arXiv subjects

Liang Pang

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Pang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Adaptive Information Seeking for Open-Domain Question Answering

Information seeking is an essential step for open-domain question answering to efficiently gather evidence from a large corpus. Recently, iterative approaches have been proven to be effective for complex questions, by recursively retrieving new evidence at each step. However, almost all existing iterative approaches use predefined strategies, either applying the same retrieval function multiple times or fixing the order of different retrieval functions, which cannot fulfill the diverse requirements of various questions. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive information-seeking strategy for open-domain question answering, namely AISO. Specifically, the whole retrieval and answer process is modeled as a partially observed Markov decision process, where three types of retrieval operations (e.g., BM25, DPR, and hyperlink) and one answer operation are defined as actions. According to the learned policy, AISO could adaptively select a proper retrieval action to seek the missing evidence at each step, based on the collected evidence and the reformulated query, or directly output the answer when the evidence set is sufficient for the question. Experiments on SQuAD Open and HotpotQA fullwiki, which serve as single-hop and multi-hop open-domain QA benchmarks, show that AISO outperforms all baseline methods with predefined strategies in terms of both retrieval and answer evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Match-Ignition: Plugging PageRank into Transformer for Long-form Text Matching

Neural text matching models have been widely used in community question answering, information retrieval, and dialogue. However, these models designed for short texts cannot well address the long-form text matching problem, because there are many contexts in long-form texts can not be directly aligned with each other, and it is difficult for existing models to capture the key matching signals from such noisy data. Besides, these models are computationally expensive for simply use all textual data indiscriminately. To tackle the effectiveness and efficiency problem, we propose a novel hierarchical noise filtering model, namely Match-Ignition. The main idea is to plug the well-known PageRank algorithm into the Transformer, to identify and filter both sentence and word level noisy information in the matching process. Noisy sentences are usually easy to detect because previous work has shown that their similarity can be explicitly evaluated by the word overlapping, so we directly use PageRank to filter such information based on a sentence similarity graph. Unlike sentences, words rely on their contexts to express concrete meanings, so we propose to jointly learn the filtering and matching process, to well capture the critical word-level matching signals. Specifically, a word graph is first built based on the attention scores in each self-attention block of Transformer, and key words are then selected by applying PageRank on this graph. In this way, noisy words will be filtered out layer by layer in the matching process. Experimental results show that Match-Ignition outperforms both SOTA short text matching models and recent long-form text matching models. We also conduct detailed analysis to show that Match-Ignition efficiently captures important sentences and words, to facilitate the long-form text matching process.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Toward the Understanding of Deep Text Matching Models for Information Retrieval

Semantic text matching is a critical problem in information retrieval. Recently, deep learning techniques have been widely used in this area and obtained significant performance improvements. However, most models are black boxes and it is hard to understand what happened in the matching process, due to the poor interpretability of deep learning. This paper aims at tackling this problem. The key idea is to test whether existing deep text matching methods satisfy some fundamental heuristics in information retrieval. Specifically, four heuristics are used in our study, i.e., term frequency constraint, term discrimination constraint, length normalization constraints, and TF-length constraint. Since deep matching models usually contain many parameters, it is difficult to conduct a theoretical study for these complicated functions. In this paper, We propose an empirical testing method. Specifically, We first construct some queries and documents to make them satisfy the assumption in a constraint, and then test to which extend a deep text matching model trained on the original dataset satisfies the corresponding constraint. Besides, a famous attribution based interpretation method, namely integrated gradient, is adopted to conduct detailed analysis and guide for feasible improvement. Experimental results on LETOR 4.0 and MS Marco show that all the investigated deep text matching methods, both representation and interaction based methods, satisfy the above constraints with high probabilities in statistics. We further extend these constraints to the semantic settings, which are shown to be better satisfied for all the deep text matching models. These empirical findings give clear understandings on why deep text matching models usually perform well in information retrieval. We believe the proposed evaluation methodology will be useful for testing future deep text matching models.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Modeling Relevance Ranking under the Pre-training and Fine-tuning Paradigm

