Yusu Qian


2020

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Story-level Text Style Transfer: A Proposal
Yusu Qian
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Text style transfer aims to change the style of the input text to the target style while preserving the content to some extent. Previous works on this task are on the sentence level. We aim to work on story-level text style transfer to generate stories that preserve the plot of the input story while exhibiting a strong target style. The challenge in this task compared to previous work is that the structure of the input story, consisting of named entities and their relations with each other, needs to be preserved, and that the generated story needs to be consistent after adding flavors. We plan to explore three methods including the BERT-based method, the Story Realization method, and the Graph-based method.

2019

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Gender Stereotypes Differ between Male and Female Writings
Yusu Qian
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Written language often contains gender stereotypes, typically conveyed unintentionally by the author. To study the difference in how female and male authors portray people of different genders, we quantitatively evaluate and analyze the gender stereotypes in their writings on two different datasets and from multiple aspects. We show that writings by females on average have lower gender stereotype scores. We plan to study and interpret the distributions of gender stereotype scores of individual words, and how they differ between male and female writings. We also plan on using more datasets over the past century to study how the stereotypes in female and male writings evolved over time.

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Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models with a Gender-Equalizing Loss Function
Yusu Qian | Urwa Muaz | Ben Zhang | Jae Won Hyun
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Gender bias exists in natural language datasets, which neural language models tend to learn, resulting in biased text generation. In this research, we propose a debiasing approach based on the loss function modification. We introduce a new term to the loss function which attempts to equalize the probabilities of male and female words in the output. Using an array of bias evaluation metrics, we provide empirical evidence that our approach successfully mitigates gender bias in language models without increasing perplexity. In comparison to existing debiasing strategies, data augmentation, and word embedding debiasing, our method performs better in several aspects, especially in reducing gender bias in occupation words. Finally, we introduce a combination of data augmentation and our approach and show that it outperforms existing strategies in all bias evaluation metrics.