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Chaojun Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Chaojun Xiao.

69 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

A Roadmap for Big Model

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.

cs.LG↗

LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset

Recognizing facts is the most fundamental step in making judgments, hence detecting events in the legal documents is important to legal case analysis tasks. However, existing Legal Event Detection (LED) datasets only concern incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data, which restricts the development of LED methods and their downstream applications. To alleviate these issues, we present LEVEN a large-scale Chinese LEgal eVENt detection dataset, with 8,116 legal documents and 150,977 human-annotated event mentions in 108 event types. Not only charge-related events, LEVEN also covers general events, which are critical for legal case understanding but neglected in existing LED datasets. To our knowledge, LEVEN is the largest LED dataset and has dozens of times the data scale of others, which shall significantly promote the training and evaluation of LED methods. The results of extensive experiments indicate that LED is challenging and needs further effort. Moreover, we simply utilize legal events as side information to promote downstream applications. The method achieves improvements of average 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction, and 1.5 points mean average precision in unsupervised case retrieval, which suggests the fundamentality of LED. The source code and dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/LEVEN.

cs.CL↗

CPM-2: Large-scale Cost-effective Pre-trained Language Models

In recent years, the size of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has grown by leaps and bounds. However, efficiency issues of these large-scale PLMs limit their utilization in real-world scenarios. We present a suite of cost-effective techniques for the use of PLMs to deal with the efficiency issues of pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. (1) We introduce knowledge inheritance to accelerate the pre-training process by exploiting existing PLMs instead of training models from scratch. (2) We explore the best practice of prompt tuning with large-scale PLMs. Compared with conventional fine-tuning, prompt tuning significantly reduces the number of task-specific parameters. (3) We implement a new inference toolkit, namely InfMoE, for using large-scale PLMs with limited computational resources. Based on our cost-effective pipeline, we pre-train two models: an encoder-decoder bilingual model with 11 billion parameters (CPM-2) and its corresponding MoE version with 198 billion parameters. In our experiments, we compare CPM-2 with mT5 on downstream tasks. Experimental results show that CPM-2 has excellent general language intelligence. Moreover, we validate the efficiency of InfMoE when conducting inference of large-scale models having tens of billions of parameters on a single GPU. All source code and model parameters are available at https://github.com/TsinghuaAI/CPM.

cs.CL↗

Lawformer: A Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese Legal Long Documents

Legal artificial intelligence (LegalAI) aims to benefit legal systems with the technology of artificial intelligence, especially natural language processing (NLP). Recently, inspired by the success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in the generic domain, many LegalAI researchers devote their effort to apply PLMs to legal tasks. However, utilizing PLMs to address legal tasks is still challenging, as the legal documents usually consist of thousands of tokens, which is far longer than the length that mainstream PLMs can process. In this paper, we release the Longformer-based pre-trained language model, named as Lawformer, for Chinese legal long documents understanding. We evaluate Lawformer on a variety of LegalAI tasks, including judgment prediction, similar case retrieval, legal reading comprehension, and legal question answering. The experimental results demonstrate that our model can achieve promising improvement on tasks with long documents as inputs.

cs.CL↗

Equality before the Law: Legal Judgment Consistency Analysis for Fairness

In a legal system, judgment consistency is regarded as one of the most important manifestations of fairness. However, due to the complexity of factual elements that impact sentencing in real-world scenarios, few works have been done on quantitatively measuring judgment consistency towards real-world data. In this paper, we propose an evaluation metric for judgment inconsistency, Legal Inconsistency Coefficient (LInCo), which aims to evaluate inconsistency between data groups divided by specific features (e.g., gender, region, race). We propose to simulate judges from different groups with legal judgment prediction (LJP) models and measure the judicial inconsistency with the disagreement of the judgment results given by LJP models trained on different groups. Experimental results on the synthetic data verify the effectiveness of LInCo. We further employ LInCo to explore the inconsistency in real cases and come to the following observations: (1) Both regional and gender inconsistency exist in the legal system, but gender inconsistency is much less than regional inconsistency; (2) The level of regional inconsistency varies little across different time periods; (3) In general, judicial inconsistency is negatively correlated with the severity of the criminal charges. Besides, we use LInCo to evaluate the performance of several de-bias methods, such as adversarial learning, and find that these mechanisms can effectively help LJP models to avoid suffering from data bias.

