Papers by Ming Gong
WhiteningBERT: An Easy Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Approach (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models perform well on learning sentence semantics when fine-tuned with supervised data. |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough examination of pretrained model based unsupervised sentence embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on whitening-based vector normalization with less than 10 lines of code. |
Enhancing Language Representation with Constructional Information for Natural Language Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing focus on acquiring lexico-semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a construction grammar which highlights the pairings of form and meaning to enrich language representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to existing models on a variety of NLU tasks. |
Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on NLP tasks. however, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually requires exorbitant costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box tuning technique that optimizes task-specific prompts without accessing gradients and hidden representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance under few-shot learning scenarios. |
Unicoder: A Universal Language Encoder by Pre-training with Multiple Cross-lingual Tasks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that can handle cross-lingual tasks with limited or no training data are insensitive to different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Unicoder to train models in one language and apply it to other languages. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Unicoder learns the mappings among different languages from more perspectives. |
CoSQA: 20,000+ Web Queries for Code Search and Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using deep neural networks to find codes is difficult . we present a dataset that includes 20,604 labels for natural language queries and codes . |
| Approach: | They introduce a contrastive learning method to enhance text-code matching . they find that CoSQA improves the accuracy of code question answering by 5.1% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of code question answering by 5.1% and improves by 10.5% on a CodeBERT model. |
Selected Languages are All You Need for Cross-lingual Truthfulness Transfer (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for truthfulness enhancement in English are limited to multilingual scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for cross-lingual truthfulness transfer that uses language bias and transfer contributions to select an optimal subset of all tested languages and employ translation instruction tuning for cross language truthfulness transfers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces multilingual representation disparity and boosts cross-lingual truthfulness transfer of LLMs. |
Empowering Dual-Encoder with Query Generator for Cross-Lingual Dense Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to distill knowledge from cross-encoder re-ranker to dual-encoding retriever are lacking in the cross-lingual setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a query generator as the teacher in the cross-lingual setting to distill knowledge to a dual-encoder retrieval model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Bridging the Gap between Language Models and Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train cross-lingual pre-trained language models have shown great success in cross-linguistic sequence labeling tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual language informative span masking task to eliminate the objective gap between pre-training and fine-tuning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks even with limited pre-training data. |
Enhancing Answer Boundary Detection for Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve machine reading comprehension performance on low resource languages are limited due to the lack of sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a mixed MRC task to translate the question to other languages and build cross-lingual question-passage pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves on two cross-lingual MRC datasets. |
Quantifying and Improving the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Against Spurious Features in Grounding Data (2026.acl-long)
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Shiping Yang, Jie Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Ning Wu, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, Hongzhi Li, Hengyuan Zhang, Angel X. Chang, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlook implicit noise (spurious features). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to quantify the robustness of RAGs against spurious features by integrating a data synthesis pipeline and a taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies the robustness of RALMs against spurious features. |
ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing sequence-to-sequence models are optimized for future n-gram prediction and n stream self-attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised objective called future n-gram prediction and the proposed n stream self-attention mechanism to optimize the model for sequence-to-sequence learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus. |
No Answer is Better Than Wrong Answer: A Reflection Model for Document Level Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Natural Questions (NQ) benchmark sets new challenges for machine reading comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to handle all answer types systematically using a two-step training procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieved the top 1 on both long and short answer leaderboards with F1 scores of 77.2 and 64.1. |
Retrieval Enhanced Model for Commonsense Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for commonsense generation are lacking for pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses concept matching to retrieve prototype sentences and trainable sentence retriever to enhance pre-training and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the large-scale Common-Gen benchmark. |
Visual Zero-Shot E-Commerce Product Attribute Value Extraction (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot product attribute value extraction approaches require sellers to manually provide product descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal zero-shot attribute value generation framework based on CLIP that uses product images as inputs for zero- shot inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms other vision-language models for zero-shot attribute value extraction. |
