Chenwei Zhang

Shuliang Liu, Xuming Hu, Chenwei Zhang et al. · amazon-science, tsinghua

Unsupervised relation extraction aims to extract the relationship between entities from natural language sentences without prior information on relational scope or distribution. Existing works either utilize self-supervised schemes to refine relational feature signals by iteratively leveraging adaptive clustering and classification that provoke gradual drift problems, or adopt instance-wise contrastive learning which unreasonably pushes apart those sentence pairs that are semantically similar. To overcome these defects, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework named HiURE, which has the capability to derive hierarchical signals from relational feature space using cross hierarchy attention and effectively optimize relation representation of sentences under exemplar-wise contrastive learning. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the advanced effectiveness and robustness of HiURE on unsupervised relation extraction when compared with state-of-the-art models.

Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Xian Li et al. · amazon-science

Automatic extraction of product attributes from their textual descriptions is essential for online shopper experience. One inherent challenge of this task is the emerging nature of e-commerce products -- we see new types of products with their unique set of new attributes constantly. Most prior works on this matter mine new values for a set of known attributes but cannot handle new attributes that arose from constantly changing data. In this work, we study the attribute mining problem in an open-world setting to extract novel attributes and their values. Instead of providing comprehensive training data, the user only needs to provide a few examples for a few known attribute types as weak supervision. We propose a principled framework that first generates attribute value candidates and then groups them into clusters of attributes. The candidate generation step probes a pre-trained language model to extract phrases from product titles. Then, an attribute-aware fine-tuning method optimizes a multitask objective and shapes the language model representation to be attribute-discriminative. Finally, we discover new attributes and values through the self-ensemble of our framework, which handles the open-world challenge. We run extensive experiments on a large distantly annotated development set and a gold standard human-annotated test set that we collected. Our model significantly outperforms strong baselines and can generalize to unseen attributes and product types.

Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) empowered agents have recently emerged as advanced paradigms that exhibit impressive capabilities in a wide range of domains and tasks. Despite their potential, current LLM agents often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, lacking the flexibility to respond to users' varying needs and preferences. This limitation motivates us to develop PersonaAgent, the first personalized LLM agent framework designed to address versatile personalization tasks. Specifically, PersonaAgent integrates two complementary components - a personalized memory module that includes episodic and semantic memory mechanisms; a personalized action module that enables the agent to perform tool actions tailored to the user. At the core, the persona (defined as unique system prompt for each user) functions as an intermediary: it leverages insights from personalized memory to control agent actions, while the outcomes of these actions in turn refine the memory. Based on the framework, we propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that simulate the latest n interactions to optimize the persona prompt, ensuring real-time user preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that PersonaAgent significantly outperforms other baseline methods by not only personalizing the action space effectively but also scaling during test-time real-world applications. These results underscore the feasibility and potential of our approach in delivering tailored, dynamic user experiences.

Zijie Huang, Daheng Wang, Binxuan Huang et al.

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) have been extensively studied to embed large-scale relational data for many real-world applications. Existing methods have long ignored the fact many KGs contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entities. They usually embed all nodes as vectors in one latent space. However, a single geometric representation fails to capture the structural differences between two views and lacks probabilistic semantics towards concepts' granularity. We propose Concept2Box, a novel approach that jointly embeds the two views of a KG using dual geometric representations. We model concepts with box embeddings, which learn the hierarchy structure and complex relations such as overlap and disjoint among them. Box volumes can be interpreted as concepts' granularity. Different from concepts, we model entities as vectors. To bridge the gap between concept box embeddings and entity vector embeddings, we propose a novel vector-to-box distance metric and learn both embeddings jointly. Experiments on both the public DBpedia KG and a newly-created industrial KG showed the effectiveness of Concept2Box.

Yuxuan Hu, Minghuan Tan, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Empathetic response generation is designed to comprehend the emotions of others and select the most appropriate strategies to assist them in resolving emotional challenges. Empathy can be categorized into cognitive empathy and affective empathy. The former pertains to the ability to understand and discern the emotional issues and situations of others, while the latter involves the capacity to provide comfort. To enhance one's empathetic abilities, it is essential to develop both these aspects. Therefore, we develop an innovative framework that combines retrieval augmentation and emotional support strategy integration. Our framework starts with the introduction of a comprehensive emotional palette for empathy. We then apply appraisal theory to decompose this palette and create a database of empathetic responses. This database serves as an external resource and enhances the LLM's empathy by integrating semantic retrieval mechanisms. Moreover, our framework places a strong emphasis on the proper articulation of response strategies. By incorporating emotional support strategies, we aim to enrich the model's capabilities in both cognitive and affective empathy, leading to a more nuanced and comprehensive empathetic response. Finally, we extract datasets ED and ET from the empathetic dialogue dataset \textsc{EmpatheticDialogues} and ExTES based on dialogue length. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can enhance the empathy ability of LLMs from both cognitive and affective empathy perspectives. Our code is released at https://github.com/CAS-SIAT-XinHai/APTNESS.