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have been applied to document ranking for information retrieval, which first pre-train a general language model on an unlabeled large corpus and then conduct ranking-specific fine-tuning on expert-labeled relevance datasets. Ideally, an IR system would model relevance from a user-system dualism: the user's view and the system's view. User's view judges the relevance based on the activities of "real users" while the system's view focuses on the relevance signals from the system side, e.g., from the experts or algorithms, etc. Inspired by the user-system relevance views and the success of pre-trained language models, in this paper we propose a novel ranking framework called Pre-Rank that takes both user's view and system's view into consideration, under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. Specifically, to model the user's view of relevance, Pre-Rank pre-trains the initial query-document representations based on large-scale user activities data such as the click log. To model the system's view of relevance, Pre-Rank further fine-tunes the model on expert-labeled relevance data. More importantly, the pre-trained representations, are fine-tuned together with handcrafted learning-to-rank features under a wide and deep network architecture. In this way, Pre-Rank can model the relevance by incorporating the relevant knowledge and signals from both real search users and the IR experts. To verify the effectiveness of Pre-Rank, we showed two implementations by using BERT and SetRank as the underlying ranking model, respectively. Experimental results base on three publicly available benchmarks showed that in both of the implementations, Pre-Rank can respectively outperform the underlying ranking models and achieved state-of-the-art performances.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Transformation Driven Visual Reasoning

This paper defines a new visual reasoning paradigm by introducing an important factor, i.e.~transformation. The motivation comes from the fact that most existing visual reasoning tasks, such as CLEVR in VQA, are solely defined to test how well the machine understands the concepts and relations within static settings, like one image. We argue that this kind of \textbf{state driven visual reasoning} approach has limitations in reflecting whether the machine has the ability to infer the dynamics between different states, which has been shown as important as state-level reasoning for human cognition in Piaget's theory. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel \textbf{transformation driven visual reasoning} task. Given both the initial and final states, the target is to infer the corresponding single-step or multi-step transformation, represented as a triplet (object, attribute, value) or a sequence of triplets, respectively. Following this definition, a new dataset namely TRANCE is constructed on the basis of CLEVR, including three levels of settings, i.e.~Basic (single-step transformation), Event (multi-step transformation), and View (multi-step transformation with variant views). Experimental results show that the state-of-the-art visual reasoning models perform well on Basic, but are still far from human-level intelligence on Event and View. We believe the proposed new paradigm will boost the development of machine visual reasoning. More advanced methods and real data need to be investigated in this direction. The resource of TVR is available at https://hongxin2019.github.io/TVR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Sketch and Customize: A Counterfactual Story Generator

Recent text generation models are easy to generate relevant and fluent text for the given text, while lack of causal reasoning ability when we change some parts of the given text. Counterfactual story rewriting is a recently proposed task to test the causal reasoning ability for text generation models, which requires a model to predict the corresponding story ending when the condition is modified to a counterfactual one. Previous works have shown that the traditional sequence-to-sequence model cannot well handle this problem, as it often captures some spurious correlations between the original and counterfactual endings, instead of the causal relations between conditions and endings. To address this issue, we propose a sketch-and-customize generation model guided by the causality implicated in the conditions and endings. In the sketch stage, a skeleton is extracted by removing words which are conflict to the counterfactual condition, from the original ending. In the customize stage, a generation model is used to fill proper words in the skeleton under the guidance of the counterfactual condition. In this way, the obtained counterfactual ending is both relevant to the original ending and consistent with the counterfactual condition. Experimental results show that the proposed model generates much better endings, as compared with the traditional sequence-to-sequence model.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Wasserstein Distance Regularized Sequence Representation for Text Matching in Asymmetrical Domains

One approach to matching texts from asymmetrical domains is projecting the input sequences into a common semantic space as feature vectors upon which the matching function can be readily defined and learned. In real-world matching practices, it is often observed that with the training goes on, the feature vectors projected from different domains tend to be indistinguishable. The phenomenon, however, is often overlooked in existing matching models. As a result, the feature vectors are constructed without any regularization, which inevitably increases the difficulty of learning the downstream matching functions. In this paper, we propose a novel match method tailored for text matching in asymmetrical domains, called WD-Match. In WD-Match, a Wasserstein distance-based regularizer is defined to regularize the features vectors projected from different domains. As a result, the method enforces the feature projection function to generate vectors such that those correspond to different domains cannot be easily discriminated. The training process of WD-Match amounts to a game that minimizes the matching loss regularized by the Wasserstein distance. WD-Match can be used to improve different text matching methods, by using the method as its underlying matching model. Four popular text matching methods have been exploited in the paper. Experimental results based on four publicly available benchmarks showed that WD-Match consistently outperformed the underlying methods and the baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Beyond Language: Learning Commonsense from Images for Reasoning

This paper proposes a novel approach to learn commonsense from images, instead of limited raw texts or costly constructed knowledge bases, for the commonsense reasoning problem in NLP. Our motivation comes from the fact that an image is worth a thousand words, where richer scene information could be leveraged to help distill the commonsense knowledge, which is often hidden in languages. Our approach, namely Loire, consists of two stages. In the first stage, a bi-modal sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized to conduct the scene layout generation task, based on a text representation model ViBERT. In this way, the required visual scene knowledge, such as spatial relations, will be encoded in ViBERT by the supervised learning process with some bi-modal data like COCO. Then ViBERT is concatenated with a pre-trained language model to perform the downstream commonsense reasoning tasks. Experimental results on two commonsense reasoning problems, i.e. commonsense question answering and pronoun resolution, demonstrate that Loire outperforms traditional language-based methods. We also give some case studies to show what knowledge is learned from images and explain how the generated scene layout helps the commonsense reasoning process.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Modeling Topical Relevance for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation

Topic drift is a common phenomenon in multi-turn dialogue. Therefore, an ideal dialogue generation models should be able to capture the topic information of each context, detect the relevant context, and produce appropriate responses accordingly. However, existing models usually use word or sentence level similarities to detect the relevant contexts, which fail to well capture the topical level relevance. In this paper, we propose a new model, named STAR-BTM, to tackle this problem. Firstly, the Biterm Topic Model is pre-trained on the whole training dataset. Then, the topic level attention weights are computed based on the topic representation of each context. Finally, the attention weights and the topic distribution are utilized in the decoding process to generate the corresponding responses. Experimental results on both Chinese customer services data and English Ubuntu dialogue data show that STAR-BTM significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Ranking Enhanced Dialogue Generation

How to effectively utilize the dialogue history is a crucial problem in multi-turn dialogue generation. Previous works usually employ various neural network architectures (e.g., recurrent neural networks, attention mechanisms, and hierarchical structures) to model the history. However, a recent empirical study by Sankar et al. has shown that these architectures lack the ability of understanding and modeling the dynamics of the dialogue history. For example, the widely used architectures are insensitive to perturbations of the dialogue history, such as words shuffling, utterances missing, and utterances reordering. To tackle this problem, we propose a Ranking Enhanced Dialogue generation framework in this paper. Despite the traditional representation encoder and response generation modules, an additional ranking module is introduced to model the ranking relation between the former utterance and consecutive utterances. Specifically, the former utterance and consecutive utterances are treated as query and corresponding documents, and both local and global ranking losses are designed in the learning process. In this way, the dynamics in the dialogue history can be explicitly captured. To evaluate our proposed models, we conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets, i.e., bAbI, PersonaChat, and JDC. Experimental results show that our models produce better responses in terms of both quantitative measures and human judgments, as compared with the state-of-the-art dialogue generation models. Furthermore, we give some detailed experimental analysis to show where and how the improvements come from.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Robust Reinforcement Learning with Wasserstein Constraint

