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Wanxiang Che

Publications and source records attributed to Wanxiang Che.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

MetricPrompt: Prompting Model as a Relevance Metric for Few-shot Text Classification

Prompting methods have shown impressive performance in a variety of text mining tasks and applications, especially few-shot ones. Despite the promising prospects, the performance of prompting model largely depends on the design of prompt template and verbalizer. In this work, we propose MetricPrompt, which eases verbalizer design difficulty by reformulating few-shot text classification task into text pair relevance estimation task. MetricPrompt adopts prompting model as the relevance metric, further bridging the gap between Pre-trained Language Model's (PLM) pre-training objective and text classification task, making possible PLM's smooth adaption. Taking a training sample and a query one simultaneously, MetricPrompt captures cross-sample relevance information for accurate relevance estimation. We conduct experiments on three widely used text classification datasets across four few-shot settings. Results show that MetricPrompt outperforms manual verbalizer and other automatic verbalizer design methods across all few-shot settings, achieving new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

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ICDAR 2023 Competition on Structured Text Extraction from Visually-Rich Document Images

Structured text extraction is one of the most valuable and challenging application directions in the field of Document AI. However, the scenarios of past benchmarks are limited, and the corresponding evaluation protocols usually focus on the submodules of the structured text extraction scheme. In order to eliminate these problems, we organized the ICDAR 2023 competition on Structured text extraction from Visually-Rich Document images (SVRD). We set up two tracks for SVRD including Track 1: HUST-CELL and Track 2: Baidu-FEST, where HUST-CELL aims to evaluate the end-to-end performance of Complex Entity Linking and Labeling, and Baidu-FEST focuses on evaluating the performance and generalization of Zero-shot / Few-shot Structured Text extraction from an end-to-end perspective. Compared to the current document benchmarks, our two tracks of competition benchmark enriches the scenarios greatly and contains more than 50 types of visually-rich document images (mainly from the actual enterprise applications). The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 24th March, 2023. There are 35 participants and 91 valid submissions received for Track 1, and 15 participants and 26 valid submissions received for Track 2. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, and submission summaries. According to the performance of the submissions, we believe there is still a large gap on the expected information extraction performance for complex and zero-shot scenarios. It is hoped that this competition will attract many researchers in the field of CV and NLP, and bring some new thoughts to the field of Document AI.

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Language Anisotropic Cross-Lingual Model Editing

Multilingual pre-trained language models can learn task-specific abilities or memorize facts across multiple languages but inevitably make undesired predictions with specific inputs. Under similar observation, model editing aims to post-hoc calibrate a model targeted to specific inputs with keeping the model's raw behavior. However, existing work only studies the monolingual scenario, which lacks the cross-lingual transferability to perform editing simultaneously across languages. In this work, we focus on cross-lingual model editing. Firstly, we define the cross-lingual model editing task and corresponding metrics, where an edit in one language propagates to the others. Next, we propose a framework to naturally adapt monolingual model editing approaches to the cross-lingual scenario using parallel corpus. Further, we propose language anisotropic editing to improve cross-lingual editing by amplifying different subsets of parameters for each language. On the newly defined cross-lingual model editing task, we empirically demonstrate the failure of monolingual baselines in propagating the edit to multiple languages and the effectiveness of the proposed language anisotropic model editing. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/franklear/LiME.

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ManagerTower: Aggregating the Insights of Uni-Modal Experts for Vision-Language Representation Learning

Two-Tower Vision-Language (VL) models have shown promising improvements on various downstream VL tasks. Although the most advanced work improves performance by building bridges between encoders, it suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of uni-modal representations and cannot flexibly exploit different levels of uni-modal semantic knowledge. In this work, we propose ManagerTower, a novel VL model architecture that gathers and combines the insights of pre-trained uni-modal experts at different levels. The managers introduced in each cross-modal layer can adaptively aggregate uni-modal semantic knowledge to facilitate more comprehensive cross-modal alignment and fusion. ManagerTower outperforms previous strong baselines both with and without Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP). With only 4M VLP data, ManagerTower achieves superior performances on various downstream VL tasks, especially 79.15% accuracy on VQAv2 Test-Std, 86.56% IR@1 and 95.64% TR@1 on Flickr30K. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/LooperXX/ManagerTower.

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OpenSLU: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Toolkit for Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is one of the core components of a task-oriented dialogue system, which aims to extract the semantic meaning of user queries (e.g., intents and slots). In this work, we introduce OpenSLU, an open-source toolkit to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible toolkit for spoken language understanding. Specifically, OpenSLU unifies 10 SLU models for both single-intent and multi-intent scenarios, which support both non-pretrained and pretrained models simultaneously. Additionally, OpenSLU is highly modularized and extensible by decomposing the model architecture, inference, and learning process into reusable modules, which allows researchers to quickly set up SLU experiments with highly flexible configurations. OpenSLU is implemented based on PyTorch, and released at \url{https://github.com/LightChen233/OpenSLU}.

