arXiv subjects

Baoxing Huai

Publications and source records attributed to Baoxing Huai.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

CED: Catalog Extraction from Documents

Sentence-by-sentence information extraction from long documents is an exhausting and error-prone task. As the indicator of document skeleton, catalogs naturally chunk documents into segments and provide informative cascade semantics, which can help to reduce the search space. Despite their usefulness, catalogs are hard to be extracted without the assist from external knowledge. For documents that adhere to a specific template, regular expressions are practical to extract catalogs. However, handcrafted heuristics are not applicable when processing documents from different sources with diverse formats. To address this problem, we build a large manually annotated corpus, which is the first dataset for the Catalog Extraction from Documents (CED) task. Based on this corpus, we propose a transition-based framework for parsing documents into catalog trees. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baseline systems and shows a good ability to transfer. We believe the CED task could fill the gap between raw text segments and information extraction tasks on extremely long documents. Data and code are available at \url{https://github.com/Spico197/CatalogExtraction}

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks

Causal chain reasoning (CCR) is an essential ability for many decision-making AI systems, which requires the model to build reliable causal chains by connecting causal pairs. However, CCR suffers from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. In other words, the causal pairs to be spliced may have a conflicting threshold boundary or scenario. To address these issues, we propose a novel Reliable Causal chain reasoning framework~(ReCo), which introduces exogenous variables to represent the threshold and scene factors of each causal pair within the causal chain, and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions across exogenous variables via structural causal recurrent neural networks~(SRNN). Experiments show that ReCo outperforms a series of strong baselines on both Chinese and English CCR datasets. Moreover, by injecting reliable causal chain knowledge distilled by ReCo, BERT can achieve better performances on four downstream causal-related tasks than BERT models enhanced by other kinds of knowledge.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Adaptive Teacher Learning and Fine-grained Student Ensemble

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (DS-NER) effectively alleviates the data scarcity problem in NER by automatically generating training samples. Unfortunately, the distant supervision may induce noisy labels, thus undermining the robustness of the learned models and restricting the practical application. To relieve this problem, recent works adopt self-training teacher-student frameworks to gradually refine the training labels and improve the generalization ability of NER models. However, we argue that the performance of the current self-training frameworks for DS-NER is severely underestimated by their plain designs, including both inadequate student learning and coarse-grained teacher updating. Therefore, in this paper, we make the first attempt to alleviate these issues by proposing: (1) adaptive teacher learning comprised of joint training of two teacher-student networks and considering both consistent and inconsistent predictions between two teachers, thus promoting comprehensive student learning. (2) fine-grained student ensemble that updates each fragment of the teacher model with a temporal moving average of the corresponding fragment of the student, which enhances consistent predictions on each model fragment against noise. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on four DS-NER datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses previous SOTA methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Efficient Document-level Event Extraction via Pseudo-Trigger-aware Pruned Complete Graph

Most previous studies of document-level event extraction mainly focus on building argument chains in an autoregressive way, which achieves a certain success but is inefficient in both training and inference. In contrast to the previous studies, we propose a fast and lightweight model named as PTPCG. In our model, we design a novel strategy for event argument combination together with a non-autoregressive decoding algorithm via pruned complete graphs, which are constructed under the guidance of the automatically selected pseudo triggers. Compared to the previous systems, our system achieves competitive results with 19.8\% of parameters and much lower resource consumption, taking only 3.8\% GPU hours for training and up to 8.5 times faster for inference. Besides, our model shows superior compatibility for the datasets with (or without) triggers and the pseudo triggers can be the supplements for annotated triggers to make further improvements. Codes are available at https://github.com/Spico197/DocEE .

