arXiv subjects

Yanyan Lan

Publications and source records attributed to Yanyan Lan.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Probing Product Description Generation via Posterior Distillation

In product description generation (PDG), the user-cared aspect is critical for the recommendation system, which can not only improve user's experiences but also obtain more clicks. High-quality customer reviews can be considered as an ideal source to mine user-cared aspects. However, in reality, a large number of new products (known as long-tailed commodities) cannot gather sufficient amount of customer reviews, which brings a big challenge in the product description generation task. Existing works tend to generate the product description solely based on item information, i.e., product attributes or title words, which leads to tedious contents and cannot attract customers effectively. To tackle this problem, we propose an adaptive posterior network based on Transformer architecture that can utilize user-cared information from customer reviews. Specifically, we first extend the self-attentive Transformer encoder to encode product titles and attributes. Then, we apply an adaptive posterior distillation module to utilize useful review information, which integrates user-cared aspects to the generation process. Finally, we apply a Transformer-based decoding phase with copy mechanism to automatically generate the product description. Besides, we also collect a large-scare Chinese product description dataset to support our work and further research in this field. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models in both automatic indicators and human evaluation.

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arXiv2021

Learning to Truncate Ranked Lists for Information Retrieval

Ranked list truncation is of critical importance in a variety of professional information retrieval applications such as patent search or legal search. The goal is to dynamically determine the number of returned documents according to some user-defined objectives, in order to reach a balance between the overall utility of the results and user efforts. Existing methods formulate this task as a sequential decision problem and take some pre-defined loss as a proxy objective, which suffers from the limitation of local decision and non-direct optimization. In this work, we propose a global decision based truncation model named AttnCut, which directly optimizes user-defined objectives for the ranked list truncation. Specifically, we take the successful transformer architecture to capture the global dependency within the ranked list for truncation decision, and employ the reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML) for direct optimization. We consider two types of user-defined objectives which are of practical usage. One is the widely adopted metric such as F1 which acts as a balanced objective, and the other is the best F1 under some minimal recall constraint which represents a typical objective in professional search. Empirical results over the Robust04 and MQ2007 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach as compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.

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arXiv2021

A Linguistic Study on Relevance Modeling in Information Retrieval

Relevance plays a central role in information retrieval (IR), which has received extensive studies starting from the 20th century. The definition and the modeling of relevance has always been critical challenges in both information science and computer science research areas. Along with the debate and exploration on relevance, IR has already become a core task in many real-world applications, such as Web search engines, question answering systems, conversational bots, and so on. While relevance acts as a unified concept in all these retrieval tasks, the inherent definitions are quite different due to the heterogeneity of these tasks. This raises a question to us: Do these different forms of relevance really lead to different modeling focuses? To answer this question, in this work, we conduct an empirical study on relevance modeling in three representative IR tasks, i.e., document retrieval, answer retrieval, and response retrieval. Specifically, we attempt to study the following two questions: 1) Does relevance modeling in these tasks really show differences in terms of natural language understanding (NLU)? We employ 16 linguistic tasks to probe a unified retrieval model over these three retrieval tasks to answer this question. 2) If there do exist differences, how can we leverage the findings to enhance the relevance modeling? We proposed three intervention methods to investigate how to leverage different modeling focuses of relevance to improve these IR tasks. We believe the way we study the problem as well as our findings would be beneficial to the IR community.

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arXiv2021

User-Inspired Posterior Network for Recommendation Reason Generation

Recommendation reason generation, aiming at showing the selling points of products for customers, plays a vital role in attracting customers' attention as well as improving user experience. A simple and effective way is to extract keywords directly from the knowledge-base of products, i.e., attributes or title, as the recommendation reason. However, generating recommendation reason from product knowledge doesn't naturally respond to users' interests. Fortunately, on some E-commerce websites, there exists more and more user-generated content (user-content for short), i.e., product question-answering (QA) discussions, which reflect user-cared aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we consider generating the recommendation reason by taking into account not only the product attributes but also the customer-generated product QA discussions. In reality, adequate user-content is only possible for the most popular commodities, whereas large sums of long-tail products or new products cannot gather a sufficient number of user-content. To tackle this problem, we propose a user-inspired multi-source posterior transformer (MSPT), which induces the model reflecting the users' interests with a posterior multiple QA discussions module, and generating recommendation reasons containing the product attributes as well as the user-cared aspects. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models. Additionally, the analysis also shows that our model can focus more on the user-cared aspects than baselines.