cs.CL↗

UPRec: User-Aware Pre-training for Recommender Systems

Existing sequential recommendation methods rely on large amounts of training data and usually suffer from the data sparsity problem. To tackle this, the pre-training mechanism has been widely adopted, which attempts to leverage large-scale data to perform self-supervised learning and transfer the pre-trained parameters to downstream tasks. However, previous pre-trained models for recommendation focus on leverage universal sequence patterns from user behaviour sequences and item information, whereas ignore capturing personalized interests with the heterogeneous user information, which has been shown effective in contributing to personalized recommendation. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance pre-trained models with heterogeneous user information, called User-aware Pre-training for Recommendation (UPRec). Specifically, UPRec leverages the user attributes andstructured social graphs to construct self-supervised objectives in the pre-training stage and proposes two user-aware pre-training tasks. Comprehensive experimental results on several real-world large-scale recommendation datasets demonstrate that UPRec can effectively integrate user information into pre-trained models and thus provide more appropriate recommendations for users.

cs.IR↗

Adversarial Language Games for Advanced Natural Language Intelligence

We study the problem of adversarial language games, in which multiple agents with conflicting goals compete with each other via natural language interactions. While adversarial language games are ubiquitous in human activities, little attention has been devoted to this field in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a challenging adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo as an example, in which an attacker and a defender compete around a target word. The attacker is tasked with inducing the defender to utter the target word invisible to the defender, while the defender is tasked with detecting the target word before being induced by the attacker. In Adversarial Taboo, a successful attacker must hide its intention and subtly induce the defender, while a competitive defender must be cautious with its utterances and infer the intention of the attacker. Such language abilities can facilitate many important downstream NLP tasks. To instantiate the game, we create a game environment and a competition platform. Comprehensive experiments and empirical studies on several baseline attack and defense strategies show promising and interesting results. Based on the analysis on the game and experiments, we discuss multiple promising directions for future research.

cs.CL↗

Denoising Relation Extraction from Document-level Distant Supervision

Distant supervision (DS) has been widely used to generate auto-labeled data for sentence-level relation extraction (RE), which improves RE performance. However, the existing success of DS cannot be directly transferred to the more challenging document-level relation extraction (DocRE), since the inherent noise in DS may be even multiplied in document level and significantly harm the performance of RE. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pre-trained model for DocRE, which denoises the document-level DS data via multiple pre-training tasks. Experimental results on the large-scale DocRE benchmark show that our model can capture useful information from noisy DS data and achieve promising results.

cs.CL↗

More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction

Relational facts are an important component of human knowledge, which are hidden in vast amounts of text. In order to extract these facts from text, people have been working on relation extraction (RE) for years. From early pattern matching to current neural networks, existing RE methods have achieved significant progress. Yet with explosion of Web text and emergence of new relations, human knowledge is increasing drastically, and we thus require "more" from RE: a more powerful RE system that can robustly utilize more data, efficiently learn more relations, easily handle more complicated context, and flexibly generalize to more open domains. In this paper, we look back at existing RE methods, analyze key challenges we are facing nowadays, and show promising directions towards more powerful RE. We hope our view can advance this field and inspire more efforts in the community.

cs.CL↗

Knowledge Transfer via Pre-training for Recommendation: A Review and Prospect

Recommender systems aim to provide item recommendations for users, and are usually faced with data sparsity problem (e.g., cold start) in real-world scenarios. Recently pre-trained models have shown their effectiveness in knowledge transfer between domains and tasks, which can potentially alleviate the data sparsity problem in recommender systems. In this survey, we first provide a review of recommender systems with pre-training. In addition, we show the benefits of pre-training to recommender systems through experiments. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research for recommender systems with pre-training.