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

SingGAN: Generative Adversarial Network For High-Fidelity Singing Voice Generation

Deep generative models have achieved significant progress in speech synthesis to date, while high-fidelity singing voice synthesis is still an open problem for its long continuous pronunciation, rich high-frequency parts, and strong expressiveness. Existing neural vocoders designed for text-to-speech cannot directly be applied to singing voice synthesis because they result in glitches and poor high-frequency reconstruction. In this work, we propose SingGAN, a generative adversarial network designed for high-fidelity singing voice synthesis. Specifically, 1) to alleviate the glitch problem in the generated samples, we propose source excitation with the adaptive feature learning filters to expand the receptive field patterns and stabilize long continuous signal generation; and 2) SingGAN introduces global and local discriminators at different scales to enrich low-frequency details and promote high-frequency reconstruction; and 3) To improve the training efficiency, SingGAN includes auxiliary spectrogram losses and sub-band feature matching penalty loss. To the best of our knowledge, SingGAN is the first work designed toward high-fidelity singing voice vocoding. Our evaluation of SingGAN demonstrates the state-of-the-art results with higher-quality (MOS 4.05) samples. Also, SingGAN enables a sample speed of 50x faster than real-time on a single NVIDIA 2080Ti GPU. We further show that SingGAN generalizes well to the mel-spectrogram inversion of unseen singers, and the end-to-end singing voice synthesis system SingGAN-SVS enjoys a two-stage pipeline to transform the music scores into expressive singing voices. Audio samples are available at \url{https://SingGAN.github.io/}

eess.AS↗

arXiv2022

Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models and their Evaluation for Arabic Natural Language Understanding

There is a growing body of work in recent years to develop pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the Arabic language. This work concerns addressing two major problems in existing Arabic PLMs which constraint progress of the Arabic NLU and NLG fields.First, existing Arabic PLMs are not well-explored and their pre-trainig can be improved significantly using a more methodical approach. Second, there is a lack of systematic and reproducible evaluation of these models in the literature. In this work, we revisit both the pre-training and evaluation of Arabic PLMs. In terms of pre-training, we explore improving Arabic LMs from three perspectives: quality of the pre-training data, size of the model, and incorporating character-level information. As a result, we release three new Arabic BERT-style models ( JABER, Char-JABER, and SABER), and two T5-style models (AT5S and AT5B). In terms of evaluation, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of existing state-of-the-art models on ALUE that is a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU tasks, and on a subset of the ARGEN benchmark for Arabic NLG tasks. We show that our models significantly outperform existing Arabic PLMs and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on discriminative and generative Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. Our models and source code to reproduce of results will be made available shortly.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Delving Deep into Regularity: A Simple but Effective Method for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Recent years have witnessed the improving performance of Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) from proposing new frameworks or incorporating word lexicons. However, the inner composition of entity mentions in character-level Chinese NER has been rarely studied. Actually, most mentions of regular types have strong name regularity. For example, entities end with indicator words such as "company" or "bank" usually belong to organization. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method for investigating the regularity of entity spans in Chinese NER, dubbed as Regularity-Inspired reCOgnition Network (RICON). Specifically, the proposed model consists of two branches: a regularity-aware module and a regularityagnostic module. The regularity-aware module captures the internal regularity of each span for better entity type prediction, while the regularity-agnostic module is employed to locate the boundary of entities and relieve the excessive attention to span regularity. An orthogonality space is further constructed to encourage two modules to extract different aspects of regularity features. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and a practical medical dataset. The experimental results show that our RICON significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, including various lexicon-based methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

VLAD-VSA: Cross-Domain Face Presentation Attack Detection with Vocabulary Separation and Adaptation

For face presentation attack detection (PAD), most of the spoofing cues are subtle, local image patterns (e.g., local image distortion, 3D mask edge and cut photo edges). The representations of existing PAD works with simple global pooling method, however, lose the local feature discriminability. In this paper, the VLAD aggregation method is adopted to quantize local features with visual vocabulary locally partitioning the feature space, and hence preserve the local discriminability. We further propose the vocabulary separation and adaptation method to modify VLAD for cross-domain PADtask. The proposed vocabulary separation method divides vocabulary into domain-shared and domain-specific visual words to cope with the diversity of live and attack faces under the cross-domain scenario. The proposed vocabulary adaptation method imitates the maximization step of the k-means algorithm in the end-to-end training, which guarantees the visual words be close to the center of assigned local features and thus brings robust similarity measurement. We give illustrations and extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of VLAD with the proposed vocabulary separation and adaptation method on standard cross-domain PAD benchmarks. The codes are available at https://github.com/Liubinggunzu/VLAD-VSA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

