Minh Nguyen


2024

pdf bib
HierarchyNet: Learning to Summarize Source Code with Heterogeneous Representations
Minh Nguyen | Nghi Bui | Truong Son Hy | Long Tran-Thanh | Tien Nguyen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Code representation is important to machine learning models in the code-related applications. Existing code summarization approaches primarily leverage Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) and sequential information from source code to generate code summaries while often overlooking the critical consideration of the interplay of dependencies among code elements and code hierarchy. However, effective summarization necessitates a holistic analysis of code snippets from three distinct aspects: lexical, syntactic, and semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel code summarization approach utilizing Heterogeneous Code Representations (HCRs) and our specially designed HierarchyNet. HCRs adeptly capture essential code features at lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels within a hierarchical structure. HierarchyNet processes each layer of the HCR separately, employing a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer, a Tree-based CNN, and a Transformer Encoder. In addition, HierarchyNet demonstrates superior performance compared to fine-tuned pre-trained models, including CodeT5, and CodeBERT, as well as large language models that employ zero/few-shot settings, such as CodeLlama, StarCoder, and CodeGen. Implementation details can be found at https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/HierarchyNet.

pdf bib
Functional Overlap Reranking for Neural Code Generation
Hung To | Minh Nguyen | Nghi Bui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Code Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) have ushered in a new era in code generation advancements. However, selecting the best code solutions from all possible CodeLLM outputs remains a challenge. Previous methods often overlooked the intricate functional similarities and interactions between solution clusters. We introduce SRank, a novel reranking strategy for selecting the best solutions from code generation, focusing on modeling the relationships between clusters of solutions. By quantifying the functional overlap between solution clusters, our approach provides a better ranking strategy for code solutions. Empirical results show that our method achieves remarkable results on the pass@1 score. For instance, on the Human-Eval benchmark, we achieve 69.66% in pass@1 with Codex002, 75.31% with WizardCoder, 53.99% with StarCoder, and 60.55% with CodeGen, surpassing state-of-the-art code generation reranking methods such as CodeT and Coder-Reviewer on the same CodeLLM by a significant margin approx 6.1% improvement on average. Even in scenarios with a limited number of sampled solutions and test cases, our approach demonstrates robustness and superiority, marking a new benchmark in code generation reranking. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/SRank-CodeRanker.

pdf bib
ZeLa: Advancing Zero-Shot Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Large Language Models and Chain-of-Thought Strategies
Truong Dinh Do | Phuong Minh Nguyen | Minh Nguyen
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In recent years, there have been significant advancements in semantic parsing tasks, thanks to the introduction of pre-trained language models. However, a substantial gap persists between English and other languages due to the scarcity of annotated data. One promising strategy to bridge this gap involves augmenting multilingual datasets using labeled English data and subsequently leveraging this augmented dataset for training semantic parsers (known as zero-shot multilingual semantic parsing). In our study, we propose a novel framework to effectively perform zero-shot multilingual semantic parsing under the support of large language models (LLMs). Given data annotated pairs (sentence, semantic representation) in English, our proposed framework automatically augments data in other languages via multilingual chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting techniques that progressively construct the semantic form in these languages. By breaking down the entire semantic representation into sub-semantic fragments, our CoT prompting technique simplifies the intricate semantic structure at each step, thereby facilitating the LLMs in generating accurate outputs more efficiently. Notably, this entire augmentation process is achieved without the need for any demonstration samples in the target languages (zero-shot learning). In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating it on two well-known multilingual semantic parsing datasets: MTOP and MASSIVE.

