OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Task-Specific Representation for Novel Words in Sequence Labeling
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Word representation is a key component in neural-network-based sequence labeling systems. However, representations of unseen or rare words trained on the end task are usually poor for appreciable performance. This is commonly referred to as the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. In this work, we address the OOV problem in sequence labeling using only training data of the task. To this end, we propose a novel method to predict representations for OOV words from their surface-forms (e.g., character sequence) and contexts. The method is specifically designed to avoid the error propagation problem suffered by existing approaches in the same paradigm. To evaluate its effectiveness, we performed extensive empirical studies on four part-of-speech tagging (POS) tasks and four named entity recognition (NER) tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better or competitive performance on the OOV problem compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Cross-Domain Performance for Relation Extraction via Dependency Prediction and Information Flow Control
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Relation Extraction (RE) is one of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction and Natural Language Processing. Dependency trees have been shown to be a very useful source of information for this task. The current deep learning models for relation extraction has mainly exploited this dependency information by guiding their computation along the structures of the dependency trees. One potential problem with this approach is it might prevent the models from capturing important context information beyond syntactic structures and cause the poor cross-domain generalization. This paper introduces a novel method to use dependency trees in RE for deep learning models that jointly predicts dependency and semantics relations. We also propose a new mechanism to control the information flow in the model based on the input entity mentions. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the existing methods for RE significantly.
A Deep Generative Model for Code Switched Text
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Code-switching, the interleaving of two or more languages within a sentence or discourse is pervasive in multilingual societies. Accurate language models for code-switched text are critical for NLP tasks. State-of-the-art data-intensive neural language models are difficult to train well from scarce language-labeled code-switched text. A potential solution is to use deep generative models to synthesize large volumes of realistic code-switched text. Although generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders can synthesize plausible monolingual text from continuous latent space, they cannot adequately address code-switched text, owing to their informal style and complex interplay between the constituent languages. We introduce VACS, a novel variational autoencoder architecture specifically tailored to code-switching phenomena. VACS encodes to and decodes from a two-level hierarchical representation, which models syntactic contextual signals in the lower level, and language switching signals in the upper layer. Sampling representations from the prior and decoding them produced well-formed, diverse code-switched sentences. Extensive experiments show that using synthetic code-switched text with natural monolingual data results in significant (33.06%) drop in perplexity.
Exploiting Persona Information for Diverse Generation of Conversational Responses
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

In human conversations, due to their personalities in mind, people can easily carry out and maintain the conversations. Giving conversational context with persona information to a chatbot, how to exploit the information to generate diverse and sustainable conversations is still a non-trivial task. Previous work on persona-based conversational models successfully make use of predefined persona information and have shown great promise in delivering more realistic responses. And they all learn with the assumption that given a source input, there is only one target response. However, in human conversations, there are massive appropriate responses to a given input message. In this paper, we propose a memory-augmented architecture to exploit persona information from context and incorporate a conditional variational autoencoder model together to generate diverse and sustainable conversations. We evaluate the proposed model on a benchmark persona-chat dataset. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our model can deliver more diverse and more engaging persona-based responses than baseline approaches.
GANs for Semi-Supervised Opinion Spam Detection
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Online reviews have become a vital source of information in purchasing a service (product). Opinion spammers manipulate reviews, affecting the overall perception of the service. A key challenge in detecting opinion spam is obtaining ground truth. Though there exists a large set of reviews online, only a few of them have been labeled spam or non-spam. In this paper, we propose spamGAN, a generative adversarial network which relies on limited set of labeled data as well as unlabeled data for opinion spam detection. spamGAN improves the state-of-the-art GAN based techniques for text classification. Experiments on TripAdvisor dataset show that spamGAN outperforms existing spam detection techniques when limited labeled data is used. Apart from detecting spam reviews, spamGAN can also generate reviews with reasonable perplexity.
