifically, we propose three objectives to adapt the generic CodeT5 for debugging: a bug detection objective to determine whether a given code snippet is buggy or not, a bug localization objective to identify the buggy lines, and a program repair objective to translate the buggy code to its fixed version. We evaluate it on each of these tasks and their combined setting on two newly collected line-level debugging datasets in Java and Python. Extensive results show that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines from both NLP and software engineering domains.

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Towards Unified Representations of Knowledge Graph and Expert Rules for Machine Learning and Reasoning
Zhepei Wei | Yue Wang | Jinnan Li | Zhining Liu | Erxin Yu | Yuan Tian | Xin Wang | Yi Chang
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

With a knowledge graph and a set of if-then rules, can we reason about the conclusions given a set of observations? In this work, we formalize this question as the cognitive inference problem, and introduce the Cognitive Knowledge Graph (CogKG) that unifies two representations of heterogeneous symbolic knowledge: expert rules and relational facts. We propose a general framework in which the unified knowledge representations can perform both learning and reasoning. Specifically, we implement the above framework in two settings, depending on the availability of labeled data. When no labeled data are available for training, the framework can directly utilize symbolic knowledge as the decision basis and perform reasoning. When labeled data become available, the framework casts symbolic knowledge as a trainable neural architecture and optimizes the connection weights among neurons through gradient descent. Empirical study on two clinical diagnosis benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over time-tested knowledge-driven and data-driven methods, showing the great potential of the proposed method in unifying heterogeneous symbolic knowledge, i.e., expert rules and relational facts, as the substrate of machine learning and reasoning models.

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Sentence-Level Resampling for Named Entity Recognition
Xiaochen Wang | Yue Wang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

As a fundamental task in natural language processing, named entity recognition (NER) aims to locate and classify named entities in unstructured text. However, named entities are always the minority among all tokens in the text. This data imbalance problem presents a challenge to machine learning models as their learning objective is usually dominated by the majority of non-entity tokens. To alleviate data imbalance, we propose a set of sentence-level resampling methods where the importance of each training sentence is computed based on its tokens and entities. We study the generalizability of these resampling methods on a wide variety of NER models (CRF, Bi-LSTM, and BERT) across corpora from diverse domains (general, social, and medical texts). Extensive experiments show that the proposed methods improve span-level macro F1-scores of the evaluated NER models on multiple corpora, frequently outperforming sub-sentence-level resampling, data augmentation, and special loss functions such as focal and Dice loss.

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FastClass: A Time-Efficient Approach to Weakly-Supervised Text Classification
Tingyu Xia | Yue Wang | Yuan Tian | Yi Chang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to train a classifier using only class descriptions and unlabeled data. Recent research shows that keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, these methods not only rely on carefully-crafted class descriptions to obtain class-specific keywords but also require substantial amount of unlabeled data and takes a long time to train. This paper proposes FastClass, an efficient weakly-supervised classification approach. It uses dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from external unlabeled corpus and selects an optimal subset to train a classifier. Compared to keyword-driven methods, our approach is less reliant on initial class descriptions as it no longer needs to expand each class description into a set of class-specific keywords. Experiments on a wide range of classification tasks show that the proposed approach frequently outperforms keyword-driven models in terms of classification accuracy and often enjoys orders-of-magnitude faster training speed.

2021

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基于词信息嵌入的汉语构词结构识别研究(Chinese Word-Formation Prediction based on Representations of Word-Related Features)
Hua Zheng (郑婳) | Yaqi Yan (殷雅琦) | Yue Wang (王悦) | Damai Dai (代达劢) | Yang Liu (刘扬)
Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

