Xinnian Liang


2024

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m3P: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt
Jian Yang | Hongcheng Guo | Yuwei Yin | Jiaqi Bai | Bing Wang | Jiaheng Liu | Xinnian Liang | LinZheng Chai | Liqun Yang | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Multilingual translation supports multiple translation directions by projecting all languages in a shared space, but the translation quality is undermined by the difference between languages in the text-only modality, especially when the number of languages is large. To bridge this gap, we introduce visual context as the universal language-independent representation to facilitate multilingual translation. In this paper, we propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (m3P), which aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation. We construct a multilingual multimodal instruction dataset (InstrMulti102) to support 102 languages Our method aims to minimize the representation distance of different languages by regarding the image as a central language. Experimental results show that m3P outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. Furthermore, the probing experiments validate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing translation under the low-resource and massively multilingual scenario.

2023

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Iterative Nearest Neighbour Machine Translation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Hui Huang | Shuangzhi Wu | Xinnian Liang | Zefan Zhou | Muyun Yang | Tiejun Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Unsupervised domain adaptation of machine translation, which adapts a pre-trained translation model to a specific domain without in-domain parallel data, has drawn extensive attention in recent years. However, most existing methods focus on the fine-tuning based techniques, which is non-extensible. In this paper, we propose a new method to perform unsupervised domain adaptation in a non-parametric manner. Our method only resorts to in-domain monolingual data, and we jointly perform nearest neighbour inference on both forward and backward translation directions. The forward translation model creates nearest neighbour datastore for the backward direction, and vice versa, strengthening each other in an iterative style. Experiments on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the in-domain translation performance and achieves state-of-the-art results among non-parametric methods.

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Multi-Stage Pre-training Enhanced by ChatGPT for Multi-Scenario Multi-Domain Dialogue Summarization
Weixiao Zhou | Gengyao Li | Xianfu Cheng | Xinnian Liang | Junnan Zhu | Feifei Zhai | Zhoujun Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Dialogue summarization involves a wide range of scenarios and domains. However, existing methods generally only apply to specific scenarios or domains. In this study, we propose a new pre-trained model specifically designed for multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue summarization. It adopts a multi-stage pre-training strategy to reduce the gap between the pre-training objective and fine-tuning objective. Specifically, we first conduct domain-aware pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue data to enhance the adaptability of our pre-trained model. Then, we conduct task-oriented pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain “dialogue-summary” parallel data annotated by ChatGPT to enhance the dialogue summarization ability of our pre-trained model. Experimental results on three dialogue summarization datasets from different scenarios and domains indicate that our pre-trained model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in full fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot settings.

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Enhancing Dialogue Summarization with Topic-Aware Global- and Local- Level Centrality
Xinnian Liang | Shuangzhi Wu | Chenhao Cui | Jiaqi Bai | Chao Bian | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Dialogue summarization aims to condense a given dialogue into a simple and focused summary text. Typically, both the roles’ viewpoints and conversational topics change in the dialogue stream. Thus how to effectively handle the shifting topics and select the most salient utterance becomes one of the major challenges of this task. In this paper, we propose a novel topic-aware Global-Local Centrality (GLC) model to help select the salient context from all sub-topics. The centralities are constructed in both global level and local level. The global one aims to identify vital sub-topics in the dialogue and the local one aims to select the most important context in each sub-topic. Specifically, the GLC collects sub-topic based on the utterance representations. And each utterance is aligned with one sub-topic. Based on the sub-topics, the GLC calculates global- and local-level centralities. Finally, we combine the two to guide the model to capture both salient context and sub-topics when generating summaries. Experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on three public dialogue summarization datasets: CSDS, MC, and SAMSUM. Further analysis demonstrates that our GLC can exactly identify vital contents from sub-topics.

2022

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Towards Modeling Role-Aware Centrality for Dialogue Summarization
Xinnian Liang | Chao Bian | Shuangzhi Wu | Zhoujun Li
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 2: Short Papers)

Role-oriented dialogue summarization generates summaries for different roles in dialogue (e.g. doctor and patient). Existing methods consider roles separately where interactions among different roles are not fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel Role-Aware Centrality (RAC) model to capture role interactions, which can be easily applied to any seq2seq models. The RAC assigns each role a specific sentence-level centrality score by involving role prompts to control what kind of summary to generate. The RAC measures both the importance of utterances and the relevance between roles and utterances. Then we use RAC to re-weight context representations, which are used by the decoder to generate role summaries. We verify RAC on two public benchmark datasets, CSDS and MC. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on the two datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that the role-aware centrality helps generate summaries more precisely.

