Zeyu Li


2021

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Recommend for a Reason: Unlocking the Power of Unsupervised Aspect-Sentiment Co-Extraction
Zeyu Li | Wei Cheng | Reema Kshetramade | John Houser | Haifeng Chen | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Compliments and concerns in reviews are valuable for understanding users’ shopping interests and their opinions with respect to specific aspects of certain items. Existing review-based recommenders favor large and complex language encoders that can only learn latent and uninterpretable text representations. They lack explicit user-attention and item-property modeling, which however could provide valuable information beyond the ability to recommend items. Therefore, we propose a tightly coupled two-stage approach, including an Aspect-Sentiment Pair Extractor (ASPE) and an Attention-Property-aware Rating Estimator (APRE). Unsupervised ASPE mines Aspect-Sentiment pairs (AS-pairs) and APRE predicts ratings using AS-pairs as concrete aspect-level evidences. Extensive experiments on seven real-world Amazon Review Datasets demonstrate that ASPE can effectively extract AS-pairs which enable APRE to deliver superior accuracy over the leading baselines.

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Powering Comparative Classification with Sentiment Analysis via Domain Adaptive Knowledge Transfer
Zeyu Li | Yilong Qin | Zihan Liu | Wei Wang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We study Comparative Preference Classification (CPC) which aims at predicting whether a preference comparison exists between two entities in a given sentence and, if so, which entity is preferred over the other. High-quality CPC models can significantly benefit applications such as comparative question answering and review-based recommendation. Among the existing approaches, non-deep learning methods suffer from inferior performances. The state-of-the-art graph neural network-based ED-GAT (Ma et al., 2020) only considers syntactic information while ignoring the critical semantic relations and the sentiments to the compared entities. We propose Sentiment Analysis Enhanced COmparative Network (SAECON) which improves CPC accuracy with a sentiment analyzer that learns sentiments to individual entities via domain adaptive knowledge transfer. Experiments on the CompSent-19 (Panchenko et al., 2019) dataset present a significant improvement on the F1 scores over the best existing CPC approaches.

2018

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Learning Gender-Neutral Word Embeddings
Jieyu Zhao | Yichao Zhou | Zeyu Li | Wei Wang | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Word embedding models have become a fundamental component in a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. However, embeddings trained on human-generated corpora have been demonstrated to inherit strong gender stereotypes that reflect social constructs. To address this concern, in this paper, we propose a novel training procedure for learning gender-neutral word embeddings. Our approach aims to preserve gender information in certain dimensions of word vectors while compelling other dimensions to be free of gender influence. Based on the proposed method, we generate a Gender-Neutral variant of GloVe (GN-GloVe). Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that GN-GloVe successfully isolates gender information without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.