2023

pdf bib
StructSP: Efficient Fine-tuning of Task-Oriented Dialog System by Using Structure-aware Boosting and Grammar Constraints
Truong Do | Phuong Nguyen | Minh Nguyen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

We have investigated methods utilizing hierarchical structure information representation in the semantic parsing task and have devised a method that reinforces the semantic awareness of a pre-trained language model via a two-step fine-tuning mechanism: hierarchical structure information strengthening and a final specific task. The model used is better than existing ones at learning the contextual representations of utterances embedded within its hierarchical semantic structure and thereby improves system performance. In addition, we created a mechanism using inductive grammar to dynamically prune the unpromising directions in the semantic structure parsing process. Finally, through experimentsOur code will be published when this paper is accepted. on the TOP and TOPv2 (low-resource setting) datasets, we achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed model.

pdf bib
CovRelex-SE: Adding Semantic Information for Relation Search via Sequence Embedding
Truong Do | Chau Nguyen | Vu Tran | Ken Satoh | Yuji Matsumoto | Minh Nguyen
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

In recent years, COVID-19 has impacted all aspects of human life. As a result, numerous publications relating to this disease have been issued. Due to the massive volume of publications, some retrieval systems have been developed to provide researchers with useful information. In these systems, lexical searching methods are widely used, which raises many issues related to acronyms, synonyms, and rare keywords. In this paper, we present a hybrid relation retrieval system, CovRelex-SE, based on embeddings to provide high-quality search results. Our system can be accessed through the following URL: https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/nguyen-lab/systems/covrelex-se/

pdf bib
FiRo: Finite-context Indexing of Restricted Output Space for NLP Models Facing Noisy Input
Minh Nguyen | Nancy Chen
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2022

pdf bib
VIMQA: A Vietnamese Dataset for Advanced Reasoning and Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering
Khang Le | Hien Nguyen | Tung Le Thanh | Minh Nguyen
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Vietnamese is the native language of over 98 million people in the world. However, existing Vietnamese Question Answering (QA) datasets do not explore the model’s ability to perform advanced reasoning and provide evidence to explain the answer. We introduce VIMQA, a new Vietnamese dataset with over 10,000 Wikipedia-based multi-hop question-answer pairs. The dataset is human-generated and has four main features: (1) The questions require advanced reasoning over multiple paragraphs. (2) Sentence-level supporting facts are provided, enabling the QA model to reason and explain the answer. (3) The dataset offers various types of reasoning to test the model’s ability to reason and extract relevant proof. (4) The dataset is in Vietnamese, a low-resource language. We also conduct experiments on our dataset using state-of-the-art Multilingual single-hop and multi-hop QA methods. The results suggest that our dataset is challenging for existing methods, and there is room for improvement in Vietnamese QA systems. In addition, we propose a general process for data creation and publish a framework for creating multilingual multi-hop QA datasets. The dataset and framework are publicly available to encourage further research in Vietnamese QA systems.

pdf bib
Event Causality Identification via Generation of Important Context Words
Hieu Man | Minh Nguyen | Thien Nguyen
Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

An important problem of Information Extraction involves Event Causality Identification (ECI) that seeks to identify causal relation between pairs of event mentions. Prior models for ECI have mainly solved the problem using the classification framework that does not explore prediction/generation of important context words from input sentences for causal recognition. In this work, we consider the words along the dependency path between the two event mentions in the dependency tree as the important context words for ECI. We introduce dependency path generation as a complementary task for ECI, which can be solved jointly with causal label prediction to improve the performance. To facilitate the multi-task learning, we cast ECI into a generation problem that aims to generate both causal relation and dependency path words from input sentence. In addition, we propose to use the REINFORCE algorithm to train our generative model where novel reward functions are designed to capture both causal prediction accuracy and generation quality. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the proposed model for ECI.

2021

pdf bib
CovRelex: A COVID-19 Retrieval System with Relation Extraction
Vu Tran | Van-Hien Tran | Phuong Nguyen | Chau Nguyen | Ken Satoh | Yuji Matsumoto | Minh Nguyen
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

This paper presents CovRelex, a scientific paper retrieval system targeting entities and relations via relation extraction on COVID-19 scientific papers. This work aims at building a system supporting users efficiently in acquiring knowledge across a huge number of COVID-19 scientific papers published rapidly. Our system can be accessed via https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/nguyen-lab/systems/covrelex/.

pdf bib
Improving Named Entity Recognition in Spoken Dialog Systems by Context and Speech Pattern Modeling
Minh Nguyen | Zhou Yu
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

