arXiv subjects

Henghui Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Henghui Zhu.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Training

Most recently, there has been significant interest in learning contextual representations for various NLP tasks, by leveraging large scale text corpora to train large neural language models with self-supervised learning objectives, such as Masked Language Model (MLM). However, based on a pilot study, we observe three issues of existing general-purpose language models when they are applied to text-to-SQL semantic parsers: fail to detect column mentions in the utterances, fail to infer column mentions from cell values, and fail to compose complex SQL queries. To mitigate these issues, we present a model pre-training framework, Generation-Augmented Pre-training (GAP), that jointly learns representations of natural language utterances and table schemas by leveraging generation models to generate pre-train data. GAP MODEL is trained on 2M utterance-schema pairs and 30K utterance-schema-SQL triples, whose utterances are produced by generative models. Based on experimental results, neural semantic parsers that leverage GAP MODEL as a representation encoder obtain new state-of-the-art results on both SPIDER and CRITERIA-TO-SQL benchmarks.

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arXiv2020

An Ensemble Approach for Automatic Structuring of Radiology Reports

Automatic structuring of electronic medical records is of high demand for clinical workflow solutions to facilitate extraction, storage, and querying of patient care information. However, developing a scalable solution is extremely challenging, specifically for radiology reports, as most healthcare institutes use either no template or department/institute specific templates. Moreover, radiologists' reporting style varies from one to another as sentences are telegraphic and do not follow general English grammar rules. We present an ensemble method that consolidates the predictions of three models, capturing various attributes of textual information for automatic labeling of sentences with section labels. These three models are: 1) Focus Sentence model, capturing context of the target sentence; 2) Surrounding Context model, capturing the neighboring context of the target sentence; and finally, 3) Formatting/Layout model, aimed at learning report formatting cues. We utilize Bi-directional LSTMs, followed by sentence encoders, to acquire the context. Furthermore, we define several features that incorporate the structure of reports. We compare our proposed approach against multiple baselines and state-of-the-art approaches on a proprietary dataset as well as 100 manually annotated radiology notes from the MIMIC-III dataset, which we are making publicly available. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms other approaches by achieving 97.1% accuracy.

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arXiv2019

Who did They Respond to? Conversation Structure Modeling using Masked Hierarchical Transformer

Conversation structure is useful for both understanding the nature of conversation dynamics and for providing features for many downstream applications such as summarization of conversations. In this work, we define the problem of conversation structure modeling as identifying the parent utterance(s) to which each utterance in the conversation responds to. Previous work usually took a pair of utterances to decide whether one utterance is the parent of the other. We believe the entire ancestral history is a very important information source to make accurate prediction. Therefore, we design a novel masking mechanism to guide the ancestor flow, and leverage the transformer model to aggregate all ancestors to predict parent utterances. Our experiments are performed on the Reddit dataset (Zhang, Culbertson, and Paritosh 2017) and the Ubuntu IRC dataset (Kummerfeld et al. 2019). In addition, we also report experiments on a new larger corpus from the Reddit platform and release this dataset. We show that the proposed model, that takes into account the ancestral history of the conversation, significantly outperforms several strong baselines including the BERT model on all datasets

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arXiv2018

Clinical Concept Extraction with Contextual Word Embedding

Automatic extraction of clinical concepts is an essential step for turning the unstructured data within a clinical note into structured and actionable information. In this work, we propose a clinical concept extraction model for automatic annotation of clinical problems, treatments, and tests in clinical notes utilizing domain-specific contextual word embedding. A contextual word embedding model is first trained on a corpus with a mixture of clinical reports and relevant Wikipedia pages in the clinical domain. Next, a bidirectional LSTM-CRF model is trained for clinical concept extraction using the contextual word embedding model. We tested our proposed model on the I2B2 2010 challenge dataset. Our proposed model achieved the best performance among reported baseline models and outperformed the state-of-the-art models by 3.4% in terms of F1-score.

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arXiv2017

Sequential Dynamic Decision Making with Deep Neural Nets on a Test-Time Budget

Deep neural network (DNN) based approaches hold significant potential for reinforcement learning (RL) and have already shown remarkable gains over state-of-art methods in a number of applications. The effectiveness of DNN methods can be attributed to leveraging the abundance of supervised data to learn value functions, Q-functions, and policy function approximations without the need for feature engineering. Nevertheless, the deployment of DNN-based predictors with very deep architectures can pose an issue due to computational and other resource constraints at test-time in a number of applications. We propose a novel approach for reducing the average latency by learning a computationally efficient gating function that is capable of recognizing states in a sequential decision process for which policy prescriptions of a shallow network suffices and deeper layers of the DNN have little marginal utility. The overall system is adaptive in that it dynamically switches control actions based on state-estimates in order to reduce average latency without sacrificing terminal performance. We experiment with a number of alternative loss-functions to train gating functions and shallow policies and show that in a number of applications a speed-up of up to almost 5X can be obtained with little loss in performance.

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arXiv2017

Learning Policies for Markov Decision Processes from Data

We consider the problem of learning a policy for a Markov decision process consistent with data captured on the state-actions pairs followed by the policy. We assume that the policy belongs to a class of parameterized policies which are defined using features associated with the state-action pairs. The features are known a priori, however, only an unknown subset of them could be relevant. The policy parameters that correspond to an observed target policy are recovered using $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression that best fits the observed state-action samples. We establish bounds on the difference between the average reward of the estimated and the original policy (regret) in terms of the generalization error and the ergodic coefficient of the underlying Markov chain. To that end, we combine sample complexity theory and sensitivity analysis of the stationary distribution of Markov chains. Our analysis suggests that to achieve regret within order $O(\sqrtε)$, it suffices to use training sample size on the order of $Ω(\log n \cdot poly(1/ε))$, where $n$ is the number of the features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a synthetic robot navigation example.

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