Xiao Zhang


2023

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Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue
Chuhao Jin | Yutao Zhu | Lingzhen Kong | Shijie Li | Xiao Zhang | Ruihua Song | Xu Chen | Huan Chen | Yuchong Sun | Yu Chen | Jun Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Persuasive dialogue aims to persuade users to achieve some targets by conversations. While previous persuasion models have achieved notable successes, they mostly base themselves on utterance semantic matching, and an important aspect has been ignored, that is, the strategy of the conversations, for example, the agent can choose an emotional-appeal strategy to impress users. Compared with utterance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuasions. In this paper, we propose to build a persuasion model by jointly modeling the conversation semantics and strategies, where we design a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor to match the semantics and strategies, respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach can significantly improve the state-of-the-art baseline by 5% on a small dataset and 37% on a large dataset in terms of Recall@1. Detailed analyses show that the auto-regressive predictor contributes most to the final performance.

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Discourse Representation Structure Parsing for Chinese
Chunliu Wang | Xiao Zhang | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 4th Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning Workshop

Previous work has predominantly focused on monolingual English semantic parsing. We, instead, explore the feasibility of Chinese semantic parsing in the absence of labeled data for Chinese meaning representations. We describe the pipeline of automatically collecting the linearized Chinese meaning representation data for sequential-to-sequential neural networks. We further propose a test suite designed explicitly for Chinese semantic parsing, which provides fine-grained evaluation for parsing performance, where we aim to study Chinese parsing difficulties. Our experimental results show that the difficulty of Chinese semantic parsing is mainly caused by adverbs. Realizing Chinese parsing through machine translation and an English parser yields slightly lower performance than training a model directly on Chinese data.

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Bridging The Gap: Entailment Fused-T5 for Open-retrieval Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension
Xiao Zhang | Heyan Huang | Zewen Chi | Xian-Ling Mao
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversational interaction scenes. Machines are required to make a decision of “Yes/No/Inquire” or generate a follow-up question when the decision is “Inquire” based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user question and dialogue history. Recent studies try to reduce the information gap between decision-making and question generation, in order to improve the performance of generation. However, the information gap still persists because these methods are still limited in pipeline framework, where decision-making and question generation are performed separately, making it hard to share the entailment reasoning used in decision-making across all stages. To tackle the above problem, we propose a novel one-stage end-to-end framework, called Entailment Fused-T5 (EFT), to bridge the information gap between decision-making and question generation in a global understanding manner. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the OR-ShARC benchmark. Our model and code are publicly available at an anonymous link.

2022

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Cross-Lingual Phrase Retrieval
Heqi Zheng | Xiao Zhang | Zewen Chi | Heyan Huang | Yan Tan | Tian Lan | Wei Wei | Xian-Ling Mao
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Cross-lingual retrieval aims to retrieve relevant text across languages. Current methods typically achieve cross-lingual retrieval by learning language-agnostic text representations in word or sentence level. However, how to learn phrase representations for cross-lingual phrase retrieval is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose , a cross-lingual phrase retriever that extracts phrase representations from unlabeled example sentences. Moreover, we create a large-scale cross-lingual phrase retrieval dataset, which contains 65K bilingual phrase pairs and 4.2M example sentences in 8 English-centric language pairs. Experimental results show that outperforms state-of-the-art baselines which utilize word-level or sentence-level representations. also shows impressive zero-shot transferability that enables the model to perform retrieval in an unseen language pair during training. Our dataset, code, and trained models are publicly available at github.com/cwszz/XPR/.

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ET5: A Novel End-to-end Framework for Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension
Xiao Zhang | Heyan Huang | Zewen Chi | Xian-Ling Mao
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) aims to assist computers to understand an natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. Existing methods typically require three steps: (1) decision making based on entailment reasoning; (2) span extraction if required by the above decision; (3) question rephrasing based on the extracted span. However, for nearly all these methods, the span extraction and question rephrasing steps cannot fully exploit the fine-grained entailment reasoning information in decision making step because of their relative independence, which will further enlarge the information gap between decision making and question phrasing. Thus, to tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for conversational machine reading comprehension based on shared parameter mechanism, called entailment reasoning T5 (ET5). Despite the lightweight of our proposed framework, experimental results show that the proposed ET5 achieves new state-of-the-art results on the ShARC leaderboard with the BLEU-4 score of 55.2. Our model and code are publicly available.