Hoang H. Nguyen, Ye Liu, Chenwei Zhang et al. · amazon-science

While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored. Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought (CoF-CoT) approach that breaks down NLU tasks into multiple reasoning steps where LLMs can learn to acquire and leverage essential concepts to solve tasks from different granularities. Moreover, we propose leveraging semantic-based Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structured knowledge as an intermediate step to capture the nuances and diverse structures of utterances, and to understand connections between their varying levels of granularity. Our proposed approach is demonstrated effective in assisting the LLMs adapt to the multi-grained NLU tasks under both zero-shot and few-shot multi-domain settings.

Xuming Hu, Shiao Meng, Chenwei Zhang et al. · amazon-science

Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structured information from heterogeneous sources. IE from natural language texts include sub-tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Event Extraction (EE). Most IE systems require comprehensive understandings of sentence structure, implied semantics, and domain knowledge to perform well; thus, IE tasks always need adequate external resources and annotations. However, it takes time and effort to obtain more human annotations. Low-Resource Information Extraction (LRIE) strives to use unsupervised data, reducing the required resources and human annotation. In practice, existing systems either utilize self-training schemes to generate pseudo labels that will cause the gradual drift problem, or leverage consistency regularization methods which inevitably possess confirmation bias. To alleviate confirmation bias due to the lack of feedback loops in existing LRIE learning paradigms, we develop a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning (GIRL) method to encourage pseudo-labeled data to imitate the gradient descent direction on labeled data, which can force pseudo-labeled data to achieve better optimization capabilities similar to labeled data. Based on how well the pseudo-labeled data imitates the instructive gradient descent direction obtained from labeled data, we design a reward to quantify the imitation process and bootstrap the optimization capability of pseudo-labeled data through trial and error. In addition to learning paradigms, GIRL is not limited to specific sub-tasks, and we leverage GIRL to solve all IE sub-tasks (named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction) in low-resource settings (semi-supervised IE and few-shot IE).

Hoang H. Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Ye Liu et al. · amazon-science, salesforce

Recent advanced methods in Natural Language Understanding for Task-oriented Dialogue (TOD) Systems (e.g., intent detection and slot filling) require a large amount of annotated data to achieve competitive performance. In reality, token-level annotations (slot labels) are time-consuming and difficult to acquire. In this work, we study the Slot Induction (SI) task whose objective is to induce slot boundaries without explicit knowledge of token-level slot annotations. We propose leveraging Unsupervised Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) Probing and Contrastive Learning mechanism to exploit (1) unsupervised semantic knowledge extracted from PLM, and (2) additional sentence-level intent label signals available from TOD. Our approach is shown to be effective in SI task and capable of bridging the gaps with token-level supervised models on two NLU benchmark datasets. When generalized to emerging intents, our SI objectives also provide enhanced slot label representations, leading to improved performance on the Slot Filling tasks.

Hoang H. Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Tao Zhang et al. · amazon-science

Previous cross-lingual transfer methods are restricted to orthographic representation learning via textual scripts. This limitation hampers cross-lingual transfer and is biased towards languages sharing similar well-known scripts. To alleviate the gap between languages from different writing scripts, we propose PhoneXL, a framework incorporating phonemic transcriptions as an additional linguistic modality beyond the traditional orthographic transcriptions for cross-lingual transfer. Particularly, we propose unsupervised alignment objectives to capture (1) local one-to-one alignment between the two different modalities, (2) alignment via multi-modality contexts to leverage information from additional modalities, and (3) alignment via multilingual contexts where additional bilingual dictionaries are incorporated. We also release the first phonemic-orthographic alignment dataset on two token-level tasks (Named Entity Recognition and Part-of-Speech Tagging) among the understudied but interconnected Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese (CJKV) languages. Our pilot study reveals phonemic transcription provides essential information beyond the orthography to enhance cross-lingual transfer and bridge the gap among CJKV languages, leading to consistent improvements on cross-lingual token-level tasks over orthographic-based multilingual PLMs.

Hejie Cui, Rongmei Lin, Nasser Zalmout et al.