作为一种意合型语言,汉语中的构词结构刻画了构词成分之间的组合关系,是认知、理解词义的关键。在中文信息处理领域,此前的构词结构识别工作大多沿用句法层面的粗粒度标签,且主要基于上下文等词间信息建模,忽略了语素义、词义等词内信息对构词结构识别的作用。本文采用语言学视域下的构词结构标签体系,构建汉语构词结构及相关信息数据集,提出了一种基于Bi-LSTM和Self-attention的模型,以此来探究词内、词间等多方面信息对构词结构识别的潜在影响和能达到的性能。实验取得了良好的预测效果,准确率77.87%,F1值78.36%;同时,对比测试揭示,词内的语素义信息对构词结构识别具有显著的贡献,而词间的上下文信息贡献较弱且带有较强的不稳定性。该预测方法与数据集,将为中文信息处理的多种任务,如语素和词结构分析、词义识别与生成、语言文字研究与词典编纂等提供新的观点和方案。

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CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation
Yue Wang | Weishi Wang | Shafiq Joty | Steven C.H. Hoi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Pre-trained models for Natural Languages (NL) like BERT and GPT have been recently shown to transfer well to Programming Languages (PL) and largely benefit a broad set of code-related tasks. Despite their success, most current methods either rely on an encoder-only (or decoder-only) pre-training that is suboptimal for generation (resp. understanding) tasks or process the code snippet in the same way as NL, neglecting the special characteristics of PL such as token types. We present CodeT5, a unified pre-trained encoder-decoder Transformer model that better leverages the code semantics conveyed from the developer-assigned identifiers. Our model employs a unified framework to seamlessly support both code understanding and generation tasks and allows for multi-task learning. Besides, we propose a novel identifier-aware pre-training task that enables the model to distinguish which code tokens are identifiers and to recover them when they are masked. Furthermore, we propose to exploit the user-written code comments with a bimodal dual generation task for better NL-PL alignment. Comprehensive experiments show that CodeT5 significantly outperforms prior methods on understanding tasks such as code defect detection and clone detection, and generation tasks across various directions including PL-NL, NL-PL, and PL-PL. Further analysis reveals that our model can better capture semantic information from code. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/salesforce/CodeT5.

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Towards Modeling the Style of Translators in Neural Machine Translation
Yue Wang | Cuong Hoang | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

One key ingredient of neural machine translation is the use of large datasets from different domains and resources (e.g. Europarl, TED talks). These datasets contain documents translated by professional translators using different but consistent translation styles. Despite that, the model is usually trained in a way that neither explicitly captures the variety of translation styles present in the data nor translates new data in different and controllable styles. In this work, we investigate methods to augment the state of the art Transformer model with translator information that is available in part of the training data. We show that our style-augmented translation models are able to capture the style variations of translators and to generate translations with different styles on new data. Indeed, the generated variations differ significantly, up to +4.5 BLEU score difference. Despite that, human evaluation confirms that the translations are of the same quality.

2020

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Multimodal Joint Attribute Prediction and Value Extraction for E-commerce Product
Tiangang Zhu | Yue Wang | Haoran Li | Youzheng Wu | Xiaodong He | Bowen Zhou
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Product attribute values are essential in many e-commerce scenarios, such as customer service robots, product recommendations, and product retrieval. While in the real world, the attribute values of a product are usually incomplete and vary over time, which greatly hinders the practical applications. In this paper, we propose a multimodal method to jointly predict product attributes and extract values from textual product descriptions with the help of the product images. We argue that product attributes and values are highly correlated, e.g., it will be easier to extract the values on condition that the product attributes are given. Thus, we jointly model the attribute prediction and value extraction tasks from multiple aspects towards the interactions between attributes and values. Moreover, product images have distinct effects on our tasks for different product attributes and values. Thus, we selectively draw useful visual information from product images to enhance our model. We annotate a multimodal product attribute value dataset that contains 87,194 instances, and the experimental results on this dataset demonstrate that explicitly modeling the relationship between attributes and values facilitates our method to establish the correspondence between them, and selectively utilizing visual product information is necessary for the task. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/jd-aig/JAVE.