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arXiv2020

Dynamic-K Recommendation with Personalized Decision Boundary

In this paper, we investigate the recommendation task in the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases). State-of-the-art methods in this direction usually cast the problem as to learn a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g., webpages, products). The top-N results are then provided to users as recommendations, where the N is usually a fixed number pre-defined by the system according to some heuristic criteria (e.g., page size, screen size). There is one major assumption underlying this fixed-number recommendation scheme, i.e., there are always sufficient relevant items to users' preferences. Unfortunately, this assumption may not always hold in real-world scenarios. In some applications, there might be very limited candidate items to recommend, and some users may have very high relevance requirement in recommendation. In this way, even the top-1 ranked item may not be relevant to a user's preference. Therefore, we argue that it is critical to provide a dynamic-K recommendation, where the K should be different with respect to the candidate item set and the target user. We formulate this dynamic-K recommendation task as a joint learning problem with both ranking and classification objectives. The ranking objective is the same as existing methods, i.e., to create a ranking list of items according to users' interests. The classification objective is unique in this work, which aims to learn a personalized decision boundary to differentiate the relevant items from irrelevant items. Based on these ideas, we extend two state-of-the-art ranking-based recommendation methods, i.e., BPRMF and HRM, to the corresponding dynamic-K versions, namely DK-BPRMF and DK-HRM. Our experimental results on two datasets show that the dynamic-K models are more effective than the original fixed-N recommendation methods.

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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.

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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.

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arXiv2020

Query Understanding via Intent Description Generation

Query understanding is a fundamental problem in information retrieval (IR), which has attracted continuous attention through the past decades. Many different tasks have been proposed for understanding users' search queries, e.g., query classification or query clustering. However, it is not that precise to understand a search query at the intent class/cluster level due to the loss of many detailed information. As we may find in many benchmark datasets, e.g., TREC and SemEval, queries are often associated with a detailed description provided by human annotators which clearly describes its intent to help evaluate the relevance of the documents. If a system could automatically generate a detailed and precise intent description for a search query, like human annotators, that would indicate much better query understanding has been achieved. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel Query-to-Intent-Description (Q2ID) task for query understanding. Unlike those existing ranking tasks which leverage the query and its description to compute the relevance of documents, Q2ID is a reverse task which aims to generate a natural language intent description based on both relevant and irrelevant documents of a given query. To address this new task, we propose a novel Contrastive Generation model, namely CtrsGen for short, to generate the intent description by contrasting the relevant documents with the irrelevant documents given a query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by comparing with several state-of-the-art generation models on the Q2ID task. We discuss the potential usage of such Q2ID technique through an example application.

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arXiv2020

Continual Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) has become a core component in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications such as question answering and dialogue systems. It becomes a practical challenge that an MRC model needs to learn in non-stationary environments, in which the underlying data distribution changes over time. A typical scenario is the domain drift, i.e. different domains of data come one after another, where the MRC model is required to adapt to the new domain while maintaining previously learned ability. To tackle such a challenge, in this work, we introduce the \textit{Continual Domain Adaptation} (CDA) task for MRC. So far as we know, this is the first study on the continual learning perspective of MRC. We build two benchmark datasets for the CDA task, by re-organizing existing MRC collections into different domains with respect to context type and question type, respectively. We then analyze and observe the catastrophic forgetting (CF) phenomenon of MRC under the CDA setting. To tackle the CDA task, we propose several BERT-based continual learning MRC models using either regularization-based methodology or dynamic-architecture paradigm. We analyze the performance of different continual learning MRC models under the CDA task and show that the proposed dynamic-architecture based model achieves the best performance.

