Chen Liang


2023

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Novel Slot Detection With an Incremental Setting
Chen Liang | Hongliang Li | Changhao Guan | Qingbin Liu | Jian Liu | Jinan Xu | Zhe Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types become a major challenge. Recently, researchers have introduced novel slot detection (NSD) to discover potential new types. However, dialogue system with NSD does not bring practical improvements due to the system still cannot handle novel slots in subsequent interactions. In this paper, we define incremental novel slot detection (INSD), which separates the dialogue system to deal with novel types as two major phrases: 1) model discovers unknown slots, 2) training model to possess the capability to handle new classes. We provide an effective model to extract novel slots with set prediction strategy and propose a query-enhanced approach to overcome catastrophic forgetting during the process of INSD. We construct two INSD datasets to evaluate our method and experimental results show that our approach exhibits superior performance.

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Document-Level Event Argument Extraction With a Chain Reasoning Paradigm
Jian Liu | Chen Liang | Jinan Xu | Haoyan Liu | Zhe Zhao
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Document-level event argument extraction aims to identify event arguments beyond sentence level, where a significant challenge is to model long-range dependencies. Focusing on this challenge, we present a new chain reasoning paradigm for the task, which can generate decomposable first-order logic rules for reasoning. This paradigm naturally captures long-range interdependence due to the chains’ compositional nature, which also improves interpretability by explicitly modeling the reasoning process. We introduce T-norm fuzzy logic for optimization, which permits end-to-end learning and shows promise for integrating the expressiveness of logical reasoning with the generalization of neural networks. In experiments, we show that our approach outperforms previous methods by a significant margin on two standard benchmarks (over 6 points in F1).Moreover, it is data-efficient in low-resource scenarios and robust enough to defend against adversarial attacks.

2022

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S+PAGE: A Speaker and Position-Aware Graph Neural Network Model for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Chen Liang | Jing Xu | Yangkun Lin | Chong Yang | Yongliang Wang
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has attracted much attention in recent years for its necessity in widespread applications. With the development of graph neural network (GNN), recent state-of-the-art ERC models mostly use GNN to embed the intrinsic structure information of a conversation into the utterance features. In this paper, we propose a novel GNN-based model for ERC, namely S+PAGE, to better capture the speaker and position-aware conversation structure information. Specifically, we add the relative positional encoding and speaker dependency encoding in the representations of edge weights and edge types respectively to acquire a more reasonable aggregation algorithm for ERC. Besides, a two-stream conversational Transformer is presented to extract both the self and inter-speaker contextual features for each utterance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four ERC benchmarks with state-of-the-art models employed as baselines for comparison, whose results demonstrate the superiority of our model.

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ZHIXIAOBAO at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Apporoaching Structured Sentiment with Graph Parsing
Yangkun Lin | Chen Liang | Jing Xu | Chong Yang | Yongliang Wang
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper presents our submission to task 10, Structured Sentiment Analysis of the SemEval 2022 competition. The task aims to extract all elements of the fine-grained sentiment in a text. We cast structured sentiment analysis to the prediction of the sentiment graphs following (Barnes et al., 2021), where nodes are spans of sentiment holders, targets and expressions, and directed edges denote the relation types between them. Our approach closely follows that of semantic dependency parsing (Dozat and Manning, 2018). The difference is that we use pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT and RoBERTa) as text encoder to solve the problem of limited annotated data. Additionally, we make improvements on the computation of cross attention and present the suffix masking technique to make further performance improvement. Substantially, our model achieved the Top-1 average Sentiment Graph F1 score on seven datasets in five different languages in the monolingual subtask.

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Self-Training with Differentiable Teacher
Simiao Zuo | Yue Yu | Chen Liang | Haoming Jiang | Siawpeng Er | Chao Zhang | Tuo Zhao | Hongyuan Zha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Self-training achieves enormous success in various semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning tasks. The method can be interpreted as a teacher-student framework, where the teacher generates pseudo-labels, and the student makes predictions. The two models are updated alternatingly. However, such a straightforward alternating update rule leads to training instability. This is because a small change in the teacher may result in a significant change in the student. To address this issue, we propose DRIFT, short for differentiable self-training, that treats teacher-student as a Stackelberg game. In this game, a leader is always in a more advantageous position than a follower. In self-training, the student contributes to the prediction performance, and the teacher controls the training process by generating pseudo-labels. Therefore, we treat the student as the leader and the teacher as the follower. The leader procures its advantage by acknowledging the follower’s strategy, which involves differentiable pseudo-labels and differentiable sample weights. Consequently, the leader-follower interaction can be effectively captured via Stackelberg gradient, obtained by differentiating the follower’s strategy. Experimental results on semi- and weakly-supervised classification and named entity recognition tasks show that our model outperforms existing approaches by large margins.

