Chinese medical question-answer matching is more challenging than the open-domain question answer matching in English. Even though the deep learning method has performed well in improving the performance of question answer matching, these methods only focus on the semantic information inside sentences, while ignoring the semantic association between questions and answers, thus resulting in performance deficits. In this paper, we design a series of interactive sentence representation learning models to tackle this problem. To better adapt to Chinese medical question-answer matching and take the advantages of different neural network structures, we propose the Crossed BERT network to extract the deep semantic information inside the sentence and the semantic association between question and answer, and then combine with the multi-scale CNNs network or BiGRU network to take the advantage of different structure of neural networks to learn more semantic features into the sentence representation. The experiments on the cMedQA V2.0 and cMedQA V1.0 dataset show that our model significantly outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art models of Chinese medical question answer matching.
The Chinese language has evolved a lot during the long-term development. Therefore, native speakers now have trouble in reading sentences written in ancient Chinese. In this paper, we propose to build an end-to-end neural model to automatically translate between ancient and contemporary Chinese. However, the existing ancient-contemporary Chinese parallel corpora are not aligned at the sentence level and sentence-aligned corpora are limited, which makes it difficult to train the model. To build the sentence level parallel training data for the model, we propose an unsupervised algorithm that co…
A New Dataset and Empirical Study for Sentence Simplification in Chinese
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）
Adversarial attacks in texts are mostly substitution-based methods that replace words or characters in the original texts to achieve success attacks. Recent methods use pre-trained language models as the substitutes generator. While in Chinese, such methods are not applicable since words in Chinese require segmentations first. In this paper, we propose a pre-train language model as the substitutes generator using sentence-pieces to craft adversarial examples in Chinese. The substitutions in the generated adversarial examples are not characters or words but \textit{'pieces'}, which are more nat…
Measuring sentence similarity is a key research area nowadays as it allows machines to better understand human languages. In this paper, we proposed a Cross-Attention Siamese Network (CATsNet) to carry out the task of learning the semantic meanings of Chinese sentences and comparing the similarity between two sentences. This novel model is capable of catching non-local features. Additionally, we also tried to apply the long short-term memory (LSTM) network in the model to improve its performance. The experiments were conducted on the LCQMC dataset and the results showed that our model could ac…
Rapidly developed neural models have achieved competitive performance in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) as their traditional counterparts. However, most of methods encounter the computational inefficiency especially for long sentences because of the increasing model complexity and slower decoders. This paper presents a simple neural segmenter which directly labels the gap existence between adjacent characters to alleviate the existing drawback. Our segmenter is fully end-to-end and capable of performing segmentation very fast. We also show a performance difference with different tag sets. The…
Underutilization of Syntactic Processing by Chinese Learners of English in Comprehending English Sentences, Evidenced from Adapted Garden-Path Ambiguity Experiment
Yangzhou University（扬州大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Idioms, are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Due to the properties of non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, Chinese Idioms are hard to be understood by children and non-native speakers. This study proposes a novel task, denoted as Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing (CIP). CIP aims to rephrase idioms-included sentences to non-idiomatic ones under the premise of preserving the original sentence's meaning. Since the sentences without idioms are easier handled by Chinese NLP systems, CIP can be used to pre-process Chinese datasets, there…
Korean-Chinese is a low resource language pair, but Korean and Chinese have a lot in common in terms of vocabulary. Sino-Korean words, which can be converted into corresponding Chinese characters, account for more than fifty of the entire Korean vocabulary. Motivated by this, we propose a simple linguistically motivated solution to improve the performance of the Korean-to-Chinese neural machine translation model by using their common vocabulary. We adopt Chinese characters as a translation pivot by converting Sino-Korean words in Korean sentences to Chinese characters and then train the machin…
Research Center for SCIR, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学SCIR研究中心）；State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, iFLYTEK Research, China（科大讯飞研究中心认知智能国家重点实验室）；iFLYTEK AI Research (Hebei), Langfang, China（科大讯飞（河北）人工智能研究院，廊坊）