JABER and SABER: Junior and Senior Arabic BERt

Language-specific pre-trained models have proven to be more accurate than multilingual ones in a monolingual evaluation setting, Arabic is no exception. However, we found that previously released Arabic BERT models were significantly under-trained. In this technical report, we present JABER and SABER, Junior and Senior Arabic BERt respectively, our pre-trained language model prototypes dedicated for Arabic. We conduct an empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of models across a diverse set of existing Arabic NLU tasks. Experimental results show that JABER and SABER achieve state-of-the-art performances on ALUE, a new benchmark for Arabic Language Understanding Evaluation, as well as on a well-established NER benchmark.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Parallel and High-Fidelity Text-to-Lip Generation

As a key component of talking face generation, lip movements generation determines the naturalness and coherence of the generated talking face video. Prior literature mainly focuses on speech-to-lip generation while there is a paucity in text-to-lip (T2L) generation. T2L is a challenging task and existing end-to-end works depend on the attention mechanism and autoregressive (AR) decoding manner. However, the AR decoding manner generates current lip frame conditioned on frames generated previously, which inherently hinders the inference speed, and also has a detrimental effect on the quality of generated lip frames due to error propagation. This encourages the research of parallel T2L generation. In this work, we propose a parallel decoding model for fast and high-fidelity text-to-lip generation (ParaLip). Specifically, we predict the duration of the encoded linguistic features and model the target lip frames conditioned on the encoded linguistic features with their duration in a non-autoregressive manner. Furthermore, we incorporate the structural similarity index loss and adversarial learning to improve perceptual quality of generated lip frames and alleviate the blurry prediction problem. Extensive experiments conducted on GRID and TCD-TIMIT datasets demonstrate the superiority of proposed methods. Video samples are available via \url{https://paralip.github.io/}.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2021

An In-depth Study on Internal Structure of Chinese Words

Unlike English letters, Chinese characters have rich and specific meanings. Usually, the meaning of a word can be derived from its constituent characters in some way. Several previous works on syntactic parsing propose to annotate shallow word-internal structures for better utilizing character-level information. This work proposes to model the deep internal structures of Chinese words as dependency trees with 11 labels for distinguishing syntactic relationships. First, based on newly compiled annotation guidelines, we manually annotate a word-internal structure treebank (WIST) consisting of over 30K multi-char words from Chinese Penn Treebank. To guarantee quality, each word is independently annotated by two annotators and inconsistencies are handled by a third senior annotator. Second, we present detailed and interesting analysis on WIST to reveal insights on Chinese word formation. Third, we propose word-internal structure parsing as a new task, and conduct benchmark experiments using a competitive dependency parser. Finally, we present two simple ways to encode word-internal structures, leading to promising gains on the sentence-level syntactic parsing task.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

FastLR: Non-Autoregressive Lipreading Model with Integrate-and-Fire

Lipreading is an impressive technique and there has been a definite improvement of accuracy in recent years. However, existing methods for lipreading mainly build on autoregressive (AR) model, which generate target tokens one by one and suffer from high inference latency. To breakthrough this constraint, we propose FastLR, a non-autoregressive (NAR) lipreading model which generates all target tokens simultaneously. NAR lipreading is a challenging task that has many difficulties: 1) the discrepancy of sequence lengths between source and target makes it difficult to estimate the length of the output sequence; 2) the conditionally independent behavior of NAR generation lacks the correlation across time which leads to a poor approximation of target distribution; 3) the feature representation ability of encoder can be weak due to lack of effective alignment mechanism; and 4) the removal of AR language model exacerbates the inherent ambiguity problem of lipreading. Thus, in this paper, we introduce three methods to reduce the gap between FastLR and AR model: 1) to address challenges 1 and 2, we leverage integrate-and-fire (I\&F) module to model the correspondence between source video frames and output text sequence. 2) To tackle challenge 3, we add an auxiliary connectionist temporal classification (CTC) decoder to the top of the encoder and optimize it with extra CTC loss. We also add an auxiliary autoregressive decoder to help the feature extraction of encoder. 3) To overcome challenge 4, we propose a novel Noisy Parallel Decoding (NPD) for I\&F and bring Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) into lipreading. Our experiments exhibit that FastLR achieves the speedup up to 10.97$\times$ comparing with state-of-the-art lipreading model with slight WER absolute increase of 1.5\% and 5.5\% on GRID and LRS2 lipreading datasets respectively, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2021