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CAMERO: Consistency Regularized Ensemble of Perturbed Language Models with Weight Sharing
Chen Liang | Pengcheng He | Yelong Shen | Weizhu Chen | Tuo Zhao
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Model ensemble is a popular approach to produce a low-variance and well-generalized model. However, it induces large memory and inference costs, which is often not affordable for real-world deployment. Existing work has resorted to sharing weights among models. However, when increasing the proportion of the shared weights, the resulting models tend to be similar, and the benefits of using model ensemble diminish. To retain ensemble benefits while maintaining a low memory cost, we propose a consistency-regularized ensemble learning approach based on perturbed models, named CAMERO. Specifically, we share the weights of bottom layers across all models and apply different perturbations to the hidden representations for different models, which can effectively promote the model diversity. Meanwhile, we apply a prediction consistency regularizer across the perturbed models to control the variance due to the model diversity. Our experiments using large language models demonstrate that CAMERO significantly improves the generalization performance of the ensemble model. Specifically, CAMERO outperforms the standard ensemble of 8 BERT-base models on the GLUE benchmark by 0.7 with a significantly smaller model size (114.2M vs. 880.6M).

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MoEBERT: from BERT to Mixture-of-Experts via Importance-Guided Adaptation
Simiao Zuo | Qingru Zhang | Chen Liang | Pengcheng He | Tuo Zhao | Weizhu Chen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, these models usually contain hundreds of millions of parameters, which limits their practicality because of latency requirements in real-world applications. Existing methods train small compressed models via knowledge distillation. However, performance of these small models drops significantly compared with the pre-trained models due to their reduced model capacity. We propose MoEBERT, which uses a Mixture-of-Experts structure to increase model capacity and inference speed. We initialize MoEBERT by adapting the feed-forward neural networks in a pre-trained model into multiple experts. As such, representation power of the pre-trained model is largely retained. During inference, only one of the experts is activated, such that speed can be improved. We also propose a layer-wise distillation method to train MoEBERT. We validate the efficiency and efficacy of MoEBERT on natural language understanding and question answering tasks. Results show that the proposed method outperforms existing task-specific distillation algorithms. For example, our method outperforms previous approaches by over 2% on the MNLI (mismatched) dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/SimiaoZuo/MoEBERT.

2021

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Adversarial Regularization as Stackelberg Game: An Unrolled Optimization Approach
Simiao Zuo | Chen Liang | Haoming Jiang | Xiaodong Liu | Pengcheng He | Jianfeng Gao | Weizhu Chen | Tuo Zhao
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Adversarial regularization has been shown to improve the generalization performance of deep learning models in various natural language processing tasks. Existing works usually formulate the method as a zero-sum game, which is solved by alternating gradient descent/ascent algorithms. Such a formulation treats the adversarial and the defending players equally, which is undesirable because only the defending player contributes to the generalization performance. To address this issue, we propose Stackelberg Adversarial Regularization (SALT), which formulates adversarial regularization as a Stackelberg game. This formulation induces a competition between a leader and a follower, where the follower generates perturbations, and the leader trains the model subject to the perturbations. Different from conventional approaches, in SALT, the leader is in an advantageous position. When the leader moves, it recognizes the strategy of the follower and takes the anticipated follower’s outcomes into consideration. Such a leader’s advantage enables us to improve the model fitting to the unperturbed data. The leader’s strategic information is captured by the Stackelberg gradient, which is obtained using an unrolling algorithm. Our experimental results on a set of machine translation and natural language understanding tasks show that SALT outperforms existing adversarial regularization baselines across all tasks. Our code is publicly available.

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Token-wise Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation
Chen Liang | Haoming Jiang | Xiaodong Liu | Pengcheng He | Weizhu Chen | Jianfeng Gao | Tuo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Existing curriculum learning approaches to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) require sampling sufficient amounts of “easy” samples from training data at the early training stage. This is not always achievable for low-resource languages where the amount of training data is limited. To address such a limitation, we propose a novel token-wise curriculum learning approach that creates sufficient amounts of easy samples. Specifically, the model learns to predict a short sub-sequence from the beginning part of each target sentence at the early stage of training. Then the sub-sequence is gradually expanded as the training progresses. Such a new curriculum design is inspired by the cumulative effect of translation errors, which makes the latter tokens more challenging to predict than the beginning ones. Extensive experiments show that our approach can consistently outperform baselines on five language pairs, especially for low-resource languages. Combining our approach with sentence-level methods further improves the performance of high-resource languages.