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Cross-Media Keyphrase Prediction: A Unified Framework with Multi-Modality Multi-Head Attention and Image Wordings
Yue Wang | Jing Li | Michael Lyu | Irwin King
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Social media produces large amounts of contents every day. To help users quickly capture what they need, keyphrase prediction is receiving a growing attention. Nevertheless, most prior efforts focus on text modeling, largely ignoring the rich features embedded in the matching images. In this work, we explore the joint effects of texts and images in predicting the keyphrases for a multimedia post. To better align social media style texts and images, we propose: (1) a novel Multi-Modality MultiHead Attention (M3H-Att) to capture the intricate cross-media interactions; (2) image wordings, in forms of optical characters and image attributes, to bridge the two modalities. Moreover, we design a unified framework to leverage the outputs of keyphrase classification and generation and couple their advantages. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset newly collected from Twitter show that our model significantly outperforms the previous state of the art based on traditional attention mechanisms. Further analyses show that our multi-head attention is able to attend information from various aspects and boost classification or generation in diverse scenarios.

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VD-BERT: A Unified Vision and Dialog Transformer with BERT
Yue Wang | Shafiq Joty | Michael Lyu | Irwin King | Caiming Xiong | Steven C.H. Hoi
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Visual dialog is a challenging vision-language task, where a dialog agent needs to answer a series of questions through reasoning on the image content and dialog history. Prior work has mostly focused on various attention mechanisms to model such intricate interactions. By contrast, in this work, we propose VD-BERT, a simple yet effective framework of unified vision-dialog Transformer that leverages the pretrained BERT language models for Visual Dialog tasks. The model is unified in that (1) it captures all the interactions between the image and the multi-turn dialog using a single-stream Transformer encoder, and (2) it supports both answer ranking and answer generation seamlessly through the same architecture. More crucially, we adapt BERT for the effective fusion of vision and dialog contents via visually grounded training. Without the need of pretraining on external vision-language data, our model yields new state of the art, achieving the top position in both single-model and ensemble settings (74.54 and 75.35 NDCG scores) on the visual dialog leaderboard. Our code and pretrained models are released at https://github.com/salesforce/VD-BERT.

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A Novel Cascade Binary Tagging Framework for Relational Triple Extraction
Zhepei Wei | Jianlin Su | Yue Wang | Yuan Tian | Yi Chang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Extracting relational triples from unstructured text is crucial for large-scale knowledge graph construction. However, few existing works excel in solving the overlapping triple problem where multiple relational triples in the same sentence share the same entities. In this work, we introduce a fresh perspective to revisit the relational triple extraction task and propose a novel cascade binary tagging framework (CasRel) derived from a principled problem formulation. Instead of treating relations as discrete labels as in previous works, our new framework models relations as functions that map subjects to objects in a sentence, which naturally handles the overlapping problem. Experiments show that the CasRel framework already outperforms state-of-the-art methods even when its encoder module uses a randomly initialized BERT encoder, showing the power of the new tagging framework. It enjoys further performance boost when employing a pre-trained BERT encoder, outperforming the strongest baseline by 17.5 and 30.2 absolute gain in F1-score on two public datasets NYT and WebNLG, respectively. In-depth analysis on different scenarios of overlapping triples shows that the method delivers consistent performance gain across all these scenarios. The source code and data are released online.

2019

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Topic-Aware Neural Keyphrase Generation for Social Media Language
Yue Wang | Jing Li | Hou Pong Chan | Irwin King | Michael R. Lyu | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A huge volume of user-generated content is daily produced on social media. To facilitate automatic language understanding, we study keyphrase prediction, distilling salient information from massive posts. While most existing methods extract words from source posts to form keyphrases, we propose a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based neural keyphrase generation framework, enabling absent keyphrases to be created. Moreover, our model, being topic-aware, allows joint modeling of corpus-level latent topic representations, which helps alleviate data sparsity widely exhibited in social media language. Experiments on three datasets collected from English and Chinese social media platforms show that our model significantly outperforms both extraction and generation models without exploiting latent topics. Further discussions show that our model learns meaningful topics, which interprets its superiority in social media keyphrase generation.