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MICO: Selective Search with Mutual Information Co-training
Zhanyu Wang | Xiao Zhang | Hyokun Yun | Choon Hui Teo | Trishul Chilimbi
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In contrast to traditional exhaustive search, selective search first clusters documents into several groups before all the documents are searched exhaustively by a query, to limit the search executed within one group or only a few groups. Selective search is designed to reduce the latency and computation in modern large-scale search systems. In this study, we propose MICO, a Mutual Information CO-training framework for selective search with minimal supervision using the search logs. After training, MICO does not only cluster the documents, but also routes unseen queries to the relevant clusters for efficient retrieval. In our empirical experiments, MICO significantly improves the performance on multiple metrics of selective search and outperforms a number of existing competitive baselines.

2021

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软件标识符的自然语言规范性研究(Research on the Natural Language Normalness of Software Identifiers)
Dongzhen Wen (汶东震) | Fan Zhang (张帆) | Xiao Zhang (张晓) | Liang Yang (杨亮) | Yuan Lin (林原) | Bo Xu (徐博) | Hongfei Lin (林鸿飞)
Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

软件源代码的理解则是软件协同开发与维护的核心,而源代码中占半数以上的标识符的理解则在软件理解中起到重要作用,传统软件工程主要研究通过命名规范限制标识符的命名过程以构造更易理解和交流的标识符。本文则在梳理分析常见编程语言命名规范的基础上,提出一种全新的标识符可理解性评价标准。具体而言,本文首先总结梳理了常见主流编程语言中的命名规范并类比自然语言语素概念本文提出基于软件语素的标识符构成过程,即标识符的构成可被视为软件语素的生成、排列和连接过程。在此基础上,本文提出一种结合自然语料库的软件标识符规范性评价方法,用来衡量软件标识符是否易于理解。最后,本文通过源代码理解数据集和乇乩乴乨乵乢平台中开源项目对规范性指标进行了验证性实验,结果表明本文提出的规范性分数能够很好衡量软件项目的可理解性。

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Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition
Xuan Zhou | Xiao Zhang | Chenyang Tao | Junya Chen | Bing Xu | Wei Wang | Jing Xiao
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Although pre-trained big models (e.g., BERT, ERNIE, XLNet, GPT3 etc.) have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by the excessive computations and memory demand involved. For many applications, including named entity recognition (NER), matching the state-of-the-art result under budget has attracted considerable attention. Drawing power from the recent advance in knowledge distillation (KD), this work presents a novel distillation scheme to efficiently transfer the knowledge learned from big models to their more affordable counterpart. Our solution highlights the construction of surrogate labels through the k-best Viterbi algorithm to distill knowledge from the teacher model. To maximally assimilate knowledge into the student model, we propose a multi-grained distillation scheme, which integrates cross entropy involved in conditional random field (CRF) and fuzzy learning. To validate the effectiveness of our proposal, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation on five NER benchmarks, reporting cross-the-board performance gains relative to competing prior-arts. We further discuss ablation results to dissect our gains.

2020

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Semi-supervised Parsing with a Variational Autoencoding Parser
Xiao Zhang | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2020 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies

We propose an end-to-end variational autoencoding parsing (VAP) model for semi-supervised graph-based projective dependency parsing. It encodes the input using continuous latent variables in a sequential manner by deep neural networks (DNN) that can utilize the contextual information, and reconstruct the input using a generative model. The VAP model admits a unified structure with different loss functions for labeled and unlabeled data with shared parameters. We conducted experiments on the WSJ data sets, showing the proposed model can use the unlabeled data to increase the performance on a limited amount of labeled data, on a par with a recently proposed semi-supervised parser with faster inference.

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Cross-Lingual Document Retrieval with Smooth Learning
Jiapeng Liu | Xiao Zhang | Dan Goldwasser | Xiao Wang
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Cross-lingual document search is an information retrieval task in which the queries’ language and the documents’ language are different. In this paper, we study the instability of neural document search models and propose a novel end-to-end robust framework that achieves improved performance in cross-lingual search with different documents’ languages. This framework includes a novel measure of the relevance, smooth cosine similarity, between queries and documents, and a novel loss function, Smooth Ordinal Search Loss, as the objective function. We further provide theoretical guarantee on the generalization error bound for the proposed framework. We conduct experiments to compare our approach with other document search models, and observe significant gains under commonly used ranking metrics on the cross-lingual document retrieval task in a variety of languages.