While named entity recognition (NER) from speech has been around as long as NER from written text has, the accuracy of NER from speech has generally been much lower than that of NER from text. The rise in popularity of spoken dialog systems such as Siri or Alexa highlights the need for more accurate NER from speech because NER is a core component for understanding what users said in dialogs. Deployed spoken dialog systems receive user input in the form of automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts, and simply applying NER model trained on written text to ASR transcripts often leads to low accuracy because compared to written text, ASR transcripts lack important cues such as punctuation and capitalization. Besides, errors in ASR transcripts also make NER from speech challenging. We propose two models that exploit dialog context and speech pattern clues to extract named entities more accurately from open-domain dialogs in spoken dialog systems. Our results show the benefit of modeling dialog context and speech patterns in two settings: a standard setting with random partition of data and a more realistic but also more difficult setting where many named entities encountered during deployment are unseen during training.

2019

bib
Isolating the Effects of Modeling Recursive Structures: A Case Study in Pronunciation Prediction of Chinese Characters
Minh Nguyen | Gia H Ngo | Nancy Chen
Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP

Finding that explicitly modeling structures leads to better generalization, we consider the task of predicting Cantonese pronunciations of logographs (Chinese characters) using logographs’ recursive structures. This task is a suitable case study for two reasons. First, logographs’ pronunciations depend on structures (i.e. the hierarchies of sub-units in logographs) Second, the quality of logographic structures is consistent since the structures are constructed automatically using a set of rules. Thus, this task is less affected by confounds such as varying quality between annotators. Empirical results show that modeling structures explicitly using treeLSTM outperforms LSTM baseline, reducing prediction error by 6.0% relative.

2018

pdf bib
Statistical Machine Transliteration Baselines for NEWS 2018
Snigdha Singhania | Minh Nguyen | Gia H. Ngo | Nancy Chen
Proceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop

This paper reports the results of our trans-literation experiments conducted on NEWS 2018 Shared Task dataset. We focus on creating the baseline systems trained using two open-source, statistical transliteration tools, namely Sequitur and Moses. We discuss the pre-processing steps performed on this dataset for both the systems. We also provide a re-ranking system which uses top hypotheses from Sequitur and Moses to create a consolidated list of transliterations. The results obtained from each of these models can be used to present a good starting point for the participating teams.

pdf bib
Who is Killed by Police: Introducing Supervised Attention for Hierarchical LSTMs
Minh Nguyen | Thien Huu Nguyen
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Finding names of people killed by police has become increasingly important as police shootings get more and more public attention (police killing detection). Unfortunately, there has been not much work in the literature addressing this problem. The early work in this field (Keith etal., 2017) proposed a distant supervision framework based on Expectation Maximization (EM) to deal with the multiple appearances of the names in documents. However, such EM-based framework cannot take full advantages of deep learning models, necessitating the use of handdesigned features to improve the detection performance. In this work, we present a novel deep learning method to solve the problem of police killing recognition. The proposed method relies on hierarchical LSTMs to model the multiple sentences that contain the person names of interests, and introduce supervised attention mechanisms based on semantical word lists and dependency trees to upweight the important contextual words. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of the proposed model and yield the state-of-the-art performance for police killing detection.

pdf bib
Multimodal neural pronunciation modeling for spoken languages with logographic origin
Minh Nguyen | Gia H. Ngo | Nancy Chen
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Graphemes of most languages encode pronunciation, though some are more explicit than others. Languages like Spanish have a straightforward mapping between its graphemes and phonemes, while this mapping is more convoluted for languages like English. Spoken languages such as Cantonese present even more challenges in pronunciation modeling: (1) they do not have a standard written form, (2) the closest graphemic origins are logographic Han characters, of which only a subset of these logographic characters implicitly encodes pronunciation. In this work, we propose a multimodal approach to predict the pronunciation of Cantonese logographic characters, using neural networks with a geometric representation of logographs and pronunciation of cognates in historically related languages. The proposed framework improves performance by 18.1% and 25.0% respective to unimodal and multimodal baselines.

2016

pdf bib
SDP-JAIST: A Shallow Discourse Parsing system @ CoNLL 2016 Shared Task
Minh Nguyen
Proceedings of the CoNLL-16 shared task