Lexicon-Enhanced Self-Supervised Training for Multilingual Dense Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent multilingual pre-trained models perform poorly on multilingual retrieval tasks due to lack of multilingual training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to mine and generate self-supervised training data based on large-scale unlabeled corpus and introduce query generator to generate more queries in target languages for unlabed passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than baselines on a Mr. TYDI dataset and an industrial dataset from a commercial search engine. |
A Graph Representation of Semi-structured Data for Web Question Answering (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat semi-structured data as flat documents with pieces of text . semi-structural data is more effective to represent rich relational information . question answering is an important feature in most search engines . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph representation of Web tables and lists based on categorization of components and their relations . they also develop reasoning techniques on the graph model for the question answering task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph improves F1 score by 3.90 points over the state-of-the-art baselines on real datasets. |
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenxin An, Zhihui Xie, Xiaonan Li, Ming Zhong, Shansan Gong, Lei Li, Jun Zhang, Jingjing Xu, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing research on long-context scaling in language models has focused on managing lengthy input prompts instead of producing long outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level curriculum learning framework that shifts a model’s focus from interpreting long chain-of-thoughts to generating them. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on rigorous reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and GPQA Diamond, show that the proposed approach surpasses standard fine-tuning by over 10% while maintaining robust performance on understanding tasks. |
ECom-Bench: Can LLM Agent Resolve Real-World E-commerce Customer Support Issues? (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | ECom-Bench is a benchmark framework for evaluating LLM agent with multimodal capabilities in e-commerce customer support domain. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark framework for evaluating LLM agent with multimodal capabilities in the e-commerce customer support domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features dynamic user simulation based on persona information from real e-commerce customer interactions and a realistic task dataset derived from authentic ecommerce dialogues. |
Label-aware Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to translate spoken language understanding into low-resource languages are limited to implicit alignment and disregard the inherent semantic structure in SLU. |
| Approach: | They propose to model utterance-slot-word structure by a multi-level contrastive learning framework . they also propose a label-aware joint model leveraging label semantics to enhance alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on two zero-shot cross-lingual datasets. |
VTechAGP: An Academic-to-General-Audience Text Paraphrase Dataset and Benchmark Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text simplification and paraphrase datasets focus on sentence-level translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset . they also propose DSPT5 dynamic soft prompt generative language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset . it is based on document-level these and dissertation abstract pairs from 8 colleges . |
Multi-View Document Representation Learning for Open-Domain Dense Retrieval (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval are hard to match with multiple views. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view document representation learning framework to generate multiple embeddings through viewers to represent documents and enforce them to align with different queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms recent works and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark (2021.findings-acl)
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Dayiheng Liu, Yu Yan, Yeyun Gong, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Weizhu Chen, Jie Fu, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Pengcheng Wang, Jiusheng Chen, Daxin Jiang, Jiancheng Lv, Ruofei Zhang, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Multi-task benchmarks focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on GLUE and Su-perGLUE for English and several other languages. |
DAMRO: Dive into the Attention Mechanism of LVLM to Reduce Object Hallucination (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of Large Vision-Language Models, they suffer from hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free strategy that "D**ive into" the attention of LVLMs to "R**educe" object hallucination by using classification tokens of ViT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the impact of outlier tokens on LVLMs . the proposed method is based on LLaVA-1.5, LLvaVA-NeXT and InstructBLIP . |
CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Zhangyin Feng, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Xiaocheng Feng, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Daxin Jiang, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained models have improved performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They develop a bimodal pre-trained model for programming language (PL) and natural language (NL) it incorporates a hybrid objective function that detects replaced tokens from generators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on two NL-PL applications by fine-tuning model parameters. |
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn better unsupervised sentence representations have been successful . over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentences reduces the capacity of powerful PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve the over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentence representations by combining negatives from PLMs intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different strong baselines on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets. |
Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension with Language Branch Knowledge Distillation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) is a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in low-source languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Vietnamese. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to augment cross-lingual machine reading comprehension by combining knowledge from multiple language branch models into a single model for all target languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two CLMRC benchmarks show the proposed method is effective and robust to data noises. |
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model (2021.acl-long)
