Liwei Wang


2024

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Making Long-Context Language Models Better Multi-Hop Reasoners
Yanyang Li | Shuo Liang | Michael Lyu | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent advancements in long-context modeling have enhanced language models (LMs) for complex tasks across multiple NLP applications. Despite this progress, we find that these models struggle with multi-hop reasoning and exhibit decreased performance in the presence of noisy contexts. In this paper, we introduce Reasoning with Attributions, a novel approach that prompts LMs to supply attributions for each assertion during their reasoning. We validate our approach through experiments on three multi-hop datasets, employing both proprietary and open-source models, and demonstrate its efficacy and resilience. Furthermore, we explore methods to augment reasoning capabilities via fine-tuning and offer an attribution-annotated dataset and a specialized training strategy. Our fine-tuned model achieves competitive performance on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, closely paralleling proprietary LMs such as ChatGPT and Claude-instant.

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Wonder at Chemotimelines 2024: MedTimeline: An End-to-End NLP System for Timeline Extraction from Clinical Narratives
Liwei Wang | Qiuhao Lu | Rui Li | Sunyang Fu | Hongfang Liu
Proceedings of the 6th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

Extracting timeline information from clinical narratives is critical for cancer research and practice using electronic health records (EHRs). In this study, we apply MedTimeline, our end-to-end hybrid NLP system combining large language model, deep learning with knowledge engineering, to the ChemoTimeLine challenge subtasks. Our experiment results in 0.83, 0.90, 0.84, and 0.53, 0.63, 0.39, respectively, for subtask1 and subtask2 in breast, melanoma and ovarian cancer.

2023

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Learning Preference Model for LLMs via Automatic Preference Data Generation
Shijia Huang | Jianqiao Zhao | Yanyang Li | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Despite the advanced capacities of the state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), they suffer from issues of hallucination, stereotype, etc. Preference models play an important role in LLM alignment, yet training preference models predominantly rely on human-annotated data. This reliance limits their versatility and scalability. In this paper, we propose learning the preference model for LLMs via automatic preference data generation (AutoPM). Our approach involves both In-Breadth Data Generation, which elicits pairwise preference data from LLMs following the helpful-honest-harmless (HHH) criteria, and In-Depth Data Generation, which enriches the dataset with responses spanning a wide quality range. With HHH-guided preference data, our approach simultaneously enables the LLMs to learn human preferences and align with human values. Quantitative assessments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the reliability and potential of AutoPM, pointing out a more general and scalable way to improve LLM performance.

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CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform
Yanyang Li | Jianqiao Zhao | Duo Zheng | Zi-Yuan Hu | Zhi Chen | Xiaohui Su | Yongfeng Huang | Shijia Huang | Dahua Lin | Michael Lyu | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model’s capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model’s performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs’ performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA’s efficacy.

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MVP-Tuning: Multi-View Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning for Commonsense Reasoning
Yongfeng Huang | Yanyang Li | Yichong Xu | Lin Zhang | Ruyi Gan | Jiaxing Zhang | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development ofcommonsense reasoning tasks. However, existing methods rely on multi-hop knowledgeretrieval and thus suffer low accuracy due toembedded noise in the acquired knowledge. In addition, these methods often attain highcomputational costs and nontrivial knowledgeloss because they encode the knowledge independently of the PLM, making it less relevant to the task and thus resulting in a poorlocal optimum. In this work, we propose MultiView Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning (MVP-Tuning). MVP-Tuning leveragessimilar question-answer pairs in the training setto improve knowledge retrieval and employsa single prompt-tuned PLM to model knowledge and input text jointly. We conduct our experiments on five commonsense reasoning QAbenchmarks to show that MVP-Tuning outperforms all other baselines in 4 out of 5 datasetswith less than 2% trainable parameters. MVPTuning even gets a new state-of-the-art resulton OpenBookQA and is number one on theleaderboard.

2022

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FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows
Jianqiao Zhao | Yanyang Li | Wanyu Du | Yangfeng Ji | Dong Yu | Michael Lyu | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.

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Eliciting Knowledge from Large Pre-Trained Models for Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation
Yanyang Li | Jianqiao Zhao | Michael Lyu | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent advances in large-scale pre-training provide large models with the potential to learn knowledge from the raw text. It is thus natural to ask whether it is possible to leverage these large models as knowledge bases for downstream tasks. In this work, we answer the aforementioned question in unsupervised knowledge-grounded conversation. We explore various methods that best elicit knowledge from large models. Our human study indicates that, though hallucinations exist, large models post the unique advantage of being able to output common sense and summarize facts that cannot be directly retrieved from the search engine. To better exploit such generated knowledge in dialogue generation, we treat the generated knowledge as a noisy knowledge source and propose the posterior-based reweighing as well as the noisy training strategy. Empirical results on two benchmarks show advantages over the state-of-the-art methods.

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Probing Structured Pruning on Multilingual Pre-trained Models: Settings, Algorithms, and Efficiency
Yanyang Li | Fuli Luo | Runxin Xu | Songfang Huang | Fei Huang | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Structured pruning has been extensively studied on monolingual pre-trained language models and is yet to be fully evaluated on their multilingual counterparts. This work investigates three aspects of structured pruning on multilingual pre-trained language models: settings, algorithms, and efficiency. Experiments on nine downstream tasks show several counter-intuitive phenomena: for settings, individually pruning for each language does not induce a better result; for algorithms, the simplest method performs the best; for efficiency, a fast model does not imply that it is also small. To facilitate the comparison on all sparsity levels, we present Dynamic Sparsification, a simple approach that allows training the model once and adapting to different model sizes at inference. We hope this work fills the gap in the study of structured pruning on multilingual pre-trained models and sheds light on future research.

