Papers by Shuming Liu
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| Challenge: | Zero pronouns (ZPs) are often omitted in pro-drop languages, but should be recalled in non-pro-drop language. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze the literature on zero pronoun translation after the neural revolution . they uncover that data limitation causes learning bias in languages and domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method and methods are compared to other models and evaluation metrics on different benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show low missampling rate and high uncertainty are both essential for achieving promising performances with negative sampling. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive and weighted sampling distribution that further improves negative sampling by introducing missampling and uncertainty concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on synthetic and well-annotated datasets in terms of F1 score and loss convergence. |
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that use a left-to-right completion paradigm are inefficient and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation system platform . they propose to use a prefix-constrained decoding approach to achieve end- to-end evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can guarantee high-quality, error-free translations . it uses prefix-constrained decoding and improves on previous systems . |
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| Challenge: | Several recent papers claim to have achieved human parity at sentence-level machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset with rich discourse annotations to evaluate MT performance . they find that MT outputs differ fundamentally from human translations in terms of latent discourse structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset builds upon the large-scale parallel corpus BWB . it covers 15,095 entity mentions in both languages and compares them to human translations . |
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| Challenge: | generative models for end-to-end sequence generation have been shown promising for this task . however, how to precisely extract a skeleton and how to effectively train a retrieval-guided response generator is still challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where skeleton extraction is made by an interpretable matching model and a retrieval-guided response generator is followed by a separate generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in a variety of experiments. |
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| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
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| Challenge: | Computer-aided translation (CAT) is a form of software that assists a human translator in the translation process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use computer-aided translation (CAT) to assist a human translator in the translation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can give significantly more accurate predictions than baseline methods on CAT datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) has seen great success during recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that measures the fidelity of explanation methods on translation tasks . they use an efficient approximation to evaluate several explanation methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is efficient and can be used on translation tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting constituency trees from language models suffer from branching bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the branching bias by comparing the performance gap on a language and its reversed language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is agnostic to language models and extracting methods, and it can be implemented with three factors to introduce the branching bias. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to handle hard mentions due to insufficient contexts, limiting their overall typing performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit sibling mentions to enhance the mention representations by adding unseen test mentions as new nodes for inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms ten strong baseline models and outperformed strong baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enforce uniform expert sizes, creating a rigidity that fails to align computational costs with varying token-level complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture of heterogeneous grouped experts (MoHGE) that allows for flexible, resource-aware expert combinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches the performance of existing Mixture-of-Experts architectures while maintaining balanced GPU utilization. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to make comments on articles are based on human-annotated subsets, but they are not suitable for online forums. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale Chinese corpus with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments’ varying quality to generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates human-annotated subset characterizing the comments’ varying quality and shows that it is more accurate than previous models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) are often impractical due to high costs and time consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses keyword extraction to reduce prompt tokens in text annotation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces prompt tokens while maintaining high accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing IMT systems relying on lexical constrained decoding (LCD) are limited in translation efficiency and quality due to LCD. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel interactive neural machine translation system that uses lexical constraints to decode missing words in a manually revised translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs significantly better and faster than state-of-the-art IMT on three translation tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on controllable unsupervised paraphrase generation are expensive and require supervised training on large parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for controllable unsupervised paraphrase generation that is flexible to adapt to specific domains without extra training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised baselines by a margin. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Sequence-to-sequence models tend to generate generic/dull responses . |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical re-weighting method that assigns different weights for multiple responses of the same query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves acceptance rate of generated responses and significantly reduces generated generic responses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use millions of parameters on massive data are inefficient and lack interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a latent structure that is easily transferable from the general domain to downstream tasks in a lightweight and transparent way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than four strong baseline models in terms of automatic and human evaluations and is 5x faster than the strongest baseline model. |
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| Challenge: | Auxiliary information from multiple sources has been demonstrated to be effective in zero-shot fine-grained entity typing (ZFET) however, there is no comprehensive understanding of how to make better use of the existing information sources and how they affect the performance of ZFET. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source fusion model targeting auxiliary information from multiple sources to improve zero-shot fine-grained entity typing (ZFET) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 11.42% and 22.84% gains over state-of-the-art baselines on BBN and Wiki respectively with regard to macro F1 scores. |