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Semi-supervised Autoencoding Projective Dependency Parsing
Xiao Zhang | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We describe two end-to-end autoencoding models for semi-supervised graph-based projective dependency parsing. The first model is a Locally Autoencoding Parser (LAP) encoding the input using continuous latent variables in a sequential manner; The second model is a Globally Autoencoding Parser (GAP) encoding the input into dependency trees as latent variables, with exact inference. Both models consist of two parts: an encoder enhanced by deep neural networks (DNN) that can utilize the contextual information to encode the input into latent variables, and a decoder which is a generative model able to reconstruct the input. Both LAP and GAP admit a unified structure with different loss functions for labeled and unlabeled data with shared parameters. We conducted experiments on WSJ and UD dependency parsing data sets, showing that our models can exploit the unlabeled data to improve the performance given a limited amount of labeled data, and outperform a previously proposed semi-supervised model.

2019

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Sentiment Tagging with Partial Labels using Modular Architectures
Xiao Zhang | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Many NLP learning tasks can be decomposed into several distinct sub-tasks, each associated with a partial label. In this paper we focus on a popular class of learning problems, sequence prediction applied to several sentiment analysis tasks, and suggest a modular learning approach in which different sub-tasks are learned using separate functional modules, combined to perform the final task while sharing information. Our experiments show this approach helps constrain the learning process and can alleviate some of the supervision efforts.

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Delta Embedding Learning
Xiao Zhang | Ji Wu | Dejing Dou
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Unsupervised word embeddings have become a popular approach of word representation in NLP tasks. However there are limitations to the semantics represented by unsupervised embeddings, and inadequate fine-tuning of embeddings can lead to suboptimal performance. We propose a novel learning technique called Delta Embedding Learning, which can be applied to general NLP tasks to improve performance by optimized tuning of the word embeddings. A structured regularization is applied to the embeddings to ensure they are tuned in an incremental way. As a result, the tuned word embeddings become better word representations by absorbing semantic information from supervision without “forgetting.” We apply the method to various NLP tasks and see a consistent improvement in performance. Evaluation also confirms the tuned word embeddings have better semantic properties.

2017

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Semi-supervised Structured Prediction with Neural CRF Autoencoder
Xiao Zhang | Yong Jiang | Hao Peng | Kewei Tu | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper we propose an end-to-end neural CRF autoencoder (NCRF-AE) model for semi-supervised learning of sequential structured prediction problems. Our NCRF-AE consists of two parts: an encoder which is a CRF model enhanced by deep neural networks, and a decoder which is a generative model trying to reconstruct the input. Our model has a unified structure with different loss functions for labeled and unlabeled data with shared parameters. We developed a variation of the EM algorithm for optimizing both the encoder and the decoder simultaneously by decoupling their parameters. Our Experimental results over the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging task on eight different languages, show that our model can outperform competitive systems in both supervised and semi-supervised scenarios.

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PurdueNLP at SemEval-2017 Task 1: Predicting Semantic Textual Similarity with Paraphrase and Event Embeddings
I-Ta Lee | Mahak Goindani | Chang Li | Di Jin | Kristen Marie Johnson | Xiao Zhang | Maria Leonor Pacheco | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

This paper describes our proposed solution for SemEval 2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity (Daniel Cer and Specia, 2017). The task aims at measuring the degree of equivalence between sentences given in English. Performance is evaluated by computing Pearson Correlation scores between the predicted scores and human judgements. Our proposed system consists of two subsystems and one regression model for predicting STS scores. The two subsystems are designed to learn Paraphrase and Event Embeddings that can take the consideration of paraphrasing characteristics and sentence structures into our system. The regression model associates these embeddings to make the final predictions. The experimental result shows that our system acquires 0.8 of Pearson Correlation Scores in this task.

2016

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Understanding Satirical Articles Using Common-Sense
Dan Goldwasser | Xiao Zhang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4

Automatic satire detection is a subtle text classification task, for machines and at times, even for humans. In this paper we argue that satire detection should be approached using common-sense inferences, rather than traditional text classification methods. We present a highly structured latent variable model capturing the required inferences. The model abstracts over the specific entities appearing in the articles, grouping them into generalized categories, thus allowing the model to adapt to previously unseen situations.

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Adapting Event Embedding for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Maria Leonor Pacheco | I-Ta Lee | Xiao Zhang | Abdullah Khan Zehady | Pranjal Daga | Di Jin | Ayush Parolia | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the CoNLL-16 shared task

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Introducing DRAIL – a Step Towards Declarative Deep Relational Learning
Xiao Zhang | Maria Leonor Pacheco | Chang Li | Dan Goldwasser
Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP

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pkudblab at SemEval-2016 Task 6 : A Specific Convolutional Neural Network System for Effective Stance Detection
Wan Wei | Xiao Zhang | Xuqin Liu | Wei Chen | Tengjiao Wang
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)