Owing to the continuous efforts by the Chinese NLP community, more and more Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets become available. To add diversity in this area, in this paper, we propose a new task called Sentence Cloze-style Machine Reading Comprehension (SC-MRC). The proposed task aims to fill the right candidate sentence into the passage that has several blanks. We built a Chinese dataset called CMRC 2019 to evaluate the difficulty of the SC-MRC task. Moreover, to add more difficulties, we also made fake candidates that are similar to the correct ones, which requires the machine …
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been proven to achieve impressive results. The NMT system translation results depend strongly on the size and quality of parallel corpora. Nevertheless, for many language pairs, no rich-resource parallel corpora exist. As described in this paper, we propose a corpus augmentation method by segmenting long sentences in a corpus using back-translation and generating pseudo-parallel sentence pairs. The experiment results of the Japanese-Chinese and Chinese-Japanese translation with Japanese-Chinese scientific paper excerpt corpus (ASPEC-JC) show that the method…
Guizhou University（贵州大学）；University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校）
A predicate head is a verbal expression that plays a role as the structural center of a sentence. Identifying predicate heads is critical to understanding a sentence. It plays the leading role in organizing the relevant syntactic elements in a sentence, including subject elements, adverbial elements, etc. For some languages, such as English, word morphologies are valuable for identifying predicate heads. However, Chinese offers no morphological information to indicate words` grammatical roles. A Chinese sentence often contains several verbal expressions; identifying the expression that plays t…
In the scenario of unsupervised extractive summarization, learning high-quality sentence representations is essential to select salient sentences from the input document. Previous studies focus more on employing statistical approaches or pre-trained language models (PLMs) to extract sentence embeddings, while ignoring the rich information inherent in the heterogeneous types of interaction between words and sentences. In this paper, we are the first to propose an unsupervised extractive summarizaiton method with heterogeneous graph embeddings (HGEs) for Chinese document. A heterogeneous text gr…
School of software Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学软件学院）；Department of statistics, Harvard University（哈佛大学统计系）
In this paper, we develop a low than character feature embedding called radical embedding, and apply it on LSTM model for sentence segmentation of pre modern Chinese texts. The datasets includes over 150 classical Chinese books from 3 different dynasties and contains different literary styles. LSTM CRF model is a state of art method for the sequence labeling problem. Our new model adds a component of radical embedding, which leads to improved performances. Experimental results based on the aforementioned Chinese books demonstrates a better accuracy than earlier methods on sentence segmentation…
Quantifying patterns of punctuation in modern Chinese prose
Faculty of Computer Science and Telecommunications, Cracow University of Technology（克拉科夫理工大学计算机科学与电信学院）；Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院核物理研究所）；School of Modern Languages, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院现代语言学院）
This paper presents MuCGEC, a multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC), consisting of 7,063 sentences collected from three Chinese-as-a-Second-Language (CSL) learner sources. Each sentence is corrected by three annotators, and their corrections are carefully reviewed by a senior annotator, resulting in 2.3 references per sentence. We conduct experiments with two mainstream CGEC models, i.e., the sequence-to-sequence model and the sequence-to-edit model, both enhanced with large pretrained language models, achieving competitive benchmark pe…
Bi-DCSpell: A Bi-directional Detector-Corrector Interactive Framework for Chinese Spelling Check
School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)（北京人工智能研究院）
Chinese meme-face is a special kind of internet subculture widely spread in Chinese Social Community Networks. It usually consists of a template image modified by some amusing details and a text caption. In this paper, we present MemeFaceGenerator, a Generative Adversarial Network with the attention module and template information as supplementary signals, to automatically generate meme-faces from text inputs. We also develop a web service as system demonstration of meme-face synthesis. MemeFaceGenerator has been shown to be capable of generating high-quality meme-faces from random text inputs…
Tomb biographies of the Tang dynasty provide invaluable information about Chinese history. The original biographies are classical Chinese texts which contain neither word boundaries nor sentence boundaries. Relying on three published books of tomb biographies of the Tang dynasty, we investigated the effectiveness of employing machine-learning methods for algorithmically identifying the pauses and terminals of sentences in the biographies. We consider the segmentation task as a classification problem. Chinese characters that are and are not followed by a punctuation mark are classified into two…
