arXiv subjects

Ting Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ting Liu.

At least 379 records · Page 21Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Exploiting Persona Information for Diverse Generation of Conversational Responses

In human conversations, due to their personalities in mind, people can easily carry out and maintain the conversations. Giving conversational context with persona information to a chatbot, how to exploit the information to generate diverse and sustainable conversations is still a non-trivial task. Previous work on persona-based conversational models successfully make use of predefined persona information and have shown great promise in delivering more realistic responses. And they all learn with the assumption that given a source input, there is only one target response. However, in human conversations, there are massive appropriate responses to a given input message. In this paper, we propose a memory-augmented architecture to exploit persona information from context and incorporate a conditional variational autoencoder model together to generate diverse and sustainable conversations. We evaluate the proposed model on a benchmark persona-chat dataset. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our model can deliver more diverse and more engaging persona-based responses than baseline approaches.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training for Neural Response Generation

Dialogue systems are usually built on either generation-based or retrieval-based approaches, yet they do not benefit from the advantages of different models. In this paper, we propose a Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training (REAT) method for neural response generation. Distinct from existing approaches, the REAT method leverages an encoder-decoder framework in terms of an adversarial training paradigm, while taking advantage of N-best response candidates from a retrieval-based system to construct the discriminator. An empirical study on a large scale public available benchmark dataset shows that the REAT method significantly outperforms the vanilla Seq2Seq model as well as the conventional adversarial training approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Story Ending Prediction by Transferable BERT

Recent advances, such as GPT and BERT, have shown success in incorporating a pre-trained transformer language model and fine-tuning operation to improve downstream NLP systems. However, this framework still has some fundamental problems in effectively incorporating supervised knowledge from other related tasks. In this study, we investigate a transferable BERT (TransBERT) training framework, which can transfer not only general language knowledge from large-scale unlabeled data but also specific kinds of knowledge from various semantically related supervised tasks, for a target task. Particularly, we propose utilizing three kinds of transfer tasks, including natural language inference, sentiment classification, and next action prediction, to further train BERT based on a pre-trained model. This enables the model to get a better initialization for the target task. We take story ending prediction as the target task to conduct experiments. The final result, an accuracy of 91.8%, dramatically outperforms previous state-of-the-art baseline methods. Several comparative experiments give some helpful suggestions on how to select transfer tasks. Error analysis shows what are the strength and weakness of BERT-based models for story ending prediction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Solutions for fractional operator problem via local Pohozaev identities

We consider the following fractional Schrödinger equation involving critical exponent: \begin{equation*} \left\{\begin{array}{ll} (-Δ)^s u+V(|y'|,y'')u=u^{2^*_s-1} \ \hbox{ in } \ \mathbb{R}^N, \\ u>0, \ y \in \mathbb{R}^N, \end{array}\right. \end{equation*} where $s\in(\frac{1}{2}, 1)$, $(y',y'')\in \mathbb{R}^2\times \mathbb{R}^{N-2}$, $V(|y'|,y'')$ is a bounded nonnegative function with a weaker symmetry condition. We prove the existence of infinitely many solutions for the above problem by a finite dimensional reduction method combining various Pohazaev identies.

math.AP↗

arXiv2019

DeeperLab: Single-Shot Image Parser

We present a single-shot, bottom-up approach for whole image parsing. Whole image parsing, also known as Panoptic Segmentation, generalizes the tasks of semantic segmentation for 'stuff' classes and instance segmentation for 'thing' classes, assigning both semantic and instance labels to every pixel in an image. Recent approaches to whole image parsing typically employ separate standalone modules for the constituent semantic and instance segmentation tasks and require multiple passes of inference. Instead, the proposed DeeperLab image parser performs whole image parsing with a significantly simpler, fully convolutional approach that jointly addresses the semantic and instance segmentation tasks in a single-shot manner, resulting in a streamlined system that better lends itself to fast processing. For quantitative evaluation, we use both the instance-based Panoptic Quality (PQ) metric and the proposed region-based Parsing Covering (PC) metric, which better captures the image parsing quality on 'stuff' classes and larger object instances. We report experimental results on the challenging Mapillary Vistas dataset, in which our single model achieves 31.95% (val) / 31.6% PQ (test) and 55.26% PC (val) with 3 frames per second (fps) on GPU or near real-time speed (22.6 fps on GPU) with reduced accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Attribute Acquisition in Ontology based on Representation Learning of Hierarchical Classes and Attributes

