Yujie He


2024

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Enhancing Question Answering on Charts Through Effective Pre-training Tasks
Ashim Gupta | Vivek Gupta | Shuo Zhang | Yujie He | Ning Zhang | Shalin Shah
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

To completely understand a document, the use of textual information is not enough. Understanding visual cues, such as layouts and charts, is also required. While the current state-of-the-art approaches for document understanding (both OCR-based and OCR-free) work well, a thorough analysis of their capabilities and limitations has not yet been performed. Therefore, in this work, we addresses the limitation of current VisualQA models when applied to charts and plots. To investigate shortcomings of the state-of-the-art models, we conduct a comprehensive behavioral analysis, using ChartQA as a case study. Our findings indicate that existing models particularly underperform in answering questions related to the chart’s structural and visual context, as well as numerical information. To address these issues, we propose three simple pre-training tasks that enforce the existing model in terms of both structural-visual knowledge, as well as its understanding of numerical questions. We evaluate our pre-trained model (called MatCha-v2) on three chart datasets - both extractive and abstractive question datasets - and observe that it achieves an average improvement of 1.7 % over the baseline model.

2023

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TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables
Vivek Gupta | Pranshu Kandoi | Mahek Vora | Shuo Zhang | Yujie He | Ridho Reinanda | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Semi-structured data, such as Infobox tables, often include temporal information about entities, either implicitly or explicitly. Can current NLP systems reason about such information in semi-structured tables? To tackle this question, we introduce the task of temporal question answering on semi-structured tables. We present a dataset, TEMPTABQA, which comprises 11,454 question-answer pairs extracted from 1,208 Wikipedia Infobox tables spanning more than 90 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models for temporal reasoning. We observe that even the top-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by more than 13.5 F1 points. Given these results, our dataset has the potential to serve as a challenging benchmark to improve the temporal reasoning capabilities of NLP models.

2022

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Right for the Right Reason: Evidence Extraction for Trustworthy Tabular Reasoning
Vivek Gupta | Shuo Zhang | Alakananda Vempala | Yujie He | Temma Choji | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

When pre-trained contextualized embedding-based models developed for unstructured data are adapted for structured tabular data, they perform admirably. However, recent probing studies show that these models use spurious correlations, and often predict inference labels by focusing on false evidence or ignoring it altogether. To study this issue, we introduce the task of Trustworthy Tabular Reasoning, where a model needs to extract evidence to be used for reasoning, in addition to predicting the label. As a case study, we propose a two-stage sequential prediction approach, which includes an evidence extraction and an inference stage. First, we crowdsource evidence row labels and develop several unsupervised and supervised evidence extraction strategies for InfoTabS, a tabular NLI benchmark. Our evidence extraction strategy outperforms earlier baselines. On the downstream tabular inference task, using only the automatically extracted evidence as the premise, our approach outperforms prior benchmarks.

2021

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Automatic Construction of Enterprise Knowledge Base
Junyi Chai | Yujie He | Homa Hashemi | Bing Li | Daraksha Parveen | Ranganath Kondapally | Wenjin Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

In this paper, we present an automatic knowledge base construction system from large scale enterprise documents with minimal efforts of human intervention. In the design and deployment of such a knowledge mining system for enterprise, we faced several challenges including data distributional shift, performance evaluation, compliance requirements and other practical issues. We leveraged state-of-the-art deep learning models to extract information (named entities and definitions) at per document level, then further applied classical machine learning techniques to process global statistical information to improve the knowledge base. Experimental results are reported on actual enterprise documents. This system is currently serving as part of a Microsoft 365 service.