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CSED: A Chinese Semantic Error Diagnosis Corpus

Recently, much Chinese text error correction work has focused on Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) and Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED). In contrast, little attention has been paid to the complicated problem of Chinese Semantic Error Diagnosis (CSED), which lacks relevant datasets. The study of semantic errors is important because they are very common and may lead to syntactic irregularities or even problems of comprehension. To investigate this, we build the CSED corpus, which includes two datasets. The one is for the CSED-Recognition (CSED-R) task. The other is for the CSED-Correction (CSED-C) task. Our annotation guarantees high-quality data through quality assurance mechanisms. Our experiments show that powerful pre-trained models perform poorly on this corpus. We also find that the CSED task is challenging, as evidenced by the fact that even humans receive a low score. This paper proposes syntax-aware models to specifically adapt to the CSED task. The experimental results show that the introduction of the syntax-aware approach is meaningful.

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U-NEED: A Fine-grained Dataset for User Needs-Centric E-commerce Conversational Recommendation

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to understand the information needs and preferences expressed in a dialogue to recommend suitable items to the user. Most of the existing conversational recommendation datasets are synthesized or simulated with crowdsourcing, which has a large gap with real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap, previous work contributes a dataset E-ConvRec, based on pre-sales dialogues between users and customer service staff in E-commerce scenarios. However, E-ConvRec only supplies coarse-grained annotations and general tasks for making recommendations in pre-sales dialogues. Different from that, we use real user needs as a clue to explore the E-commerce conversational recommendation in complex pre-sales dialogues, namely user needs-centric E-commerce conversational recommendation (UNECR). In this paper, we construct a user needs-centric E-commerce conversational recommendation dataset (U-NEED) from real-world E-commerce scenarios. U-NEED consists of 3 types of resources: (i) 7,698 fine-grained annotated pre-sales dialogues in 5 top categories (ii) 333,879 user behaviors and (iii) 332,148 product knowledge tuples. To facilitate the research of UNECR, we propose 5 critical tasks: (i) pre-sales dialogue understanding (ii) user needs elicitation (iii) user needs-based recommendation (iv) pre-sales dialogue generation and (v) pre-sales dialogue evaluation. We establish baseline methods and evaluation metrics for each task. We report experimental results of 5 tasks on U-NEED. We also report results in 3 typical categories. Experimental results indicate that the challenges of UNECR in various categories are different.

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Controllable Data Augmentation for Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL

The limited scale of annotated data constraints existing context-dependent text-to-SQL models because of the complexity of labeling. The data augmentation method is a commonly used method to solve this problem. However, the data generated by current augmentation methods often lack diversity. In this paper, we introduce ConDA, which generates interactive questions and corresponding SQL results. We designed the SQL dialogue state to enhance the data diversity through the state transition. Meanwhile, we also present a filter method to ensure the data quality by a grounding model. Additionally, we utilize a grounding model to identify and filter low-quality questions that mismatch the state information. Experimental results on the SParC and CoSQL datasets show that ConDA boosts the baseline model to achieve an average improvement of $3.3\%$ on complex questions. Moreover, we analyze the augmented data, which reveals that the data generated by ConDA are of high quality in both SQL template hardness and types, turns, and question consistency.

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A Preliminary Evaluation of ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue Understanding

Zero-shot dialogue understanding aims to enable dialogue to track the user's needs without any training data, which has gained increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the understanding ability of ChatGPT for zero-shot dialogue understanding tasks including spoken language understanding (SLU) and dialogue state tracking (DST). Experimental results on four popular benchmarks reveal the great potential of ChatGPT for zero-shot dialogue understanding. In addition, extensive analysis shows that ChatGPT benefits from the multi-turn interactive prompt in the DST task but struggles to perform slot filling for SLU. Finally, we summarize several unexpected behaviors of ChatGPT in dialogue understanding tasks, hoping to provide some insights for future research on building zero-shot dialogue understanding systems with Large Language Models (LLMs).

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MetaPrompting: Learning to Learn Better Prompts

Prompting method is regarded as one of the crucial progress for few-shot nature language processing. Recent research on prompting moves from discrete tokens based ``hard prompts'' to continuous ``soft prompts'', which employ learnable vectors as pseudo prompt tokens and achieve better performance. Though showing promising prospects, these soft-prompting methods are observed to rely heavily on good initialization to take effect. Unfortunately, obtaining a perfect initialization for soft prompts requires understanding of inner language models working and elaborate design, which is no easy task and has to restart from scratch for each new task. To remedy this, we propose a generalized soft prompting method called MetaPrompting, which adopts the well-recognized model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm to automatically find better prompt initialization that facilitates fast adaptation to new prompting tasks.Extensive experiments show MetaPrompting tackles soft prompt initialization problem and brings significant improvement on four different datasets (over 6 points improvement in accuracy for 1-shot setting), achieving new state-of-the-art performance.