Information extraction, e.g., attribute value extraction, has been extensively studied and formulated based only on text. However, many attributes can benefit from image-based extraction, like color, shape, pattern, among others. The visual modality has long been underutilized, mainly due to multimodal annotation difficulty. In this paper, we aim to patch the visual modality to the textual-established attribute information extractor. The cross-modality integration faces several unique challenges: (C1) images and textual descriptions are loosely paired intra-sample and inter-samples; (C2) images usually contain rich backgrounds that can mislead the prediction; (C3) weakly supervised labels from textual-established extractors are biased for multimodal training. We present PV2TEA, an encoder-decoder architecture equipped with three bias reduction schemes: (S1) Augmented label-smoothed contrast to improve the cross-modality alignment for loosely-paired image and text; (S2) Attention-pruning that adaptively distinguishes the visual foreground; (S3) Two-level neighborhood regularization that mitigates the label textual bias via reliability estimation. Empirical results on real-world e-Commerce datasets demonstrate up to 11.74% absolute (20.97% relatively) F1 increase over unimodal baselines.

Haixin Wang, Hejie Cui, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Recent progress in multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly improved reasoning LLMs' performances on complex interactive tasks. Despite advances in stabilization techniques such as fine-grained credit assignment and trajectory filtering, instability remains pervasive and often leads to training collapse. We argue that this instability stems from inefficient exploration in multi-turn settings, where policies continue to generate low-information actions that neither reduce uncertainty nor advance task progress. To address this issue, we propose Token- and Turn-level Policy Optimization (T$^2$PO), an uncertainty-aware framework that explicitly controls exploration at fine-grained levels. At the token level, T$^2$PO monitors uncertainty dynamics and triggers a thinking intervention once the marginal uncertainty change falls below a threshold. At the turn level, T$^2$PO identifies interactions with negligible exploration progress and dynamically resamples such turns to avoid wasted rollouts. We evaluate T$^2$PO in diverse environments, including WebShop, ALFWorld, and Search QA, demonstrating substantial gains in training stability and performance improvements with better exploration efficiency. Code is available at: https://github.com/WillDreamer/T2PO.

Weizhi Zhang, Yangning Li, Yuanchen Bei et al. · pku

Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex, multi-step information needs. Our position is that Large Language Models (LLMs), endowed with reasoning and agentic capabilities, are ushering in a new paradigm termed Agentic Deep Research. These systems transcend conventional information search techniques by tightly integrating autonomous reasoning, iterative retrieval, and information synthesis into a dynamic feedback loop. We trace the evolution from static web search to interactive, agent-based systems that plan, explore, and learn. We also introduce a test-time scaling law to formalize the impact of computational depth on reasoning and search. Supported by benchmark results and the rise of open-source implementations, we demonstrate that Agentic Deep Research not only significantly outperforms existing approaches, but is also poised to become the dominant paradigm for future information seeking. All the related resources, including industry products, research papers, benchmark datasets, and open-source implementations, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-Deep-Research.

Yilun Jin, Zheng Li, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Online shopping is a complex multi-task, few-shot learning problem with a wide and evolving range of entities, relations, and tasks. However, existing models and benchmarks are commonly tailored to specific tasks, falling short of capturing the full complexity of online shopping. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their multi-task and few-shot learning abilities, have the potential to profoundly transform online shopping by alleviating task-specific engineering efforts and by providing users with interactive conversations. Despite the potential, LLMs face unique challenges in online shopping, such as domain-specific concepts, implicit knowledge, and heterogeneous user behaviors. Motivated by the potential and challenges, we propose Shopping MMLU, a diverse multi-task online shopping benchmark derived from real-world Amazon data. Shopping MMLU consists of 57 tasks covering 4 major shopping skills: concept understanding, knowledge reasoning, user behavior alignment, and multi-linguality, and can thus comprehensively evaluate the abilities of LLMs as general shop assistants. With Shopping MMLU, we benchmark over 20 existing LLMs and uncover valuable insights about practices and prospects of building versatile LLM-based shop assistants. Shopping MMLU can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/KL4805/ShoppingMMLU. In addition, with Shopping MMLU, we host a competition in KDD Cup 2024 with over 500 participating teams. The winning solutions and the associated workshop can be accessed at our website https://amazon-kddcup24.github.io/.

Yuxuan Hu, Chenwei Zhang, Min Yang et al.