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arXiv2020

On the Relation between Quality-Diversity Evaluation and Distribution-Fitting Goal in Text Generation

The goal of text generation models is to fit the underlying real probability distribution of text. For performance evaluation, quality and diversity metrics are usually applied. However, it is still not clear to what extend can the quality-diversity evaluation reflect the distribution-fitting goal. In this paper, we try to reveal such relation in a theoretical approach. We prove that under certain conditions, a linear combination of quality and diversity constitutes a divergence metric between the generated distribution and the real distribution. We also show that the commonly used BLEU/Self-BLEU metric pair fails to match any divergence metric, thus propose CR/NRR as a substitute for quality/diversity metric pair.

cs.LG↗

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.

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arXiv2020

On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture

The Transformer is widely used in natural language processing tasks. To train a Transformer however, one usually needs a carefully designed learning rate warm-up stage, which is shown to be crucial to the final performance but will slow down the optimization and bring more hyper-parameter tunings. In this paper, we first study theoretically why the learning rate warm-up stage is essential and show that the location of layer normalization matters. Specifically, we prove with mean field theory that at initialization, for the original-designed Post-LN Transformer, which places the layer normalization between the residual blocks, the expected gradients of the parameters near the output layer are large. Therefore, using a large learning rate on those gradients makes the training unstable. The warm-up stage is practically helpful for avoiding this problem. On the other hand, our theory also shows that if the layer normalization is put inside the residual blocks (recently proposed as Pre-LN Transformer), the gradients are well-behaved at initialization. This motivates us to remove the warm-up stage for the training of Pre-LN Transformers. We show in our experiments that Pre-LN Transformers without the warm-up stage can reach comparable results with baselines while requiring significantly less training time and hyper-parameter tuning on a wide range of applications.

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arXiv2020

Match$^2$: A Matching over Matching Model for Similar Question Identification

Community Question Answering (CQA) has become a primary means for people to acquire knowledge, where people are free to ask questions or submit answers. To enhance the efficiency of the service, similar question identification becomes a core task in CQA which aims to find a similar question from the archived repository whenever a new question is asked. However, it has long been a challenge to properly measure the similarity between two questions due to the inherent variation of natural language, i.e., there could be different ways to ask a same question or different questions sharing similar expressions. To alleviate this problem, it is natural to involve the existing answers for the enrichment of the archived questions. Traditional methods typically take a one-side usage, which leverages the answer as some expanded representation of the corresponding question. Unfortunately, this may introduce unexpected noises into the similarity computation since answers are often long and diverse, leading to inferior performance. In this work, we propose a two-side usage, which leverages the answer as a bridge of the two questions. The key idea is based on our observation that similar questions could be addressed by similar parts of the answer while different questions may not. In other words, we can compare the matching patterns of the two questions over the same answer to measure their similarity. In this way, we propose a novel matching over matching model, namely Match$^2$, which compares the matching patterns between two question-answer pairs for similar question identification. Empirical experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods on the similar question identification task.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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arXiv2019

Controlling Risk of Web Question Answering

Web question answering (QA) has become an indispensable component in modern search systems, which can significantly improve users' search experience by providing a direct answer to users' information need. This could be achieved by applying machine reading comprehension (MRC) models over the retrieved passages to extract answers with respect to the search query. With the development of deep learning techniques, state-of-the-art MRC performances have been achieved by recent deep methods. However, existing studies on MRC seldom address the predictive uncertainty issue, i.e., how likely the prediction of an MRC model is wrong, leading to uncontrollable risks in real-world Web QA applications. In this work, we first conduct an in-depth investigation over the risk of Web QA. We then introduce a novel risk control framework, which consists of a qualify model for uncertainty estimation using the probe idea, and a decision model for selectively output. For evaluation, we introduce risk-related metrics, rather than the traditional EM and F1 in MRC, for the evaluation of risk-aware Web QA. The empirical results over both the real-world Web QA dataset and the academic MRC benchmark collection demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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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.

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