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A Survey on Table-and-Text HybridQA: Concepts, Methods, Challenges and Future Directions

Table-and-text hybrid question answering (HybridQA) is a widely used and challenging NLP task commonly applied in the financial and scientific domain. The early research focuses on migrating other QA task methods to HybridQA, while with further research, more and more HybridQA-specific methods have been present. With the rapid development of HybridQA, the systematic survey is still under-explored to summarize the main techniques and advance further research. So we present this work to summarize the current HybridQA benchmarks and methods, then analyze the challenges and future directions of this task. The contributions of this paper can be summarized in three folds: (1) first survey, to our best knowledge, including benchmarks, methods and challenges for HybridQA; (2) systematic investigation with the reasonable comparison of the existing systems to articulate their advantages and shortcomings; (3) detailed analysis of challenges in four important dimensions to shed light on future directions.

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HIT-SCIR at MMNLU-22: Consistency Regularization for Multilingual Spoken Language Understanding

Multilingual spoken language understanding (SLU) consists of two sub-tasks, namely intent detection and slot filling. To improve the performance of these two sub-tasks, we propose to use consistency regularization based on a hybrid data augmentation strategy. The consistency regularization enforces the predicted distributions for an example and its semantically equivalent augmentation to be consistent. We conduct experiments on the MASSIVE dataset under both full-dataset and zero-shot settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method improves the performance on both intent detection and slot filling tasks. Our system\footnote{The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/bozheng-hit/MMNLU-22-HIT-SCIR}.} ranked 1st in the MMNLU-22 competition under the full-dataset setting.

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Towards Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Formulaic Knowledge

In this paper, we study the problem of knowledge-intensive text-to-SQL, in which domain knowledge is necessary to parse expert questions into SQL queries over domain-specific tables. We formalize this scenario by building a new Chinese benchmark KnowSQL consisting of domain-specific questions covering various domains. We then address this problem by presenting formulaic knowledge, rather than by annotating additional data examples. More concretely, we construct a formulaic knowledge bank as a domain knowledge base and propose a framework (ReGrouP) to leverage this formulaic knowledge during parsing. Experiments using ReGrouP demonstrate a significant 28.2% improvement overall on KnowSQL.

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MultiSpider: Towards Benchmarking Multilingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.

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InterHT: Knowledge Graph Embeddings by Interaction between Head and Tail Entities

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models learn the representation of entities and relations in knowledge graphs. Distance-based methods show promising performance on link prediction task, which predicts the result by the distance between two entity representations. However, most of these methods represent the head entity and tail entity separately, which limits the model capacity. We propose two novel distance-based methods named InterHT and InterHT+ that allow the head and tail entities to interact better and get better entity representation. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the best results on ogbl-wikikg2 dataset.

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LERT: A Linguistically-motivated Pre-trained Language Model

Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) has become a representative foundation model in the natural language processing field. Most PLMs are trained with linguistic-agnostic pre-training tasks on the surface form of the text, such as the masked language model (MLM). To further empower the PLMs with richer linguistic features, in this paper, we aim to propose a simple but effective way to learn linguistic features for pre-trained language models. We propose LERT, a pre-trained language model that is trained on three types of linguistic features along with the original MLM pre-training task, using a linguistically-informed pre-training (LIP) strategy. We carried out extensive experiments on ten Chinese NLU tasks, and the experimental results show that LERT could bring significant improvements over various comparable baselines. Furthermore, we also conduct analytical experiments in various linguistic aspects, and the results prove that the design of LERT is valid and effective. Resources are available at https://github.com/ymcui/LERT

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TextHacker: Learning based Hybrid Local Search Algorithm for Text Hard-label Adversarial Attack

Existing textual adversarial attacks usually utilize the gradient or prediction confidence to generate adversarial examples, making it hard to be deployed in real-world applications. To this end, we consider a rarely investigated but more rigorous setting, namely hard-label attack, in which the attacker can only access the prediction label. In particular, we find we can learn the importance of different words via the change on prediction label caused by word substitutions on the adversarial examples. Based on this observation, we propose a novel adversarial attack, termed Text Hard-label attacker (TextHacker). TextHacker randomly perturbs lots of words to craft an adversarial example. Then, TextHacker adopts a hybrid local search algorithm with the estimation of word importance from the attack history to minimize the adversarial perturbation. Extensive evaluations for text classification and textual entailment show that TextHacker significantly outperforms existing hard-label attacks regarding the attack performance as well as adversary quality.

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NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation

Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter).

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