Dependency Grammar has been used by linguists as the basis of the syntactic components of their grammar formalisms. It has also been used in natural language parsing. In China, attempts have been made to use this grammar formalism to parse Chinese sentences using corpus-based techniques. This paper reviews the properties of Dependency Grammar as embodied in four axioms for the well-formedness conditions for dependency structures. It is shown that allowing multiple governors as done by some followers of this formalism is unnecessary. The practice of augmenting Dependency Grammar with functional…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Meituan（美团）
Single online handwritten Chinese character recognition~(single OLHCCR) has achieved prominent performance. However, in real application scenarios, users always write multiple Chinese characters to form one complete sentence and the contextual information within these characters holds the significant potential to improve the accuracy, robustness and efficiency of sentence-level OLHCCR. In this work, we first propose a simple and straightforward end-to-end network, namely vanilla compositional network~(VCN) to tackle the sentence-level OLHCCR. It couples convolutional neural network with sequen…
Chinese discourse coherence modeling remains a challenge taskin Natural Language Processing field.Existing approaches mostlyfocus on the need for feature engineering, whichadoptthe sophisticated features to capture the logic or syntactic or semantic relationships acrosssentences within a text.In this paper, we present an entity-drivenrecursive deep modelfor the Chinese discourse coherence evaluation based on current English discourse coherenceneural network model. Specifically, to overcome the shortage of identifying the entity(nouns) overlap across sentences in the currentmodel, Our combined …
Bidirectional Chinese and English Passive Sentences Dataset for Machine Translation
Centre de Llenguatge i Computacio (CLiC), Universitat de Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那大学语言与计算中心，西班牙）；Institut de Recerca en Sistemes Complexos (UBICS), Universitat de Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那大学复杂系统研究中心，西班牙）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）
Pronouns are often dropped in Chinese sentences, and this happens more frequently in conversational genres as their referents can be easily understood from context. Recovering dropped pronouns is essential to applications such as Information Extraction where the referents of these dropped pronouns need to be resolved, or Machine Translation when Chinese is the source language. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end neural network model to recover dropped pronouns in conversational data. Our model is based on a structured attention mechanism that models the referents of dropped pronouns ut…
As a fundamental task in natural language processing, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) has gradually received widespread attention and become a research hotspot. However, one obvious deficiency for the existing CGEC evaluation system is that the evaluation values are significantly influenced by the Chinese word segmentation results or different language models. The evaluation values of the same error correction model can vary considerably under different word segmentation systems or different language models. However, it is expected that these metrics should be independent of the wo…
Lip reading aims at decoding texts from the movement of a speaker's mouth. In recent years, lip reading methods have made great progress for English, at both word-level and sentence-level. Unlike English, however, Chinese Mandarin is a tone-based language and relies on pitches to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning, which significantly increases the ambiguity for the lip reading task. In this paper, we propose a Cascade Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Chinese Mandarin (CSSMCM) lip reading, which explicitly models tones when predicting sentence. Tones are modeled based on visual informati…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
We present semi-supervised models with data augmentation (SMDA), a semi-supervised text classification system to classify interactive affective responses. SMDA utilizes recent transformer-based models to encode each sentence and employs back translation techniques to paraphrase given sentences as augmented data. For labeled sentences, we performed data augmentations to uniform the label distributions and computed supervised loss during training process. For unlabeled sentences, we explored self-training by regarding low-entropy predictions over unlabeled sentences as pseudo labels, assuming hi…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Transformer is important for text modeling. However, it has difficulty in handling long documents due to the quadratic complexity with input text length. In order to handle this problem, we propose a hierarchical interactive Transformer (Hi-Transformer) for efficient and effective long document modeling. Hi-Transformer models documents in a hierarchical way, i.e., first learns sentence representations and then learns document representations. It can effectively reduce the complexity and meanwhile capture global document context in the modeling of each sentence. More specifically, we first use …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