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| Challenge: | Graph data organizes complex relationships and interactions between objects . Graph neural networks (GNNs) are becoming more popular in graph learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for interactive and instructional graph data understanding and reasoning . they first evaluate the capabilities of public VLMs in graph learning from multiple aspects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an accuracy increase of 5%-15% compared to baseline models . the best-performing model achieve scores comparable to Gemini in GPT-asissted Evaluation . |
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| Challenge: | ZPs are often omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferred from intraand inter-sentential contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark testset for target evaluation on Chinese-English ZP translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed testset covers five genres and identifies current challenges for evaluation. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that initializing NMT models with pre-trained language models (LM) can speed up the model training and boost the model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to control copying behaviors in NMT models by initializing them with pre-trained language models (LM) they propose to use a metric called copy ratio to control the copying behavior in decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance by controlling copying behaviors for pre-training based models. |
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| Challenge: | Prior researches suggest that neural machine translation (NMT) captures word alignment through its attention mechanism, however, attention may fail to capture word alignment for some NMT models. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to induce word alignment which are general and agnostic to specific NMT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods induce much better word alignment than attention. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models with instruction-following capabilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation-free framework for empowering large language models with instruction-following capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that PT and BT are nicely complementary to each other. |
| Approach: | They introduce two probing tasks for PT and BT respectively and investigate their complementarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods establish state-of-the-art on the WMT16 English-Romanian and English-Russian benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods focus on one dataset, e.g., Newstest dataset in each year’s WMT Metrics Shared Task. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a single dataset to evaluate the performance of automatic translation metrics. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the rankings of metrics vary when the evaluation is conducted on different datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work on sequence segmentation models suffer from invalid predictions and a lack of consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified span-based model that embeds every span and computes a score for each segmentation candidate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 6 of the 3 tasks tested. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning-to-rank response selection are suboptimal due to ignorance of diversity of response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf response retrieval models as automatic grayscale data generators to train response selection models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be automated without human effort on grayscale data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing generative dialogue models generate responses from input queries . however, the results are limited and the models are unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which exploits retrieval results via a skeleton-to-response paradigm . they extract a query skelet and use it to generate a new skele and response . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the informativeness of the generated responses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation use encoder-decoder framework, but lack of large parallel data is a problem for many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to separate table-to-text generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only achieves 9.71 BLUE score. |
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised keyphrase extraction is a task of extracting a keyphrase set that provides readers with highlevel information about the key ideas or important topics described in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction task that is a document-set matching problem instead of modeling the relevance between an individual phrase and the document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised keyphrase extraction baselines by a large margin. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract sentimental triplets are infeasible and counterproductive . aspect Sentiment Triplets Extraction (ASTE) task is an emerging sub-task of Aspect-based Sentimence Analysis . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based approach to the Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction task . they retrieve semantic similar triplets from the training corpus and interpolate their label information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction task. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored some methods for understanding hidden representations, but they have not sought to improve the translation quality rationally according to their understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a sequence of nested relative tasks and measure the feature generalization ability of the learned hidden representation over these tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve consistent improvements (up to +1.3 BLEU) on two widely-used datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Standard evaluation metrics, e.g., BLEU, TER and METEOR, focus on the quality of translations at the sentence level and do not consider discourse-level features. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a metric to take discourse coherence into consideration by categorizing discourse-related spans and calculating the similarity-based F1 measure of categorized spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric possesses better selectivity and interpretability at the document-level, and is more sensitive to document- level nuances. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-augmented text classification are successful in the few-shot scenario with limited retrieval space. |
| Approach: | They propose to use EM-L and R-L to provide task-specific guidance to retrieval metric . they also propose to incorporate retrieved memory alongside parameters for better generalization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better on the few-shot scenario with limited retrieval space. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that NMT models trained with label smoothing are well-calibrated on ground-truth training data, but miscalibration remains a challenge during inference due to the discrepancy between training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a graduated label smoothing method that can improve inference calibration and translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both inference calibration and translation performance. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate opendomain dialogues are limited due to the one-to-many nature of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised setting to obtain a smooth latent space that captures discourse-level context information and implicitly models more references in latent spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on two real-world dialogue datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in slow-thinking reasoning models have shown exceptional performance in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables models to automatically adjust Chain-of-Thought (CoT) length based on problem difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework penalizes inefficiency on simple problems while incentivizing deep reasoning for complex ones. |
