Yongjing Cheng


2022

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UniTranSeR: A Unified Transformer Semantic Representation Framework for Multimodal Task-Oriented Dialog System
Zhiyuan Ma | Jianjun Li | Guohui Li | Yongjing Cheng
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

As a more natural and intelligent interaction manner, multimodal task-oriented dialog system recently has received great attention and many remarkable progresses have been achieved. Nevertheless, almost all existing studies follow the pipeline to first learn intra-modal features separately and then conduct simple feature concatenation or attention-based feature fusion to generate responses, which hampers them from learning inter-modal interactions and conducting cross-modal feature alignment for generating more intention-aware responses. To address these issues, we propose UniTranSeR, a Unified Transformer Semantic Representation framework with feature alignment and intention reasoning for multimodal dialog systems. Specifically, we first embed the multimodal features into a unified Transformer semantic space to prompt inter-modal interactions, and then devise a feature alignment and intention reasoning (FAIR) layer to perform cross-modal entity alignment and fine-grained key-value reasoning, so as to effectively identify user’s intention for generating more accurate responses. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of UniTranSeR, showing that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on the representative MMD dataset.

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GLAF: Global-to-Local Aggregation and Fission Network for Semantic Level Fact Verification
Zhiyuan Ma | Jianjun Li | Guohui Li | Yongjing Cheng
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Accurate fact verification depends on performing fine-grained reasoning over crucial entities by capturing their latent logical relations hidden in multiple evidence clues, which is generally lacking in existing fact verification models. In this work, we propose a novel Global-to-Local Aggregation and Fission network (GLAF) to fill this gap. Instead of treating entire sentences or all semantic elements within them as nodes to construct a coarse-grained or unstructured evidence graph as in previous methods, GLAF constructs a fine-grained and structured evidence graph by parsing the rambling sentences into structural triple-level reasoning clues and regarding them as graph nodes to achieve fine-grained and interpretable evidence graph reasoning. Specifically, to capture latent logical relations between the clues, GLAF first employs a local fission reasoning layer to conduct fine-grained multi-hop reasoning, and then uses a global evidence aggregation layer to achieve information sharing and the interchange of evidence clues for final claim label prediction. Experimental results on the FEVER dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAF, showing that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance by obtaining a 77.62% FEVER score.

2021

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Intention Reasoning Network for Multi-Domain End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue
Zhiyuan Ma | Jianjun Li | Zezheng Zhang | Guohui Li | Yongjing Cheng
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent years has witnessed the remarkable success in end-to-end task-oriented dialog system, especially when incorporating external knowledge information. However, the quality of most existing models’ generated response is still limited, mainly due to their lack of fine-grained reasoning on deterministic knowledge (w.r.t. conceptual tokens), which makes them difficult to capture the concept shifts and identify user’s real intention in cross-task scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel intention mechanism to better model deterministic entity knowledge. Based on such a mechanism, we further propose an intention reasoning network (IR-Net), which consists of joint and multi-hop reasoning, to obtain intention-aware representations of conceptual tokens that can be used to capture the concept shifts involved in task-oriented conversations, so as to effectively identify user’s intention and generate more accurate responses. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of IR-Net, showing that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two representative multi-domain dialog datasets.