Attribute acquisition for classes is a key step in ontology construction, which is often achieved by community members manually. This paper investigates an attention-based automatic paradigm called TransATT for attribute acquisition, by learning the representation of hierarchical classes and attributes in Chinese ontology. The attributes of an entity can be acquired by merely inspecting its classes, because the entity can be regard as the instance of its classes and inherit their attributes. For explicitly describing of the class of an entity unambiguously, we propose class-path to represent the hierarchical classes in ontology, instead of the terminal class word of the hypernym-hyponym relation (i.e., is-a relation) based hierarchy. The high performance of TransATT on attribute acquisition indicates the promising ability of the learned representation of class-paths and attributes. Moreover, we construct a dataset named \textbf{BigCilin11k}. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese dataset with abundant hierarchical classes and entities with attributes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Towards Time-Aware Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction

Distant supervision for relation extraction heavily suffers from the wrong labeling problem. To alleviate this issue in news data with the timestamp, we take a new factor time into consideration and propose a novel time-aware distant supervision framework (Time-DS). Time-DS is composed of a time series instance-popularity and two strategies. Instance-popularity is to encode the strong relevance of time and true relation mention. Therefore, instance-popularity would be an effective clue to reduce the noises generated through distant supervision labeling. The two strategies, i.e., hard filter and curriculum learning are both ways to implement instance-popularity for better relation extraction in the manner of Time-DS. The curriculum learning is a more sophisticated and flexible way to exploit instance-popularity to eliminate the bad effects of noises, thus get better relation extraction performance. Experiments on our collected multi-source news corpus show that Time-DS achieves significant improvements for relation extraction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Learning to Refine Source Representations for Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) models generally adopt an encoder-decoder architecture for modeling the entire translation process. The encoder summarizes the representation of input sentence from scratch, which is potentially a problem if the sentence is ambiguous. When translating a text, humans often create an initial understanding of the source sentence and then incrementally refine it along the translation on the target side. Starting from this intuition, we propose a novel encoder-refiner-decoder framework, which dynamically refines the source representations based on the generated target-side information at each decoding step. Since the refining operations are time-consuming, we propose a strategy, leveraging the power of reinforcement learning models, to decide when to refine at specific decoding steps. Experimental results on both Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks show that the proposed approach significantly and consistently improves translation performance over the standard encoder-decoder framework. Furthermore, when refining strategy is applied, results still show reasonable improvement over the baseline without much decrease in decoding speed.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

A Neural Multi-Task Learning Framework to Jointly Model Medical Named Entity Recognition and Normalization

State-of-the-art studies have demonstrated the superiority of joint modelling over pipeline implementation for medical named entity recognition and normalization due to the mutual benefits between the two processes. To exploit these benefits in a more sophisticated way, we propose a novel deep neural multi-task learning framework with explicit feedback strategies to jointly model recognition and normalization. On one hand, our method benefits from the general representations of both tasks provided by multi-task learning. On the other hand, our method successfully converts hierarchical tasks into a parallel multi-task setting while maintaining the mutual supports between tasks. Both of these aspects improve the model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method performs significantly better than state-of-the-art approaches on two publicly available medical literature datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Reducible and irreducible approximation of complex symmetric operators

This paper aims to study reducible and irreducible approximation in the set $\textsl{CSO}$ of all complex symmetric operators on a separable, complex Hilbert space $\mathcal H$. When ${\rm dim} \mathcal H=\infty$, it is proved that both those reducible ones and those irreducible ones are norm dense in $\textsl{CSO}$. When ${\rm dim} \mathcal H<\infty$, irreducible complex symmetric operators constitute an open, dense subset of $\textsl{CSO}$.

math.FA↗

arXiv2018

Devil in the Details: Towards Accurate Single and Multiple Human Parsing

Human parsing has received considerable interest due to its wide application potentials. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to develop an accurate human parsing system in an efficient and elegant way. In this paper, we identify several useful properties, including feature resolution, global context information and edge details, and perform rigorous analyses to reveal how to leverage them to benefit the human parsing task. The advantages of these useful properties finally result in a simple yet effective Context Embedding with Edge Perceiving (CE2P) framework for single human parsing. Our CE2P is end-to-end trainable and can be easily adopted for conducting multiple human parsing. Benefiting the superiority of CE2P, we achieved the 1st places on all three human parsing benchmarks. Without any bells and whistles, we achieved 56.50\% (mIoU), 45.31\% (mean $AP^r$) and 33.34\% ($AP^p_{0.5}$) in LIP, CIHP and MHP v2.0, which outperform the state-of-the-arts more than 2.06\%, 3.81\% and 1.87\%, respectively. We hope our CE2P will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in single/multiple human parsing. Code has been made available at \url{https://github.com/liutinglt/CE2P}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

