Publications

To quickly obtain new labeled data, we can choose crowdsourcing as an alternative way at lower cost in a short time. But as an exchange, crowd annotations from non-experts may be of lower quality than those from experts. In this paper, we propose an approach to performing crowd annotation learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) to make full use of the noisy sequence labels from multiple annotators. Inspired by adversarial learning, our approach uses a common Bi-LSTM and a private Bi-LSTM for representing annotator-generic and -specific information. The annotator-generic information is the common knowledge for entities easily mastered by the crowd. Finally, we build our Chinese NE tagger based on the LSTM-CRF model. In our experiments, we create two data sets for Chinese NER tasks from two domains. The experimental results show that our system achieves better scores than strong baseline systems.

Based on Semantic Web technologies, knowledge graphs help users to discover information of interest by using live SPARQL services. Answer-seekers often examine intermediate results iteratively and modify SPARQL queries repeatedly in a search session. In this context,...

Commit messages are natural language descriptions of code changes, which are important for software evolution such as code understanding and maintenance. However, previous methods are trained on the entire dataset without considering the fact that a portion of commit messages adhere to good practice (i.e., good-practice commits), while the rest do not. On the basis of our empirical study, we discover that training on good-practice commits significantly contributes to the commit message generation. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel knowledge-aware denoising learning method called KADEL. Considering that good-practice commits constitute only a small proportion of the dataset, we align the remaining training samples with these good-practice commits. To achieve this, we propose a model that learns the commit knowledge by training on good-practice commits. This knowledge model enables supplementing more information for training samples that do not conform to good practice. However, since the supplementary information may contain noise or prediction errors, we propose a dynamic denoising training method. This method composes a distribution-aware confidence function and a dynamic distribution list, which enhances the effectiveness of the training process. Experimental results on the whole MCMD dataset demonstrate that our method overall achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with previous methods.

Extracting knowledge from Wikipedia has attracted much attention in recent ten years. One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge is type information, which refers to the axioms stating that an instance is of a certain type. Current approaches for inferring the types of instances from Wikipedia mainly rely on some language-specific rules. Since these rules cannot catch the semantic associations between instances and classes (i.e. candidate types), it may lead to mistakes and omissions in the process of type inference. The authors propose a new approach leveraging attributes to perform language-independent type inference of the instances from Wikipedia. The proposed approach is applied to the whole English and Chinese Wikipedia, which results in the first version of MulType (Multilingual Type Information), a knowledge base describing the types of instances from multilingual Wikipedia. Experimental results show that not only the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison methods, but also MulType contains lots of new and high-quality type information.

Research demonstrates that the proactivity of in-vehicle conversational assistants (IVCAs) can help to reduce distractions and enhance driving safety, better meeting users' cognitive needs. However, existing IVCAs struggle with user intent recognition and context awareness, which leads to suboptimal proactive interactions. Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential for generalizing to various tasks with prompts, but their application in IVCAs and exploration of proactive interaction remain under-explored. These raise questions about how LLMs improve proactive interactions for IVCAs and influence user perception. To investigate these questions systematically, we establish a framework with five proactivity levels across two dimensions-assumption and autonomy-for IVCAs. According to the framework, we propose a "Rewrite + ReAct + Reflect" strategy, aiming to empower LLMs to fulfill the specific demands of each proactivity level when interacting with users. Both feasibility and subjective experiments are conducted. The LLM outperforms the state-of-the-art model in success rate and achieves satisfactory results for each proactivity level. Subjective experiments with 40 participants validate the effectiveness of our framework and show the proactive level with strong assumptions and user confirmation is most appropriate.

Data-to-text Generation (D2T) aims to generate textual natural language statements that can fluently and precisely describe the structured data such as graphs, tables, and meaning representations (MRs) in the form of key-value pairs. It is a typical and crucial task in natural language generation (NLG). Early D2T systems generated texts with the cost of human engineering in designing domain specific rules and templates, and achieved acceptable performance in coherence, fluency, and fidelity. In recent years, the data-driven D2T systems based on deep learning have reached state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in more challenging datasets. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing neural data-to-text generation approaches. We first introduce available D2T resources, including systematically categorized D2T datasets and mainstream evaluation metrics. Next, we survey existing works based on the taxonomy along two axes: neural end-to-end D2T and neural modular D2T. We also discuss the potential applications and the adverse impacts. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by neural D2T and outline some potential future directions in this area.

Recently, there is an increasing interest in extracting or mining type information from Web sources. Type information stating that an instance is of a certain type is an important component of knowledge bases. Although there has been some work on obtaining type...

AI applications often use ML/DL (Machine Learning/Deep Learning) models to implement specific AI tasks. As application developers usually are not AI experts, they often choose to integrate existing implementations of ML/DL models as libraries for their AI tasks. As an active research area, AI attracts many researchers and produces a lot of papers every year. Many of the papers propose ML/DL models for specific tasks and provide their implementations. However, it is not easy for developers to find ML/DL libraries that are suitable for their tasks. The challenges lie in not only the fast development of AI application domains and techniques, but also the lack of detailed information of the libraries such as environmental dependencies and supporting resources. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on ML/DL library seeking questions on Stack Overflow to understand the developers' requirements for ML/DL libraries. Based on the findings of the study, we propose a task-oriented ML/DL library recommendation approach, called MLTaskKG. It constructs a knowledge graph that captures AI tasks, ML/DL models, model implementations, repositories, and their relationships by extracting knowledge from different sources such as ML/DL resource websites, papers, ML/DL frameworks, and repositories. Based on the knowledge graph, MLTaskKG recommends ML/DL libraries for developers by matching their requirements on tasks, model characteristics, and implementation information. Our evaluation shows that 92.8% of the tuples sampled from the resulting knowledge graph are correct, demonstrating the high quality of the knowledge graph. A further experiment shows that MLTaskKG can help developers find suitable ML/DL libraries using 47.6% shorter time and with 68.4% higher satisfaction.