Correct-and-Memorize: Learning to Translate from Interactive Revisions
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

State-of-the-art machine translation models are still not on par with human translators. Previous work takes human interactions into the neural machine translation process to obtain improved results in target languages. However, not all model-translation errors are equal -- some are critical while others are minor. In the meanwhile, the same translation mistakes occur repeatedly in a similar context. To solve both issues, we propose CAMIT, a novel method for translating in an interactive environment. Our proposed method works with critical revision instructions, therefore allows human to correct arbitrary words in model-translated sentences. In addition, CAMIT learns from and softly memorizes revision actions based on the context, alleviating the issue of repeating mistakes. Experiments in both ideal and real interactive translation settings demonstrate that our proposed \method enhances machine translation results significantly while requires fewer revision instructions from human compared to previous methods.
Relation-Aware Entity Alignment for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Entity alignment is the task of linking entities with the same real-world identity from different knowledge graphs (KGs), which has been recently dominated by embedding-based methods. Such approaches work by learning KG representations so that entity alignment can be performed by measuring the similarities between entity embeddings. While promising, prior works in the field often fail to properly capture complex relation information that commonly exists in multi-relational KGs, leaving much room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel Relation-aware Dual-Graph Convolutional Network (RDGCN) to incorporate relation information via attentive interactions between the knowledge graph and its dual relation counterpart, and further capture neighboring structures to learn better entity representations. Experiments on three real-world cross-lingual datasets show that our approach delivers better and more robust results over the state-of-the-art alignment methods by learning better KG representations.
RTHN: A RNN-Transformer Hierarchical Network for Emotion Cause Extraction
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

The emotion cause extraction (ECE) task aims at discovering the potential causes behind a certain emotion expression in a document. Techniques including rule-based methods, traditional machine learning methods and deep neural networks have been proposed to solve this task. However, most of the previous work considered ECE as a set of independent clause classification problems and ignored the relations between multiple clauses in a document. In this work, we propose a joint emotion cause extraction framework, named RNN-Transformer Hierarchical Network (RTHN), to encode and classify multiple clauses synchronously. RTHN is composed of a lower word-level encoder based on RNNs to encode multiple words in each clause, and an upper clause-level encoder based on Transformer to learn the correlation between multiple clauses in a document. We furthermore propose ways to encode the relative position and global predication information into Transformer that can capture the causality between clauses and make RTHN more efficient. We finally achieve the best performance among 12 compared systems and improve the F1 score of the state-of-the-art from 72.69\% to 76.77\%.
Sharing Attention Weights for Fast Transformer
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, the Transformer machine translation system has shown strong results by stacking attention layers on both the source and target-language sides. But the inference of this model is slow due to the heavy use of dot-product attention in auto-regressive decoding. In this paper we speed up Transformer via a fast and lightweight attention model. More specifically, we share attention weights in adjacent layers and enable the efficient re-use of hidden states in a vertical manner. Moreover, the sharing policy can be jointly learned with the MT model. We test our approach on ten WMT and NIST OpenMT tasks. Experimental results show that it yields an average of 1.3X speed-up (with almost no decrease in BLEU) on top of a state-of-the-art implementation that has already adopted a cache for fast inference. Also, our approach obtains a 1.8X speed-up when it works with the \textsc{Aan} model. This is even 16 times faster than the baseline with no use of the attention cache.
Earlier Attention? Aspect-Aware LSTM for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict fine-grained sentiments of comments with respect to given aspect terms or categories. In previous ABSA methods, the importance of aspect has been realized and verified. Most existing LSTM-based models take aspect into account via the attention mechanism, where the attention weights are calculated after the context is modeled in the form of contextual vectors. However, aspect-related information may be already discarded and aspect-irrelevant information may be retained in classic LSTM cells in the context modeling process, which can be improved to generate more effective context representations. This paper proposes a novel variant of LSTM, termed as aspect-aware LSTM (AA-LSTM), which incorporates aspect information into LSTM cells in the context modeling stage before the attention mechanism. Therefore, our AA-LSTM can dynamically produce aspect-aware contextual representations. We experiment with several representative LSTM-based models by replacing the classic LSTM cells with the AA-LSTM cells. Experimental results on SemEval-2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AA-LSTM.