Drug Package Recommendation via Interaction-aware Graph Induction

Recent years have witnessed the rapid accumulation of massive electronic medical records (EMRs), which highly support the intelligent medical services such as drug recommendation. However, prior arts mainly follow the traditional recommendation strategies like collaborative filtering, which usually treat individual drugs as mutually independent, while the latent interactions among drugs, e.g., synergistic or antagonistic effect, have been largely ignored. To that end, in this paper, we target at developing a new paradigm for drug package recommendation with considering the interaction effect within drugs, in which the interaction effects could be affected by patient conditions. Specifically, we first design a pre-training method based on neural collaborative filtering to get the initial embedding of patients and drugs. Then, the drug interaction graph will be initialized based on medical records and domain knowledge. Along this line, we propose a new Drug Package Recommendation (DPR) framework with two variants, respectively DPR on Weighted Graph (DPR-WG) and DPR on Attributed Graph (DPR-AG) to solve the problem, in which each the interactions will be described as signed weights or attribute vectors. In detail, a mask layer is utilized to capture the impact of patient condition, and graph neural networks (GNNs) are leveraged for the final graph induction task to embed the package. Extensive experiments on a real-world data set from a first-rate hospital demonstrate the effectiveness of our DPR framework compared with several competitive baseline methods, and further support the heuristic study for the drug package generation task with adequate performance.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Read, Retrospect, Select: An MRC Framework to Short Text Entity Linking

Entity linking (EL) for the rapidly growing short text (e.g. search queries and news titles) is critical to industrial applications. Most existing approaches relying on adequate context for long text EL are not effective for the concise and sparse short text. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Multi-turn Multiple-choice Machine reading comprehension (M3}) to solve the short text EL from a new perspective: a query is generated for each ambiguous mention exploiting its surrounding context, and an option selection module is employed to identify the golden entity from candidates using the query. In this way, M3 framework sufficiently interacts limited context with candidate entities during the encoding process, as well as implicitly considers the dissimilarities inside the candidate bunch in the selection stage. In addition, we design a two-stage verifier incorporated into M3 to address the commonly existed unlinkable problem in short text. To further consider the topical coherence and interdependence among referred entities, M3 leverages a multi-turn fashion to deal with mentions in a sequence manner by retrospecting historical cues. Evaluation shows that our M3 framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on five Chinese and English datasets for the real-world short text EL.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Object-Aware Multi-Branch Relation Networks for Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Spatio-temporal video grounding aims to retrieve the spatio-temporal tube of a queried object according to the given sentence. Currently, most existing grounding methods are restricted to well-aligned segment-sentence pairs. In this paper, we explore spatio-temporal video grounding on unaligned data and multi-form sentences. This challenging task requires to capture critical object relations to identify the queried target. However, existing approaches cannot distinguish notable objects and remain in ineffective relation modeling between unnecessary objects. Thus, we propose a novel object-aware multi-branch relation network for object-aware relation discovery. Concretely, we first devise multiple branches to develop object-aware region modeling, where each branch focuses on a crucial object mentioned in the sentence. We then propose multi-branch relation reasoning to capture critical object relationships between the main branch and auxiliary branches. Moreover, we apply a diversity loss to make each branch only pay attention to its corresponding object and boost multi-branch learning. The extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