With the rapid development of deep learning methods, there have been many breakthroughs in the field of text classification. Models developed for this task have been shown to achieve high accuracy. However, most of these models are trained using labeled data from seen domains. It is difficult for these models to maintain high accuracy in a new challenging unseen domain, which is directly related to the generalization of the model. In this paper, we study the multi-source Domain Generalization of text classification and propose a framework to use multiple seen domains to train a model that can achieve high accuracy in an unseen domain. Specifically, we propose a multi-source meta-learning Domain Generalization framework to simulate the process of model generalization to an unseen domain, so as to extract sufficient domain-related features. We introduced a memory mechanism to store domain-specific features, which coordinate with the meta-learning framework. Besides, we adopt the novel "jury" mechanism that enables the model to learn sufficient domain-invariant features. Experiments demonstrate that our meta-learning framework can effectively enhance the ability of the model to generalize to an unseen domain and can outperform the state-of-the-art methods on multi-source text classification datasets.

Chenwei Zhang, Khanh Dao Duc, Anne Condon

Synthetic biologists and molecular programmers design novel nucleic acid reactions, with many potential applications. Good visualization tools are needed to help domain experts make sense of the complex outputs of folding pathway simulations of such reactions. Here we present ViDa, a new approach for visualizing DNA reaction folding trajectories over the energy landscape of secondary structures. We integrate a deep graph embedding model with common dimensionality reduction approaches, to map high-dimensional data onto 2D Euclidean space. We assess ViDa on two well-studied and contrasting DNA hybridization reactions. Our preliminary results suggest that ViDa's visualization successfully separates trajectories with different folding mechanisms, thereby providing useful insight to users, and is a big improvement over the current state-of-the-art in DNA kinetics visualization.

Chenwei Zhang, Anne Condon, Khanh Dao Duc

Generating synthetic cryogenic electron microscopy 3D density maps from molecular structures has potential important applications in structural biology. Yet existing simulation-based methods cannot mimic all the complex features present in experimental maps, such as secondary structure elements. As an alternative, we propose struc2mapGAN, a novel data-driven method that employs a generative adversarial network to produce improved experimental-like density maps from molecular structures. More specifically, struc2mapGAN uses a nested U-Net architecture as the generator, with an additional L1 loss term and further processing of raw training experimental maps to enhance learning efficiency. While struc2mapGAN can promptly generate maps after training, we demonstrate that it outperforms existing simulation-based methods for a wide array of tested maps and across various evaluation metrics.

Hansi Zeng, Zoey Li, Yifan Gao et al.

Research Agents enable models to gather information from the web using tools to answer user queries, requiring them to dynamically interleave internal reasoning with tool use. While such capabilities can in principle be learned via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), we observe that agents often exhibit poor exploration behaviors, including premature termination and biased tool usage. As a result, RLVR alone yields limited improvements. We propose SynPlanResearch-R1, a framework that synthesizes tool-use trajectories that encourage deeper exploration to shape exploration during cold-start supervised fine-tuning, providing a strong initialization for subsequent RL. Across seven multi-hop and open-web benchmarks, \framework improves performance by up to 6.0% on Qwen3-8B and 5.8% on Qwen3-4B backbones respectively compared to SOTA baselines. Further analyses of tool-use patterns and training dynamics compared to baselines shed light on the factors underlying these gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HansiZeng/syn-plan-research.

Pengfei Tong, Siyuan Chen, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Most large-scale recommender systems follow a multi-stage cascade of retrieval, pre-ranking, ranking, and re-ranking. A key challenge at the pre-ranking stage arises from the heterogeneity of training instances sampled from coarse-grained retrieval results, fine-grained ranking signals, and exposure feedback. Our analysis reveals that prevailing pre-ranking methods, which indiscriminately mix heterogeneous samples, suffer from gradient conflicts: hard samples dominate training while easy ones remain underutilized, leading to suboptimal performance. We further show that the common practice of uniformly scaling model complexity across all samples is inefficient, as it overspends computation on easy cases and slows training without proportional gains. To address these limitations, this paper presents Heterogeneity-Aware Adaptive Pre-ranking (HAP), a unified framework that mitigates gradient conflicts through conflict-sensitive sampling coupled with tailored loss design, while adaptively allocating computational budgets across candidates. Specifically, HAP disentangles easy and hard samples, directing each subset along dedicated optimization paths. Building on this separation, it first applies lightweight models to all candidates for efficient coverage, and further engages stronger models on the hard ones, maintaining accuracy while reducing cost. This approach not only improves pre-ranking effectiveness but also provides a practical perspective on scaling strategies in industrial recommender systems. HAP has been deployed in the Toutiao production system for 9 months, yielding up to 0.4% improvement in user app usage duration and 0.05% in active days, without additional computational cost. We also release a large-scale industrial hybrid-sample dataset to enable the systematic study of source-driven candidate heterogeneity in pre-ranking.