Neural Collective Entity Linking Based on Recurrent Random Walk Network Learning
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Benefiting from the excellent ability of neural networks on learning semantic representations, existing studies for entity linking (EL) have resorted to neural networks to exploit both the local mention-to-entity compatibility and the global interdependence between different EL decisions for target entity disambiguation. However, most neural collective EL methods depend entirely upon neural networks to automatically model the semantic dependencies between different EL decisions, which lack of the guidance from external knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end neural network with recurrent random-walk layers for collective EL, which introduces external knowledge to model the semantic interdependence between different EL decisions. Specifically, we first establish a model based on local context features, and then stack random-walk layers to reinforce the evidence for related EL decisions into high-probability decisions, where the semantic interdependence between candidate entities is mainly induced from an external knowledge base. Finally, a semantic regularizer that preserves the collective EL decisions consistency is incorporated into the conventional objective function, so that the external knowledge base can be fully exploited in collective EL decisions. Experimental results and in-depth analysis on various datasets show that our model achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art models. Our code and data are released at \url{https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/RRWEL}.
Robust Audio Adversarial Example for a Physical Attack
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a method to generate audio adversarial examples that can attack a state-of-the-art speech recognition model in the physical world. Previous work assumes that generated adversarial examples are directly fed to the recognition model, and is not able to perform such a physical attack because of reverberation and noise from playback environments. In contrast, our method obtains robust adversarial examples by simulating transformations caused by playback or recording in the physical world and incorporating the transformations into the generation process. Evaluation and a listening experiment demonstrated that our adversarial examples are able to attack without being noticed by humans. This result suggests that audio adversarial examples generated by the proposed method may become a real threat.
HorNet: A Hierarchical Offshoot Recurrent Network for Improving Person Re-ID via Image Captioning
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to recognize a person-of-interest across different cameras with notable appearance variance. Existing research works focused on the capability and robustness of visual representation. In this paper, instead, we propose a novel hierarchical offshoot recurrent network (HorNet) for improving person re-ID via image captioning. Image captions are semantically richer and more consistent than visual attributes, which could significantly alleviate the variance. We use the similarity preserving generative adversarial network (SPGAN) and an image captioner to fulfill domain transfer and language descriptions generation. Then the proposed HorNet can learn the visual and language representation from both the images and captions jointly, and thus enhance the performance of person re-ID. Extensive experiments are conducted on several benchmark datasets with or without image captions, i.e., CUHK03, Market-1501, and Duke-MTMC, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method. Our method can generate and extract meaningful image captions while achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Improving Multilingual Sentence Embedding using Bi-directional Dual Encoder with Additive Margin Softmax
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present an approach to learn multilingual sentence embeddings using a bi-directional dual-encoder with additive margin softmax. The embeddings are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the United Nations (UN) parallel corpus retrieval task. In all the languages tested, the system achieves P@1 of 86% or higher. We use pairs retrieved by our approach to train NMT models that achieve similar performance to models trained on gold pairs. We explore simple document-level embeddings constructed by averaging our sentence embeddings. On the UN document-level retrieval task, document embeddings achieve around 97% on P@1 for all experimented language pairs. Lastly, we evaluate the proposed model on the BUCC mining task. The learned embeddings with raw cosine similarity scores achieve competitive results compared to current state-of-the-art models, and with a second-stage scorer we achieve a new state-of-the-art level on this task.
Graph-based Neural Sentence Ordering
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Sentence ordering is to restore the original paragraph from a set of sentences. It involves capturing global dependencies among sentences regardless of their input order. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible graph-based neural sentence ordering model, which adopts graph recurrent network \cite{Zhang:acl18} to accurately learn semantic representations of the sentences. Instead of assuming connections between all pairs of input sentences, we use entities that are shared among multiple sentences to make more expressive graph representations with less noise. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art systems on several benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model. We also conduct a thorough analysis on how entities help the performance.