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to find the optimal policy with some extent of robustness to environmental dynamics. Existing learning algorithms usually enable the robustness through disturbing the current state or simulating environmental parameters in a heuristic way, which lack quantified robustness to the system dynamics (i.e. transition probability). To overcome this issue, we leverage Wasserstein distance to measure the disturbance to the reference transition kernel. With Wasserstein distance, we are able to connect transition kernel disturbance to the state disturbance, i.e. reduce an infinite-dimensional optimization problem to a finite-dimensional risk-aware problem. Through the derived risk-aware optimal Bellman equation, we show the existence of optimal robust policies, provide a sensitivity analysis for the perturbations, and then design a novel robust learning algorithm--Wasserstein Robust Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm (WRAAC). The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified in the Cart-Pole environment.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

SetRank: Learning a Permutation-Invariant Ranking Model for Information Retrieval

In learning-to-rank for information retrieval, a ranking model is automatically learned from the data and then utilized to rank the sets of retrieved documents. Therefore, an ideal ranking model would be a mapping from a document set to a permutation on the set, and should satisfy two critical requirements: (1)~it should have the ability to model cross-document interactions so as to capture local context information in a query; (2)~it should be permutation-invariant, which means that any permutation of the inputted documents would not change the output ranking. Previous studies on learning-to-rank either design uni-variate scoring functions that score each document separately, and thus failed to model the cross-document interactions; or construct multivariate scoring functions that score documents sequentially, which inevitably sacrifice the permutation invariance requirement. In this paper, we propose a neural learning-to-rank model called SetRank which directly learns a permutation-invariant ranking model defined on document sets of any size. SetRank employs a stack of (induced) multi-head self attention blocks as its key component for learning the embeddings for all of the retrieved documents jointly. The self-attention mechanism not only helps SetRank to capture the local context information from cross-document interactions, but also to learn permutation-equivariant representations for the inputted documents, which therefore achieving a permutation-invariant ranking model. Experimental results on three large scale benchmarks showed that the SetRank significantly outperformed the baselines include the traditional learning-to-rank models and state-of-the-art Neural IR models.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

DeepRank: A New Deep Architecture for Relevance Ranking in Information Retrieval

This paper concerns a deep learning approach to relevance ranking in information retrieval (IR). Existing deep IR models such as DSSM and CDSSM directly apply neural networks to generate ranking scores, without explicit understandings of the relevance. According to the human judgement process, a relevance label is generated by the following three steps: 1) relevant locations are detected, 2) local relevances are determined, 3) local relevances are aggregated to output the relevance label. In this paper we propose a new deep learning architecture, namely DeepRank, to simulate the above human judgment process. Firstly, a detection strategy is designed to extract the relevant contexts. Then, a measure network is applied to determine the local relevances by utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) or two-dimensional gated recurrent units (2D-GRU). Finally, an aggregation network with sequential integration and term gating mechanism is used to produce a global relevance score. DeepRank well captures important IR characteristics, including exact/semantic matching signals, proximity heuristics, query term importance, and diverse relevance requirement. Experiments on both benchmark LETOR dataset and a large scale clickthrough data show that DeepRank can significantly outperform learning to ranking methods, and existing deep learning methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

ReCoSa: Detecting the Relevant Contexts with Self-Attention for Multi-turn Dialogue Generation

In multi-turn dialogue generation, response is usually related with only a few contexts. Therefore, an ideal model should be able to detect these relevant contexts and produce a suitable response accordingly. However, the widely used hierarchical recurrent encoderdecoder models just treat all the contexts indiscriminately, which may hurt the following response generation process. Some researchers try to use the cosine similarity or the traditional attention mechanism to find the relevant contexts, but they suffer from either insufficient relevance assumption or position bias problem. In this paper, we propose a new model, named ReCoSa, to tackle this problem. Firstly, a word level LSTM encoder is conducted to obtain the initial representation of each context. Then, the self-attention mechanism is utilized to update both the context and masked response representation. Finally, the attention weights between each context and response representations are computed and used in the further decoding process. Experimental results on both Chinese customer services dataset and English Ubuntu dialogue dataset show that ReCoSa significantly outperforms baseline models, in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations. Further analysis on attention shows that the detected relevant contexts by ReCoSa are highly coherent with human's understanding, validating the correctness and interpretability of ReCoSa.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

