arXiv subjects

Liner Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Liner Yang.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Neural Quality Estimation with Multiple Hypotheses for Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to correct writing errors and help language learners improve their writing skills. However, existing GEC models tend to produce spurious corrections or fail to detect lots of errors. The quality estimation model is necessary to ensure learners get accurate GEC results and avoid misleading from poorly corrected sentences. Well-trained GEC models can generate several high-quality hypotheses through decoding, such as beam search, which provide valuable GEC evidence and can be used to evaluate GEC quality. However, existing models neglect the possible GEC evidence from different hypotheses. This paper presents the Neural Verification Network (VERNet) for GEC quality estimation with multiple hypotheses. VERNet establishes interactions among hypotheses with a reasoning graph and conducts two kinds of attention mechanisms to propagate GEC evidence to verify the quality of generated hypotheses. Our experiments on four GEC datasets show that VERNet achieves state-of-the-art grammatical error detection performance, achieves the best quality estimation results, and significantly improves GEC performance by reranking hypotheses. All data and source codes are available at https://github.com/thunlp/VERNet.

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arXiv2021

Few-Shot Domain Adaptation for Grammatical Error Correction via Meta-Learning

Most existing Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) methods based on sequence-to-sequence mainly focus on how to generate more pseudo data to obtain better performance. Few work addresses few-shot GEC domain adaptation. In this paper, we treat different GEC domains as different GEC tasks and propose to extend meta-learning to few-shot GEC domain adaptation without using any pseudo data. We exploit a set of data-rich source domains to learn the initialization of model parameters that facilitates fast adaptation on new resource-poor target domains. We adapt GEC model to the first language (L1) of the second language learner. To evaluate the proposed method, we use nine L1s as source domains and five L1s as target domains. Experiment results on the L1 GEC domain adaptation dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the multi-task transfer learning baseline by 0.50 $F_{0.5}$ score on average and enables us to effectively adapt to a new L1 domain with only 200 parallel sentences.

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arXiv2020

Toward Cross-Lingual Definition Generation for Language Learners

Generating dictionary definitions automatically can prove useful for language learners. However, it's still a challenging task of cross-lingual definition generation. In this work, we propose to generate definitions in English for words in various languages. To achieve this, we present a simple yet effective approach based on publicly available pretrained language models. In this approach, models can be directly applied to other languages after trained on the English dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on zero-shot definition generation. Experiments and manual analyses on newly constructed datasets show that our models have a strong cross-lingual transfer ability and can generate fluent English definitions for Chinese words. We further measure the lexical complexity of generated and reference definitions. The results show that the generated definitions are much simpler, which is more suitable for language learners.

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arXiv2020

Multi-task Learning for Low-resource Second Language Acquisition Modeling

Second language acquisition (SLA) modeling is to predict whether second language learners could correctly answer the questions according to what they have learned. It is a fundamental building block of the personalized learning system and has attracted more and more attention recently. However, as far as we know, almost all existing methods cannot work well in low-resource scenarios due to lacking of training data. Fortunately, there are some latent common patterns among different language-learning tasks, which gives us an opportunity to solve the low-resource SLA modeling problem. Inspired by this idea, in this paper, we propose a novel SLA modeling method, which learns the latent common patterns among different language-learning datasets by multi-task learning and are further applied to improving the prediction performance in low-resource scenarios. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method performs much better than the state-of-the-art baselines in the low-resource scenario. Meanwhile, it also obtains improvement slightly in the non-low-resource scenario.

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arXiv2019

Incorporating Sememes into Chinese Definition Modeling

Chinese definition modeling is a challenging task that generates a dictionary definition in Chinese for a given Chinese word. To accomplish this task, we construct the Chinese Definition Modeling Corpus (CDM), which contains triples of word, sememes and the corresponding definition. We present two novel models to improve Chinese definition modeling: the Adaptive-Attention model (AAM) and the Self- and Adaptive-Attention Model (SAAM). AAM successfully incorporates sememes for generating the definition with an adaptive attention mechanism. It has the capability to decide which sememes to focus on and when to pay attention to sememes. SAAM further replaces recurrent connections in AAM with self-attention and relies entirely on the attention mechanism, reducing the path length between word, sememes and definition. Experiments on CDM demonstrate that by incorporating sememes, our best proposed model can outperform the state-of-the-art method by +6.0 BLEU.

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arXiv2017

Joint POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Transition-based Neural Networks

While part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing are observed to be closely related, existing work on joint modeling with manually crafted feature templates suffers from the feature sparsity and incompleteness problems. In this paper, we propose an approach to joint POS tagging and dependency parsing using transition-based neural networks. Three neural network based classifiers are designed to resolve shift/reduce, tagging, and labeling conflicts. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods for joint POS tagging and dependency parsing across a variety of natural languages.

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