An AMR Aligner Tuned by Transition-based Parser

In this paper, we propose a new rich resource enhanced AMR aligner which produces multiple alignments and a new transition system for AMR parsing along with its oracle parser. Our aligner is further tuned by our oracle parser via picking the alignment that leads to the highest-scored achievable AMR graph. Experimental results show that our aligner outperforms the rule-based aligner in previous work by achieving higher alignment F1 score and consistently improving two open-sourced AMR parsers. Based on our aligner and transition system, we develop a transition-based AMR parser that parses a sentence into its AMR graph directly. An ensemble of our parsers with only words and POS tags as input leads to 68.4 Smatch F1 score.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

A Detection and Segmentation Architecture for Skin Lesion Segmentation on Dermoscopy Images

This report summarises our method and validation results for the ISIC Challenge 2018 - Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection - Task 1: Lesion Segmentation. We present a two-stage method for lesion segmentation with optimised training method and ensemble post-process. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on lesion segmentation and we win the first place in ISIC 2018 task1.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Unsupervised Total Variation Loss for Semi-supervised Deep Learning of Semantic Segmentation

We introduce a novel unsupervised loss function for learning semantic segmentation with deep convolutional neural nets (ConvNet) when densely labeled training images are not available. More specifically, the proposed loss function penalizes the L1-norm of the gradient of the label probability vector image , i.e. total variation, produced by the ConvNet. This can be seen as a regularization term that promotes piecewise smoothness of the label probability vector image produced by the ConvNet during learning. The unsupervised loss function is combined with a supervised loss in a semi-supervised setting to learn ConvNets that can achieve high semantic segmentation accuracy even when only a tiny percentage of the pixels in the training images are labeled. We demonstrate significant improvements over the purely supervised setting in the Weizmann horse, Stanford background and Sift Flow datasets. Furthermore, we show that using the proposed piecewise smoothness constraint in the learning phase significantly outperforms post-processing results from a purely supervised approach with Markov Random Fields (MRF). Finally, we note that the framework we introduce is general and can be used to learn to label other types of structures such as curvilinear structures by modifying the unsupervised loss function accordingly.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Towards Better UD Parsing: Deep Contextualized Word Embeddings, Ensemble, and Treebank Concatenation

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) submitted to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. We base our submission on Stanford's winning system for the CoNLL 2017 shared task and make two effective extensions: 1) incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings into both the part of speech tagger and parser; 2) ensembling parsers trained with different initialization. We also explore different ways of concatenating treebanks for further improvements. Experimental results on the development data show the effectiveness of our methods. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to LAS (75.84%) and outperformed the other systems by a large margin.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Chinese Zero pronoun Resolution

Deep neural network models for Chinese zero pronoun resolution learn semantic information for zero pronoun and candidate antecedents, but tend to be short-sighted---they often make local decisions. They typically predict coreference chains between the zero pronoun and one single candidate antecedent one link at a time, while overlooking their long-term influence on future decisions. Ideally, modeling useful information of preceding potential antecedents is critical when later predicting zero pronoun-candidate antecedent pairs. In this study, we show how to integrate local and global decision-making by exploiting deep reinforcement learning models. With the help of the reinforcement learning agent, our model learns the policy of selecting antecedents in a sequential manner, where useful information provided by earlier predicted antecedents could be utilized for making later coreference decisions. Experimental results on OntoNotes 5.0 dataset show that our technique surpasses the state-of-the-art models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Sequence-to-Sequence Data Augmentation for Dialogue Language Understanding

In this paper, we study the problem of data augmentation for language understanding in task-oriented dialogue system. In contrast to previous work which augments an utterance without considering its relation with other utterances, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation based data augmentation framework that leverages one utterance's same semantic alternatives in the training data. A novel diversity rank is incorporated into the utterance representation to make the model produce diverse utterances and these diversely augmented utterances help to improve the language understanding module. Experimental results on the Airline Travel Information System dataset and a newly created semantic frame annotation on Stanford Multi-turn, Multidomain Dialogue Dataset show that our framework achieves significant improvements of 6.38 and 10.04 F-scores respectively when only a training set of hundreds utterances is represented. Case studies also confirm that our method generates diverse utterances.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue with Dialogue State Representation

Classic pipeline models for task-oriented dialogue system require explicit modeling the dialogue states and hand-crafted action spaces to query a domain-specific knowledge base. Conversely, sequence-to-sequence models learn to map dialogue history to the response in current turn without explicit knowledge base querying. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages the advantages of classic pipeline and sequence-to-sequence models. Our framework models a dialogue state as a fixed-size distributed representation and use this representation to query a knowledge base via an attention mechanism. Experiment on Stanford Multi-turn Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialogue Dataset shows that our framework significantly outperforms other sequence-to-sequence based baseline models on both automatic and human evaluation.

cs.CL↗