A Deep Look into Neural Ranking Models for Information Retrieval

Ranking models lie at the heart of research on information retrieval (IR). During the past decades, different techniques have been proposed for constructing ranking models, from traditional heuristic methods, probabilistic methods, to modern machine learning methods. Recently, with the advance of deep learning technology, we have witnessed a growing body of work in applying shallow or deep neural networks to the ranking problem in IR, referred to as neural ranking models in this paper. The power of neural ranking models lies in the ability to learn from the raw text inputs for the ranking problem to avoid many limitations of hand-crafted features. Neural networks have sufficient capacity to model complicated tasks, which is needed to handle the complexity of relevance estimation in ranking. Since there have been a large variety of neural ranking models proposed, we believe it is the right time to summarize the current status, learn from existing methodologies, and gain some insights for future development. In contrast to existing reviews, in this survey, we will take a deep look into the neural ranking models from different dimensions to analyze their underlying assumptions, major design principles, and learning strategies. We compare these models through benchmark tasks to obtain a comprehensive empirical understanding of the existing techniques. We will also discuss what is missing in the current literature and what are the promising and desired future directions.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

HAS-QA: Hierarchical Answer Spans Model for Open-domain Question Answering

This paper is concerned with open-domain question answering (i.e., OpenQA). Recently, some works have viewed this problem as a reading comprehension (RC) task, and directly applied successful RC models to it. However, the performances of such models are not so good as that in the RC task. In our opinion, the perspective of RC ignores three characteristics in OpenQA task: 1) many paragraphs without the answer span are included in the data collection; 2) multiple answer spans may exist within one given paragraph; 3) the end position of an answer span is dependent with the start position. In this paper, we first propose a new probabilistic formulation of OpenQA, based on a three-level hierarchical structure, i.e.,~the question level, the paragraph level and the answer span level. Then a Hierarchical Answer Spans Model (HAS-QA) is designed to capture each probability. HAS-QA has the ability to tackle the above three problems, and experiments on public OpenQA datasets show that it significantly outperforms traditional RC baselines and recent OpenQA baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Continual Match Based Training in Pommerman: Technical Report

Continual learning is the ability of agents to improve their capacities throughout multiple tasks continually. While recent works in the literature of continual learning mostly focused on developing either particular loss functions or specialized structures of neural network explaining the episodic memory or neural plasticity, we study continual learning from the perspective of the training mechanism. Specifically, we propose a COnitnual Match BAsed Training (COMBAT) framework for training a population of advantage-actor-critic (A2C) agents in Pommerman, a partially observable multi-agent environment with no communication. Following the COMBAT framework, we trained an agent, namely, Navocado, that won the title of the top 1 learning agent in the NeurIPS 2018 Pommerman Competition. Two critical features of our agent are worth mentioning. Firstly, our agent did not learn from any demonstrations. Secondly, our agent is highly reproducible. As a technical report, we articulate the design of state space, action space, reward, and most importantly, the COMBAT framework for our Pommerman agent. We show in the experiments that Pommerman is a perfect environment for studying continual learning, and the agent can improve its performance by continually learning new skills without forgetting the old ones. Finally, the result in the Pommerman Competition verifies the robustness of our agent when competing with various opponents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2017

Locally Smoothed Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and the locally connected layer are limited in capturing the importance and relations of different local receptive fields, which are often crucial for tasks such as face verification, visual question answering, and word sequence prediction. To tackle the issue, we propose a novel locally smoothed neural network (LSNN) in this paper. The main idea is to represent the weight matrix of the locally connected layer as the product of the kernel and the smoother, where the kernel is shared over different local receptive fields, and the smoother is for determining the importance and relations of different local receptive fields. Specifically, a multi-variate Gaussian function is utilized to generate the smoother, for modeling the location relations among different local receptive fields. Furthermore, the content information can also be leveraged by setting the mean and precision of the Gaussian function according to the content. Experiments on some variant of MNIST clearly show our advantages over CNN and locally connected layer.

cs.LG↗