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Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Qinliang Su, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Wanjun Zhong, Xiaojun Quan, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing methods that use syntax of text in pre-training and fine-tuning suffer from discrepancy between the two stages. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that utilizes the syntactic structure of text in pre-training and fine-tuning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on six public benchmark datasets. |
Sci-LoRA: Mixture of Scientific LoRAs for Cross-Domain Lay Paraphrasing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Lay paraphrasing aims to make scientific information accessible to non-experts . existing studies focus on a single domain, such as biomedicine . |
| Approach: | a new lay paraphrasing model leverages a mixture of LoRAs fine-tuned on multiple scientific domains. |
| Outcome: | a new model outperforms state-of-the-art large language models in lay paraphrasing . the model can adjust the impact of different domains without explicit labels . |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
NeuronBlocks: Building Your NLP DNN Models Like Playing Lego (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have been widely employed in industry to address various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an NLP toolkit that encapsulates neural network modules as building blocks to construct various DNN models with complex architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can build, train, and test various DNN models with complex architecture. |
Coherent Entity Disambiguation via Modeling Topic and Categorical Dependency (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing entity disambiguation methods struggle to capture explicit discourse-level dependencies, resulting in incoherent predictions at the abstract level. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised variational autoencoder to extract latent topic vectors of context sentences to enhance coherence of entity predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art on popular ED benchmarks with an average improvement of 1.3 F1 points. |
Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on developing powerful large language models for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation to build powerful multilingual math reasoning models . they propose different training strategies to build xMR LLMs that outperform open-source LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source LLMs and surpasses ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. |
Joint Type Inference on Entities and Relations via Graph Convolutional Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel graph convolutional network (GCN) is proposed for the task of joint entity relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolutional network running on an entity-relation bipartite graph . they propose combining two different methods to perform joint entity relation extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing joint models in entity performance and is competitive with the state-of-the-art in relation performance. |
LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network (2020.acl-main)
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Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact checking textual statements are not yet available. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network approach capable of leveraging logical operations for fact checking . they use a textual statement and semi-structured tables to generate a program from it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on TABFACT dataset . it derives a program (a.k.a. logical form) of the statement in semantic parsing manner . |
Learning from Multiple Noisy Augmented Data Sets for Better Cross-Lingual Spoken Language Understanding (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to scale out spoken language understanding to low-resource languages are noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for mitigating noise in augmented data by training models with augmented datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
CoELM: Construction-Enhanced Language Modeling (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that integrating constructional information can improve the performance of pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a construction-Enhanced language model that embeds constructional semantics into language models for natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on various benchmarks. |
NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation (2023.acl-long)
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Shengming Yin, Chenfei Wu, Huan Yang, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaodong Wang, Minheng Ni, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Ming Gong, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Diffusion over Difference architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (94.26%) and generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence. |
MaP: A Matrix-based Prediction Approach to Improve Span Extraction in Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict the start and end positions of answer spans generate two probability vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends the probability vector to a probability matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on SQuAD 1.1 and three other question answering benchmarks. |
Mixed-modality Representation Learning and Pre-training for Joint Table-and-Text Retrieval in OpenQA (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve evidences from corpus are difficult due to table-text discrepancy and data sparsity problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimized OpenQA Table-Text Retriever to retrieve tabular and textual evidences from tabular resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed OpenQA Table-Text Retriever significantly outperforms existing methods on QA tasks. |
Instructed Language Models with Retrievers Are Powerful Entity Linkers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative approaches powered by large language models have demonstrated emergent abilities in tasks that require complex reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence training objective with instruction-tuning that enables casual language models to perform entity linking over knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches with +6.8 F1 points gain on average and huge advantage in training data efficiency and compute consumption. |
Tell Me How to Ask Again: Question Data Augmentation with Controllable Rewriting in Continuous Space (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation techniques for natural language processing tasks are difficult to design. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable rewriting based question data augmentation method for machine reading comprehension, question generation and question-answering natural language inference tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates high-quality, high-quality question data samples on machine reading comprehension, question generation, and question-answering natural language inference tasks. |