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An Efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Unsupervised Summarization Framework Based on Semantic Blocks
Xinnian Liang | Jing Li | Shuangzhi Wu | Jiali Zeng | Yufan Jiang | Mu Li | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Unsupervised summarization methods have achieved remarkable results by incorporating representations from pre-trained language models. However, existing methods fail to consider efficiency and effectiveness at the same time when the input document is extremely long. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we proposed an efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Ranking (C2F-FAR) framework for unsupervised long document summarization, which is based on the semantic block. The semantic block refers to continuous sentences in the document that describe the same facet. Specifically, we address this problem by converting the one-step ranking method into the hierarchical multi-granularity two-stage ranking. In the coarse-level stage, we proposed a new segment algorithm to split the document into facet-aware semantic blocks and then filter insignificant blocks. In the fine-level stage, we select salient sentences in each block and then extract the final summary from selected sentences. We evaluate our framework on four long document summarization datasets: Gov-Report, BillSum, arXiv, and PubMed. Our C2F-FAR can achieve new state-of-the-art unsupervised summarization results on Gov-Report and BillSum. In addition, our method speeds up 4-28 times more than previous methods.

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Modeling Multi-Granularity Hierarchical Features for Relation Extraction
Xinnian Liang | Shuangzhi Wu | Mu Li | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Relation extraction is a key task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to extract relations between entity pairs from given texts. Recently, relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the development of deep neural networks. Most existing research focuses on constructing explicit structured features using external knowledge such as knowledge graph and dependency tree. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract multi-granularity features based solely on the original input sentences. We show that effective structured features can be attained even without external knowledge. Three kinds of features based on the input sentences are fully exploited, which are in entity mention level, segment level, and sentence level. All the three are jointly and hierarchically modeled. We evaluate our method on three public benchmarks: SemEval 2010 Task 8, Tacred, and Tacred Revisited. To verify the effectiveness, we apply our method to different encoders such as LSTM and BERT. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models that even use external knowledge. Extensive analyses demonstrate that the performance of our model is contributed by the capture of multi-granularity features and the model of their hierarchical structure.

2021

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Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction by Jointly Modeling Local and Global Context
Xinnian Liang | Shuangzhi Wu | Mu Li | Zhoujun Li
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Embedding based methods are widely used for unsupervised keyphrase extraction (UKE) tasks. Generally, these methods simply calculate similarities between phrase embeddings and document embedding, which is insufficient to capture different context for a more effective UKE model. In this paper, we propose a novel method for UKE, where local and global contexts are jointly modeled. From a global view, we calculate the similarity between a certain phrase and the whole document in the vector space as transitional embedding based models do. In terms of the local view, we first build a graph structure based on the document where phrases are regarded as vertices and the edges are similarities between vertices. Then, we proposed a new centrality computation method to capture local salient information based on the graph structure. Finally, we further combine the modeling of global and local context for ranking. We evaluate our models on three public benchmarks (Inspec, DUC 2001, SemEval 2010) and compare with existing state-of-the-art models. The results show that our model outperforms most models while generalizing better on input documents with different domains and length. Additional ablation study shows that both the local and global information is crucial for unsupervised keyphrase extraction tasks.

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Improving Unsupervised Extractive Summarization with Facet-Aware Modeling
Xinnian Liang | Shuangzhi Wu | Mu Li | Zhoujun Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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StyleDGPT: Stylized Response Generation with Pre-trained Language Models
Ze Yang | Wei Wu | Can Xu | Xinnian Liang | Jiaqi Bai | Liran Wang | Wei Wang | Zhoujun Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Generating responses following a desired style has great potentials to extend applications of open-domain dialogue systems, yet is refrained by lacking of parallel data for training. In this work, we explore the challenging task with pre-trained language models that have brought breakthrough to various natural language tasks. To this end, we introduce a KL loss and a style classifier to the fine-tuning step in order to steer response generation towards the target style in both a word-level and a sentence-level. Comprehensive empirical studies with two public datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of both style consistency and contextual coherence.