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| Challenge: | Neural text generation is a challenging task that requires rigid formats to be controlled . a framework called SongNet is designed to tackle this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to tackle a task called rigid formats controlled text generation . they propose rhyming schemes and a transformer-based auto-regressive language model to improve the modeling performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance on format, rhyme, and sentence integrity. |
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| Challenge: | Language coverage bias is important for neural machine translation because of the target-original training data. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to alleviate the language coverage bias problem by explicitly distinguishing between the source-and target-original training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve translation tasks on both back-and forward-translation and their tagged variants. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for word-level auto-completion (WLAC) do not meet the criterion of good auto-completes. |
| Approach: | They propose a measurable criterion to address the question: what kind of words are good auto-completions? they propose an approach to enhance WLAC performance by promoting adherence to the cri-terion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the top-performing system submitted to the WLAC shared tasks in WMT2022 while using significantly smaller model sizes. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for paraphrase generation are not designed for the task, but adopted from other evaluation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation metric for paraphrase generation that uses reference-based and reference-free metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric outperforms existing metrics and is more reliable than reference-based metrics. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities when leveraging in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that discretizes uninformative tokens using a self-supervised pre-training technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across classification tasks while requiring only 0.8% decrease in performance. |
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| Challenge: | Neural conversation models are easy to generate bland and generic responses . however, their improvement of generating high-quality responses is still unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a discrete latent variable with an explicit semantic meaning to improve the conditional variational autoencoder on short-text conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms various kinds of generation models under automatic and human evaluations and generates more diverse and informative responses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on logical data-to-text generation rely on neural language models to generate the final table description, but they have difficulty working out key entities in the description. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic reasoning framework that reasons out each entity in the table description with a table-compatible programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three datasets and three backbones with an absolute improvement of 5.7%11.5% on SP-Acc. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research has analyzed various factors indicating the conversational purpose such as emotions, topics, word orders, syntactic patterns and other aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a short-text conversation dataset with annotated sentences and train conversation models conditioned on the sentence functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict the quality of the returned responses. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models may not follow human instructions and produce toxic, hallucinated, or biased content. |
| Approach: | They propose a disperse-then-merge framework that dispersers instruction-following data into portions and trains multiple sub-models using different data portions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms data curation and training regularization on standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Phrase-level self-attention networks (PSAN) can capture context dependencies at the phrase level instead of the sentence level. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform self-attention across words inside a phrase to capture context dependencies at the phrase level and use the gated memory updating mechanism to refine each word’s representation hierarchically with longer-term context dependency captured in a larger phrase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art performance across a plethora of NLP tasks including binary and multi-class classification, natural language inference and sentence similarity. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance neural machine translation (NMT) by using a TM have been reported to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation memory augmented neural machine translation model that is good at fitting data but more sensitive to fluctuations in training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves consistent gains over conventional and existing models under two variance-preferable scenarios as well as the high resource scenario. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on back translation (BT) focus on beam search or random sampling . a new method to generate synthetic data with a backward model is proposed to improve BT performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate synthetic data to trade off quality and importance factors . back translation (BT) is one of the most significant technologies in NMT research fields . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline methods on WMT14 DE-EN, EN-DE, and RU-EN benchmark tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on fine-grained entity typing (FET) relies on knowledge bases as distant supervision, but lack of or incompleteness of KB can hinder training. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-step framework that trains FET models without accessing any knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with respect to the models trained on the original KB-supervised datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Empirical experiments on Chinese-to-English and Japanese-to English datasets show that the proposed attention model delivers significant improvements in terms of alignment error rate and BLEU. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly access the target foresight word in the attention model to improve alignment and translation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model improves alignment error rate and BLEU on Chinese-to-English and Japanese-toEnglish datasets. |
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| Challenge: | ambiguity, polysemy, or uncertainty remain significant challenges in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They introduce a framework that integrates LLM semantic priors with continuous fuzzy membership degrees to create an explicit interaction between probability-based reasoning and fuzzy membership reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates semantic priors with continuous fuzzy membership degrees . it allows ambiguous inputs to be gradually transformed into clear and interpretable decisions . |