cs.IR↗

How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence

Legal Artificial Intelligence (LegalAI) focuses on applying the technology of artificial intelligence, especially natural language processing, to benefit tasks in the legal domain. In recent years, LegalAI has drawn increasing attention rapidly from both AI researchers and legal professionals, as LegalAI is beneficial to the legal system for liberating legal professionals from a maze of paperwork. Legal professionals often think about how to solve tasks from rule-based and symbol-based methods, while NLP researchers concentrate more on data-driven and embedding methods. In this paper, we introduce the history, the current state, and the future directions of research in LegalAI. We illustrate the tasks from the perspectives of legal professionals and NLP researchers and show several representative applications in LegalAI. We conduct experiments and provide an in-depth analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of existing works to explore possible future directions. You can find the implementation of our work from https://github.com/thunlp/CLAIM.

cs.CL↗

JEC-QA: A Legal-Domain Question Answering Dataset

We present JEC-QA, the largest question answering dataset in the legal domain, collected from the National Judicial Examination of China. The examination is a comprehensive evaluation of professional skills for legal practitioners. College students are required to pass the examination to be certified as a lawyer or a judge. The dataset is challenging for existing question answering methods, because both retrieving relevant materials and answering questions require the ability of logic reasoning. Due to the high demand of multiple reasoning abilities to answer legal questions, the state-of-the-art models can only achieve about 28% accuracy on JEC-QA, while skilled humans and unskilled humans can reach 81% and 64% accuracy respectively, which indicates a huge gap between humans and machines on this task. We will release JEC-QA and our baselines to help improve the reasoning ability of machine comprehension models. You can access the dataset from http://jecqa.thunlp.org/.

cs.CL↗

CAIL2019-SCM: A Dataset of Similar Case Matching in Legal Domain

In this paper, we introduce CAIL2019-SCM, Chinese AI and Law 2019 Similar Case Matching dataset. CAIL2019-SCM contains 8,964 triplets of cases published by the Supreme People's Court of China. CAIL2019-SCM focuses on detecting similar cases, and the participants are required to check which two cases are more similar in the triplets. There are 711 teams who participated in this year's competition, and the best team has reached a score of 71.88. We have also implemented several baselines to help researchers better understand this task. The dataset and more details can be found from https://github.com/china-ai-law-challenge/CAIL2019/tree/master/scm.

cs.CL↗

Overview of CAIL2018: Legal Judgment Prediction Competition

In this paper, we give an overview of the Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) competition at Chinese AI and Law challenge (CAIL2018). This competition focuses on LJP which aims to predict the judgment results according to the given facts. Specifically, in CAIL2018 , we proposed three subtasks of LJP for the contestants, i.e., predicting relevant law articles, charges and prison terms given the fact descriptions. CAIL2018 has attracted several hundreds participants (601 teams, 1, 144 contestants from 269 organizations). In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the task definition, related works, outstanding methods and competition results in CAIL2018.

cs.AI↗

CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction

In this paper, we introduce the \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{AI} and \textbf{L}aw challenge dataset (CAIL2018), the first large-scale Chinese legal dataset for judgment prediction. \dataset contains more than $2.6$ million criminal cases published by the Supreme People's Court of China, which are several times larger than other datasets in existing works on judgment prediction. Moreover, the annotations of judgment results are more detailed and rich. It consists of applicable law articles, charges, and prison terms, which are expected to be inferred according to the fact descriptions of cases. For comparison, we implement several conventional text classification baselines for judgment prediction and experimental results show that it is still a challenge for current models to predict the judgment results of legal cases, especially on prison terms. To help the researchers make improvements on legal judgment prediction, both \dataset and baselines will be released after the CAIL competition\footnote{http://cail.cipsc.org.cn/}.

cs.CL↗