In this paper, we comprehensively study on context-aware generation of Chinese song lyrics. Conventional text generative models generate a sequence or sentence word by word, failing to consider the contextual relationship between sentences. Taking account into the characteristics of lyrics, a hierarchical attention based Seq2Seq (Sequence-to-Sequence) model is proposed for Chinese lyrics generation. With encoding of word-level and sentence-level contextual information, this model promotes the topic relevance and consistency of generation. A large Chinese lyrics corpus is also leveraged for mod…
Beijing Language and Culture University（北京语言大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
In this paper we address a method to align English-Chinese bilingual news reports from China News Service, combining both lexical and satistical approaches. Because of the sentential structure differences between English and Chinese, matching at the sentence level as in many other works may result in frequent matching of several sentences en masse. In view of this, the current work also attempts to create shorter alignment pairs by permitting finer matching between clauses from both texts if possible. The current method is based on statiscal correlation between sentence or clause length of bot…
Web 2.0 has brought with it numerous user-produced data revealing one's thoughts, experiences, and knowledge, which are a great source for many tasks, such as information extraction, and knowledge base construction. However, the colloquial nature of the texts poses new challenges for current natural language processing techniques, which are more adapt to the formal form of the language. Ellipsis is a common linguistic phenomenon that some words are left out as they are understood from the context, especially in oral utterance, hindering the improvement of dependency parsing, which is of great …
National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；National Chiao Tung University（国立交通大学）；University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）
We consider three major text sources about the Tang Dynasty of China in our experiments that aim to segment text written in classical Chinese. These corpora include a collection of Tang Tomb Biographies, the New Tang Book, and the Old Tang Book. We show that it is possible to achieve satisfactory segmentation results with the deep learning approach. More interestingly, we found that some of the relative superiority that we observed among different designs of experiments may be explainable. The relative relevance among the training corpora provides hints/explanation for the observed differences…
In this work, we present Lexical Unit Analysis (LUA), a framework for general sequence segmentation tasks. Given a natural language sentence, LUA scores all the valid segmentation candidates and utilizes dynamic programming (DP) to extract the maximum scoring one. LUA enjoys a number of appealing properties such as inherently guaranteeing the predicted segmentation to be valid and facilitating globally optimal training and inference. Besides, the practical time complexity of LUA can be reduced to linear time, which is very efficient. We have conducted extensive experiments on 5 tasks, includin…
In the sentiment analysis task, predicting the sentiment tendency of a sentence is an important branch. Previous research focused more on sentiment analysis in English, for example, analyzing the sentiment tendency of sentences based on Valence, Arousal, Dominance of sentences. the emotional tendency is different between the two languages. For example, the sentence order between Chinese and English may present different emotions. This paper tried a method that builds a domain-specific lexicon. In this way, the model can classify Chinese words with emotional tendency. In this approach, based on…
MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics（教育部计算语言学重点实验室）；School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science（电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Peking University（北京大学）
In the training of transition-based dependency parsers, an oracle is used to predict a transition sequence for a sentence and its gold tree. However, the transition system may exhibit ambiguity, that is, there can be multiple correct transition sequences that form the gold tree. We propose to make use of the property in the training of neural dependency parsers, and present the Hybrid Oracle. The new oracle gives all the correct transitions for a parsing state, which are used in the cross entropy loss function to provide better supervisory signal. It is also used to generate different transiti…
Automatic machine translation is super efficient to produce translations yet their quality is not guaranteed. This technique report introduces TranSmart, a practical human-machine interactive translation system that is able to trade off translation quality and efficiency. Compared to existing publicly available interactive translation systems, TranSmart supports three key features, word-level autocompletion, sentence-level autocompletion and translation memory. By word-level and sentence-level autocompletion, TranSmart allows users to interactively translate words in their own manners rather t…
RE$^2$: Improving Chinese Grammatical Error Correction via Retrieving Appropriate Examples with Explanation
Research Center for SCIR, Harbin Institute of Technology（SCIR研究中心，哈尔滨工业大学）；State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, iFLYTEK Research（认知智能国家重点实验室，iFLYTEK研究院）；Artificial Intelligence and Human Language Lab, Beijing Foreign Studies University（人工智能与语言实验室，北京外国语大学）
Due to the ambiguity of homophones, Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) has widespread applications. Existing systems typically utilize BERT for text encoding. However, CSC requires the model to account for both phonetic and graphemic information. To adapt BERT to the CSC task, we propose a token-level self-distillation contrastive learning method. We employ BERT to encode both the corrupted and corresponding correct sentence. Then, we use contrastive learning loss to regularize corrupted tokens' hidden states to be closer to counterparts in the correct sentence. On three CSC datasets, we confirmed o…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）
Chinese pre-trained language models usually process text as a sequence of characters, while ignoring more coarse granularity, e.g., words. In this work, we propose a novel pre-training paradigm for Chinese -- Lattice-BERT, which explicitly incorporates word representations along with characters, thus can model a sentence in a multi-granularity manner. Specifically, we construct a lattice graph from the characters and words in a sentence and feed all these text units into transformers. We design a lattice position attention mechanism to exploit the lattice structures in self-attention layers. W…
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’administration économique（国家统计与经济管理学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris-Dauphine（巴黎九大）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
We present a case-study demonstrating the usefulness of Bayesian hierarchical mixture modelling for investigating cognitive processes. In sentence comprehension, it is widely assumed that the distance between linguistic co-dependents affects the latency of dependency resolution: the longer the distance, the longer the retrieval time (the distance-based account). An alternative theory, direct-access, assumes that retrieval times are a mixture of two distributions: one distribution represents successful retrievals (these are independent of dependency distance) and the other represents an initial…
To understand what kinds of linguistic knowledge are encoded by pretrained Chinese language models (LMs), we introduce the benchmark of Sino LINGuistics (SLING), which consists of 38K minimal sentence pairs in Mandarin Chinese grouped into 9 high-level linguistic phenomena. Each pair demonstrates the acceptability contrast of a specific syntactic or semantic phenomenon (e.g., The keys are lost vs. The keys is lost), and an LM should assign lower perplexity to the acceptable sentence. In contrast to the CLiMP dataset (Xiang et al., 2021), which also contains Chinese minimal pairs and was create…
School of Information Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（广东外语外贸大学信息科学与技术学院）
Chinese NER is a challenging task. As pictographs, Chinese characters contain latent glyph information, which is often overlooked. In this paper, we propose the FGN, Fusion Glyph Network for Chinese NER. Except for adding glyph information, this method may also add extra interactive information with the fusion mechanism. The major innovations of FGN include: (1) a novel CNN structure called CGS-CNN is proposed to capture both glyph information and interactive information between glyphs from neighboring characters. (2) we provide a method with sliding window and Slice-Attention to fuse the BERT…
Nowadays, we are surrounded by more and more online news articles. Tens or hundreds of news articles need to be read if we wish to explore a hot news event or topic. So it is of vital importance to automatically synthesize a batch of news articles related to the event or topic into a new synthesis article (or overview article) for reader's convenience. It is so challenging to make news synthesis fully automatic that there is no successful solution by now. In this paper, we put forward a novel Interactive News Synthesis system (i.e. INS), which can help generate news overview articles automatic…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Tencent Technology Co., Ltd.（腾讯科技有限公司）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
Conventional attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) conducts dynamic alignment in generating the target sentence. By repeatedly reading the representation of source sentence, which keeps fixed after generated by the encoder (Bahdanau et al., 2015), the attention mechanism has greatly enhanced state-of-the-art NMT. In this paper, we propose a new attention mechanism, called INTERACTIVE ATTENTION, which models the interaction between the decoder and the representation of source sentence during translation by both reading and writing operations. INTERACTIVE ATTENTION can keep track of t…
Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Most existing event extraction (EE) methods merely extract event arguments within the sentence scope. However, such sentence-level EE methods struggle to handle soaring amounts of documents from emerging applications, such as finance, legislation, health, etc., where event arguments always scatter across different sentences, and even multiple such event mentions frequently co-exist in the same document. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end model, Doc2EDAG, which can generate an entity-based directed acyclic graph to fulfill the document-level EE (DEE) effectively. Moreove…