2021

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DAGN: Discourse-Aware Graph Network for Logical Reasoning
Yinya Huang | Meng Fang | Yu Cao | Liwei Wang | Xiaodan Liang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent QA with logical reasoning questions requires passage-level relations among the sentences. However, current approaches still focus on sentence-level relations interacting among tokens. In this work, we explore aggregating passage-level clues for solving logical reasoning QA by using discourse-based information. We propose a discourse-aware graph network (DAGN) that reasons relying on the discourse structure of the texts. The model encodes discourse information as a graph with elementary discourse units (EDUs) and discourse relations, and learns the discourse-aware features via a graph network for downstream QA tasks. Experiments are conducted on two logical reasoning QA datasets, ReClor and LogiQA, and our proposed DAGN achieves competitive results. The source code is available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/DAGN.

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RAST: Domain-Robust Dialogue Rewriting as Sequence Tagging
Jie Hao | Linfeng Song | Liwei Wang | Kun Xu | Zhaopeng Tu | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The task of dialogue rewriting aims to reconstruct the latest dialogue utterance by copying the missing content from the dialogue context. Until now, the existing models for this task suffer from the robustness issue, i.e., performances drop dramatically when testing on a different dataset. We address this robustness issue by proposing a novel sequence-tagging-based model so that the search space is significantly reduced, yet the core of this task is still well covered. As a common issue of most tagging models for text generation, the model’s outputs may lack fluency. To alleviate this issue, we inject the loss signal from BLEU or GPT-2 under a REINFORCE framework. Experiments show huge improvements of our model over the current state-of-the-art systems when transferring to another dataset.

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JointGT: Graph-Text Joint Representation Learning for Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs
Pei Ke | Haozhe Ji | Yu Ran | Xin Cui | Liwei Wang | Linfeng Song | Xiaoyan Zhu | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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Semi-Supervised Learning for Video Captioning
Ke Lin | Zhuoxin Gan | Liwei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Deep neural networks have made great success on video captioning in supervised learning setting. However, annotating videos with descriptions is very expensive and time-consuming. If the video captioning algorithm can benefit from a large number of unlabeled videos, the cost of annotation can be reduced. In the proposed study, we make the first attempt to train the video captioning model on labeled data and unlabeled data jointly, in a semi-supervised learning manner. For labeled data, we train them with the traditional cross-entropy loss. For unlabeled data, we leverage a self-critical policy gradient method with the difference between the scores obtained by Monte-Carlo sampling and greedy decoding as the reward function, while the scores are the negative K-L divergence between output distributions of original video data and augmented video data. The final loss is the weighted sum of losses obtained by labeled data and unlabeled data. Experiments conducted on VATEX, MSR-VTT and MSVD dataset demonstrate that the introduction of unlabeled data can improve the performance of the video captioning model. The proposed semi-supervised learning algorithm also outperforms several state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning approaches.

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MART: Memory-Augmented Recurrent Transformer for Coherent Video Paragraph Captioning
Jie Lei | Liwei Wang | Yelong Shen | Dong Yu | Tamara Berg | Mohit Bansal
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Generating multi-sentence descriptions for videos is one of the most challenging captioning tasks due to its high requirements for not only visual relevance but also discourse-based coherence across the sentences in the paragraph. Towards this goal, we propose a new approach called Memory-Augmented Recurrent Transformer (MART), which uses a memory module to augment the transformer architecture. The memory module generates a highly summarized memory state from the video segments and the sentence history so as to help better prediction of the next sentence (w.r.t. coreference and repetition aspects), thus encouraging coherent paragraph generation. Extensive experiments, human evaluations, and qualitative analyses on two popular datasets ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII show that MART generates more coherent and less repetitive paragraph captions than baseline methods, while maintaining relevance to the input video events.

2019

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Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Matching Neural Network
Kun Xu | Liwei Wang | Mo Yu | Yansong Feng | Yan Song | Zhiguo Wang | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Previous cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment studies rely on entity embeddings derived only from monolingual KG structural information, which may fail at matching entities that have different facts in two KGs. In this paper, we introduce the topic entity graph, a local sub-graph of an entity, to represent entities with their contextual information in KG. From this view, the KB-alignment task can be formulated as a graph matching problem; and we further propose a graph-attention based solution, which first matches all entities in two topic entity graphs, and then jointly model the local matching information to derive a graph-level matching vector. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

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Hint-Based Training for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Zhuohan Li | Zi Lin | Di He | Fei Tian | Tao Qin | Liwei Wang | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Due to the unparallelizable nature of the autoregressive factorization, AutoRegressive Translation (ART) models have to generate tokens sequentially during decoding and thus suffer from high inference latency. Non-AutoRegressive Translation (NART) models were proposed to reduce the inference time, but could only achieve inferior translation accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to leveraging the hints from hidden states and word alignments to help the training of NART models. The results achieve significant improvement over previous NART models for the WMT14 En-De and De-En datasets and are even comparable to a strong LSTM-based ART baseline but one order of magnitude faster in inference.

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Attention Neural Model for Temporal Relation Extraction
Sijia Liu | Liwei Wang | Vipin Chaudhary | Hongfang Liu
Proceedings of the 2nd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

Neural network models have shown promise in the temporal relation extraction task. In this paper, we present the attention based neural network model to extract the containment relations within sentences from clinical narratives. The attention mechanism used on top of GRU model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art neural network models on THYME corpus in intra-sentence temporal relation extraction.