Multi-view Knowledge Graph Embedding for Entity Alignment
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of embedding-based entity alignment between knowledge graphs (KGs). Previous works mainly focus on the relational structure of entities. Some further incorporate another type of features, such as attributes, for refinement. However, a vast of entity features are still unexplored or not equally treated together, which impairs the accuracy and robustness of embedding-based entity alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that unifies multiple views of entities to learn embeddings for entity alignment. Specifically, we embed entities based on the views of entity names, relations and attributes, with several combination strategies. Furthermore, we design some cross-KG inference methods to enhance the alignment between two KGs. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art embedding-based entity alignment methods. The selected views, cross-KG inference and combination strategies all contribute to the performance improvement.
A Document-grounded Matching Network for Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

We present a document-grounded matching network (DGMN) for response selection that can power a knowledge-aware retrieval-based chatbot system. The challenges of building such a model lie in how to ground conversation contexts with background documents and how to recognize important information in the documents for matching. To overcome the challenges, DGMN fuses information in a document and a context into representations of each other, and dynamically determines if grounding is necessary and importance of different parts of the document and the context through hierarchical interaction with a response at the matching step. Empirical studies on two public data sets indicate that DGMN can significantly improve upon state-of-the-art methods and at the same time enjoys good interpretability.
RLTM: An Efficient Neural IR Framework for Long Documents
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks have achieved significant improvements in information retrieval (IR). However, most existing models are computational costly and can not efficiently scale to long documents. This paper proposes a novel End-to-End neural ranking framework called Reinforced Long Text Matching (RLTM) which matches a query with long documents efficiently and effectively. The core idea behind the framework can be analogous to the human judgment process which firstly locates the relevance parts quickly from the whole document and then matches these parts with the query carefully to obtain the final label. Firstly, we select relevant sentences from the long documents by a coarse and efficient matching model. Secondly, we generate a relevance score by a more sophisticated matching model based on the sentence selected. The whole model is trained jointly with reinforcement learning in a pairwise manner by maximizing the expected score gaps between positive and negative examples. Experimental results demonstrate that RLTM has greatly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the state-of-the-art models.
Sequence Generation: From Both Sides to the Middle
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

The encoder-decoder framework has achieved promising process for many sequence generation tasks, such as neural machine translation and text summarization. Such a framework usually generates a sequence token by token from left to right, hence (1) this autoregressive decoding procedure is time-consuming when the output sentence becomes longer, and (2) it lacks the guidance of future context which is crucial to avoid under translation. To alleviate these issues, we propose a synchronous bidirectional sequence generation (SBSG) model which predicts its outputs from both sides to the middle simultaneously. In the SBSG model, we enable the left-to-right (L2R) and right-to-left (R2L) generation to help and interact with each other by leveraging interactive bidirectional attention network. Experiments on neural machine translation (En-De, Ch-En, and En-Ro) and text summarization tasks show that the proposed model significantly speeds up decoding while improving the generation quality compared to the autoregressive Transformer.
Counterexample-Guided Strategy Improvement for POMDPs Using Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2019
Year: 2019

We study strategy synthesis for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The particular problem is to determine strategies that provably adhere to (probabilistic) temporal logic constraints. This problem is computationally intractable and theoretically hard. We propose a novel method that combines techniques from machine learning and formal verification. First, we train a recurrent neural network (RNN) to encode POMDP strategies. The RNN accounts for memory-based decisions without the need to expand the full belief space of a POMDP. Secondly, we restrict the RNN-based strategy to represent a finite-memory strategy and implement it on a specific POMDP. For the resulting finite Markov chain, efficient formal verification techniques provide provable guarantees against temporal logic specifications. If the specification is not satisfied, counterexamples supply diagnostic information. We use this information to improve the strategy by iteratively training the RNN. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method elevates the state of the art in POMDP solving by up to three orders of magnitude in terms of solving times and model sizes.