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ARCH: Efficient Adversarial Regularized Training with Caching
Simiao Zuo | Chen Liang | Haoming Jiang | Pengcheng He | Xiaodong Liu | Jianfeng Gao | Weizhu Chen | Tuo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Adversarial regularization can improve model generalization in many natural language processing tasks. However, conventional approaches are computationally expensive since they need to generate a perturbation for each sample in each epoch. We propose a new adversarial regularization method ARCH (adversarial regularization with caching), where perturbations are generated and cached once every several epochs. As caching all the perturbations imposes memory usage concerns, we adopt a K-nearest neighbors-based strategy to tackle this issue. The strategy only requires caching a small amount of perturbations, without introducing additional training time. We evaluate our proposed method on a set of neural machine translation and natural language understanding tasks. We observe that ARCH significantly eases the computational burden (saves up to 70% of computational time in comparison with conventional approaches). More surprisingly, by reducing the variance of stochastic gradients, ARCH produces a notably better (in most of the tasks) or comparable model generalization. Our code is publicly available.

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Super Tickets in Pre-Trained Language Models: From Model Compression to Improving Generalization
Chen Liang | Simiao Zuo | Minshuo Chen | Haoming Jiang | Xiaodong Liu | Pengcheng He | Tuo Zhao | Weizhu Chen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis suggests that an over-parametrized network consists of ”lottery tickets”, and training a certain collection of them (i.e., a subnetwork) can match the performance of the full model. In this paper, we study such a collection of tickets, which is referred to as ”winning tickets”, in extremely over-parametrized models, e.g., pre-trained language models. We observe that at certain compression ratios, the generalization performance of the winning tickets can not only match but also exceed that of the full model. In particular, we observe a phase transition phenomenon: As the compression ratio increases, generalization performance of the winning tickets first improves then deteriorates after a certain threshold. We refer to the tickets on the threshold as ”super tickets”. We further show that the phase transition is task and model dependent — as the model size becomes larger and the training data set becomes smaller, the transition becomes more pronounced. Our experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that the super tickets improve single task fine-tuning by 0.9 points on BERT-base and 1.0 points on BERT-large, in terms of task-average score. We also demonstrate that adaptively sharing the super tickets across tasks benefits multi-task learning.

2020

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Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation with Word-Level Adaptive Layer-wise Domain Mixing
Haoming Jiang | Chen Liang | Chong Wang | Tuo Zhao
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Many multi-domain neural machine translation (NMT) models achieve knowledge transfer by enforcing one encoder to learn shared embedding across domains. However, this design lacks adaptation to individual domains. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel multi-domain NMT model using individual modules for each domain, on which we apply word-level, adaptive and layer-wise domain mixing. We first observe that words in a sentence are often related to multiple domains. Hence, we assume each word has a domain proportion, which indicates its domain preference. Then word representations are obtained by mixing their embedding in individual domains based on their domain proportions. We show this can be achieved by carefully designing multi-head dot-product attention modules for different domains, and eventually taking weighted averages of their parameters by word-level layer-wise domain proportions. Through this, we can achieve effective domain knowledge sharing and capture fine-grained domain-specific knowledge as well. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms existing ones in several NMT tasks.

2018

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Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions Using Learning to Rank
Chen Liang | Xiao Yang | Neisarg Dave | Drew Wham | Bart Pursel | C. Lee Giles
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

We investigate how machine learning models, specifically ranking models, can be used to select useful distractors for multiple choice questions. Our proposed models can learn to select distractors that resemble those in actual exam questions, which is different from most existing unsupervised ontology-based and similarity-based methods. We empirically study feature-based and neural net (NN) based ranking models with experiments on the recently released SciQ dataset and our MCQL dataset. Experimental results show that feature-based ensemble learning methods (random forest and LambdaMART) outperform both the NN-based method and unsupervised baselines. These two datasets can also be used as benchmarks for distractor generation.

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Research on Entity Relation Extraction for Military Field
Chen Liang | Hongying Zan | Yajun Liu | Yunfang Wu
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2017

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Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision
Chen Liang | Jonathan Berant | Quoc Le | Kenneth D. Forbus | Ni Lao
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains (a) a neural “programmer”, i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic “computer”, i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE, we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.

2015

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Storybase: Towards Building a Knowledge Base for News Events
Zhaohui Wu | Chen Liang | C. Lee Giles
Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2015 System Demonstrations

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Measuring Prerequisite Relations Among Concepts
Chen Liang | Zhaohui Wu | Wenyi Huang | C. Lee Giles
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2012

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Topical Word Trigger Model for Keyphrase Extraction
Zhiyuan Liu | Chen Liang | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Expert Finding for Microblog Misinformation Identification
Chen Liang | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters