Yigeng Zhang

Yigeng Zhang, Mahsa Shafaei, Fabio A. González et al.

In this work, we introduce a pioneering research challenge: evaluating positive and potentially harmful messages within music products. We initiate by setting a multi-faceted, multi-task benchmark for music content assessment. Subsequently, we introduce an efficient multi-task predictive model fortified with ordinality-enforcement to address this challenge. Our findings reveal that the proposed method not only significantly outperforms robust task-specific alternatives but also possesses the capability to assess multiple aspects simultaneously. Furthermore, through detailed case studies, where we employed Large Language Models (LLMs) as surrogates for content assessment, we provide valuable insights to inform and guide future research on this topic. The code for dataset creation and model implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/music-message-assessment.

Haowen Hou, Xiaopeng Yan, Yigeng Zhang et al.

In the field of cross-modal retrieval, single encoder models tend to perform better than dual encoder models, but they suffer from high latency and low throughput. In this paper, we present a dual encoder model called BagFormer that utilizes a cross modal interaction mechanism to improve recall performance without sacrificing latency and throughput. BagFormer achieves this through the use of bag-wise interactions, which allow for the transformation of text to a more appropriate granularity and the incorporation of entity knowledge into the model. Our experiments demonstrate that BagFormer is able to achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art single encoder models in cross-modal retrieval tasks, while also offering efficient training and inference with 20.72 times lower latency and 25.74 times higher throughput.

Yigeng Zhang, Fabio A. González, Thamar Solorio

Reading comprehension continues to be a crucial research focus in the NLP community. Recent advances in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) have mostly centered on literal comprehension, referring to the surface-level understanding of content. In this work, we focus on the next level - interpretive comprehension, with a particular emphasis on inferring the themes of a narrative text. We introduce the first dataset specifically designed for interpretive comprehension of educational narratives, providing corresponding well-edited theme texts. The dataset spans a variety of genres and cultural origins and includes human-annotated theme keywords with varying levels of granularity. We further formulate NLP tasks under different abstractions of interpretive comprehension toward the main idea of a story. After conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art methods, we found the task to be both challenging and significant for NLP research. The dataset and source code have been made publicly available to the research community at https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/EduStory.

Xinwei Wu, Haojie Li, Hongyu Liu et al.

In this work, we study a critical research problem regarding the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs): how LLMs behave when encountering ambiguous narrative text, with a particular focus on Chinese textual ambiguity. We created a benchmark dataset by collecting and generating ambiguous sentences with context and their corresponding disambiguated pairs, representing multiple possible interpretations. These annotated examples are systematically categorized into 3 main categories and 9 subcategories. Through experiments, we discovered significant fragility in LLMs when handling ambiguity, revealing behavior that differs substantially from humans. Specifically, LLMs cannot reliably distinguish ambiguous text from unambiguous text, show overconfidence in interpreting ambiguous text as having a single meaning rather than multiple meanings, and exhibit overthinking when attempting to understand the various possible meanings. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation in current LLMs that has significant implications for their deployment in real-world applications where linguistic ambiguity is common, calling for improved approaches to handle uncertainty in language understanding. The dataset and code are publicly available at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/ictup/LLM-Chinese-Textual-Disambiguation.

Elaheh Baharlouei, Mahsa Shafaei, Yigeng Zhang et al.

We address the challenge of detecting questionable content in online media, specifically the subcategory of comic mischief. This type of content combines elements such as violence, adult content, or sarcasm with humor, making it difficult to detect. Employing a multimodal approach is vital to capture the subtle details inherent in comic mischief content. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end multimodal system for the task of comic mischief detection. As part of this contribution, we release a novel dataset for the targeted task consisting of three modalities: video, text (video captions and subtitles), and audio. We also design a HIerarchical Cross-attention model with CAPtions (HICCAP) to capture the intricate relationships among these modalities. The results show that the proposed approach makes a significant improvement over robust baselines and state-of-the-art models for comic mischief detection and its type classification. This emphasizes the potential of our system to empower users, to make informed decisions about the online content they choose to see. In addition, we conduct experiments on the UCF101, HMDB51, and XD-Violence datasets, comparing our model against other state-of-the-art approaches showcasing the outstanding performance of our proposed model in various scenarios.

Yigeng Zhang, Mahsa Shafaei, Fabio Gonzalez et al.

In this paper, we introduce the task of predicting severity of age-restricted aspects of movie content based solely on the dialogue script. We first investigate categorizing the ordinal severity of movies on 5 aspects: Sex, Violence, Profanity, Substance consumption, and Frightening scenes. The problem is handled using a siamese network-based multitask framework which concurrently improves the interpretability of the predictions. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model and provides useful information to interpret model predictions. The proposed dataset and source code are publicly available at our GitHub repository.

Yigeng Zhang, Fan Yang, Yifan Zhang et al.

Satirical news is regularly shared in modern social media because it is entertaining with smartly embedded humor. However, it can be harmful to society because it can sometimes be mistaken as factual news, due to its deceptive character. We found that in satirical news, the lexical and pragmatical attributes of the context are the key factors in amusing the readers. In this work, we propose a method that differentiates the satirical news and true news. It takes advantage of satirical writing evidence by leveraging the difference between the prediction loss of two language models, one trained on true news and the other on satirical news, when given a new news article. We compute several statistical metrics of language model prediction loss as features, which are then used to conduct downstream classification. The proposed method is computationally effective because the language models capture the language usage differences between satirical news documents and traditional news documents, and are sensitive when applied to documents outside their domains.