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Microblog Hashtag Generation via Encoding Conversation Contexts
Yue Wang | Jing Li | Irwin King | Michael R. Lyu | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Automatic hashtag annotation plays an important role in content understanding for microblog posts. To date, progress made in this field has been restricted to phrase selection from limited candidates, or word-level hashtag discovery using topic models. Different from previous work considering hashtags to be inseparable, our work is the first effort to annotate hashtags with a novel sequence generation framework via viewing the hashtag as a short sequence of words. Moreover, to address the data sparsity issue in processing short microblog posts, we propose to jointly model the target posts and the conversation contexts initiated by them with bidirectional attention. Extensive experimental results on two large-scale datasets, newly collected from English Twitter and Chinese Weibo, show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models based on classification. Further studies demonstrate our ability to effectively generate rare and even unseen hashtags, which is however not possible for most existing methods.

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The Strength of the Weakest Supervision: Topic Classification Using Class Labels
Jiatong Li | Kai Zheng | Hua Xu | Qiaozhu Mei | Yue Wang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

When developing topic classifiers for real-world applications, we begin by defining a set of meaningful topic labels. Ideally, an intelligent classifier can understand these labels right away and start classifying documents. Indeed, a human can confidently tell if an article is about science, politics, sports, or none of the above, after knowing just the class labels. We study the problem of training an initial topic classifier using only class labels. We investigate existing techniques for solving this problem and propose a simple but effective approach. Experiments on a variety of topic classification data sets show that learning from class labels can save significant initial labeling effort, essentially providing a ”free” warm start to the topic classifier.

2018

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The APVA-TURBO Approach To Question Answering in Knowledge Base
Yue Wang | Richong Zhang | Cheng Xu | Yongyi Mao
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we study the problem of question answering over knowledge base. We identify that the primary bottleneck in this problem is the difficulty in accurately predicting the relations connecting the subject entity to the object entities. We advocate a new model architecture, APVA, which includes a verification mechanism responsible for checking the correctness of predicted relations. The APVA framework naturally supports a well-principled iterative training procedure, which we call turbo training. We demonstrate via experiments that the APVA-TUBRO approach drastically improves the question answering performance.

2016

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Refactoring the Genia Event Extraction Shared Task Toward a General Framework for IE-Driven KB Development
Jin-Dong Kim | Yue Wang | Nicola Colic | Seung Han Beak | Yong Hwan Kim | Min Song
Proceedings of the 4th BioNLP Shared Task Workshop

2014

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A Study of Concept-based Weighting Regularization for Medical Records Search
Yue Wang | Xitong Liu | Hui Fang
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2013

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The Genia Event Extraction Shared Task, 2013 Edition - Overview
Jin-Dong Kim | Yue Wang | Yamamoto Yasunori
Proceedings of the BioNLP Shared Task 2013 Workshop

2012

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PubAnnotation - a persistent and sharable corpus and annotation repository
Jin-Dong Kim | Yue Wang
BioNLP: Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing

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Boosting the protein name recognition performance by bootstrapping on selected text
Yue Wang | Jin-Dong Kim
BioNLP: Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing

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CSAF - a community-sourcing annotation framework
Jin-Dong Kim | Yue Wang
Proceedings of the Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2011

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Overview of Genia Event Task in BioNLP Shared Task 2011
Jin-Dong Kim | Yue Wang | Toshihisa Takagi | Akinori Yonezawa
Proceedings of BioNLP Shared Task 2011 Workshop

2009

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Incorporating GENETAG-style annotation to GENIA corpus
Tomoko Ohta | Jin-Dong Kim | Sampo Pyysalo | Yue Wang | Jun’ichi Tsujii
Proceedings of the BioNLP 2009 Workshop

2008

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Raising the Compatibility of Heterogeneous Annotations: A Case Study on
Yue Wang | Kazuhiro Yoshida | Jin-Dong Kim | Rune Saetre | Jun’ichi Tsujii
Proceedings of the Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing