Bing Liu

Hu Xu, Bing Liu, Lei Shu et al.

Inspired by conversational reading comprehension (CRC), this paper studies a novel task of leveraging reviews as a source to build an agent that can answer multi-turn questions from potential consumers of online businesses. We first build a review CRC dataset and then propose a novel task-aware pre-tuning step running between language model (e.g., BERT) pre-training and domain-specific fine-tuning. The proposed pre-tuning requires no data annotation, but can greatly enhance the performance on our end task. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is highly effective and has competitive performance as the supervised approach. The dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/howardhsu/RCRC}

Lei Shu, Hu Xu, Bing Liu

Traditional supervised learning makes the closed-world assumption that the classes appeared in the test data must have appeared in training. This also applies to text learning or text classification. As learning is used increasingly in dynamic open environments where some new/test documents may not belong to any of the training classes, identifying these novel documents during classification presents an important problem. This problem is called open-world classification or open classification. This paper proposes a novel deep learning based approach. It outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques dramatically.