Chenwei Zhang, Khanh Dao Duc

Enhancing cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) 3D density maps at intermediate resolution (4-8 Å) is crucial in protein structure determination. Recent advances in deep learning have led to the development of automated approaches for enhancing experimental cryo-EM density maps. Yet, these methods are not optimized for intermediate-resolution maps and rely on map density features alone. To address this, we propose CryoSAMU, a novel method designed to enhance 3D cryo-EM density maps of protein structures using structure-aware multimodal U-Nets and trained on curated intermediate-resolution density maps. We comprehensively evaluate CryoSAMU across various metrics and demonstrate its competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, CryoSAMU achieves significantly faster processing speed, showing promise for future practical applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenwei-zhang/CryoSAMU.

Chenwei Zhang, Jordan Lovrod, Boyan Beronov et al.

Visualization tools can help synthetic biologists and molecular programmers understand the complex reactive pathways of nucleic acid reactions, which can be designed for many potential applications and can be modelled using a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). Here we present ViDa, a new visualization approach for DNA reaction trajectories that uses a 2D embedding of the secondary structure state space underlying the CTMC model. To this end, we integrate a scattering transform of the secondary structure adjacency, a variational autoencoder, and a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method. We augment the training loss with domain-specific supervised terms that capture both thermodynamic and kinetic features. We assess ViDa on two well-studied DNA hybridization reactions. Our results demonstrate that the domain-specific features lead to significant quality improvements over the state-of-the-art in DNA state space visualization, successfully separating different folding pathways and thus providing useful insights into dominant reaction mechanisms.

Ruoyu Xu, Zhiyu Xiang, Chenwei Zhang et al.

3D object detection is one of the fundamental perception tasks for autonomous vehicles. Fulfilling such a task with a 4D millimeter-wave radar is very attractive since the sensor is able to acquire 3D point clouds similar to Lidar while maintaining robust measurements under adverse weather. However, due to the high sparsity and noise associated with the radar point clouds, the performance of the existing methods is still much lower than expected. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation (SCKD) method for 4D radar-based 3D object detection. It characterizes the capability of learning the feature from a Lidar-radar-fused teacher network with semi-supervised distillation. We first propose an adaptive fusion module in the teacher network to boost its performance. Then, two feature distillation modules are designed to facilitate the cross-modality knowledge transfer. Finally, a semi-supervised output distillation is proposed to increase the effectiveness and flexibility of the distillation framework. With the same network structure, our radar-only student trained by SCKD boosts the mAP by 10.38% over the baseline and outperforms the state-of-the-art works on the VoD dataset. The experiment on ZJUODset also shows 5.12% mAP improvements on the moderate difficulty level over the baseline when extra unlabeled data are available. Code is available at https://github.com/Ruoyu-Xu/SCKD.

Chenwei Zhang

This dissertation explores how deep generative models can advance the analysis of challenging biological problems by integrating domain knowledge with deep learning. It focuses on two areas: DNA reaction kinetics and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). In the first part, we present ViDa, a biophysics-informed framework leveraging variational autoencoders (VAEs) and geometric scattering transforms to generate biophysically-plausible embeddings of DNA reaction kinetics simulations. These embeddings are reduced to a two-dimensional space to visualize DNA hybridization and toehold-mediated strand displacement reactions. ViDa preserves structure and clusters trajectory ensembles into reaction pathways, making simulation results more interpretable and revealing new mechanistic insights. In the second part, we address key challenges in cryo-EM density map interpretation and protein structure modeling. We provide a comprehensive review and benchmarking of deep learning methods for atomic model building, with improved evaluation metrics and practical guidance. We then present Struc2mapGAN, a generative adversarial network that synthesizes high-fidelity experimental-like cryo-EM density maps from protein structures. Finally, we present CryoSAMU, a structure-aware multimodal U-Net that enhances intermediate-resolution cryo-EM maps by integrating density features with structural embeddings from protein language models via cross-attention. Overall, these contributions demonstrate the potential of deep generative models to interpret DNA reaction mechanisms and advance cryo-EM density map analysis and protein structure modeling.

Chenwei Zhang

We introduce PhenixCraft, a fully automated pipeline for building atomic models from cryo-EM density maps. By integrating AlphaFold predictions, we enhance the map-segmentation step in Phenix during model building, addressing challenges posed by noise and artifacts that traditionally hinder this step. Our results demonstrate PhenixCraft's superior performance in TM-scores and sequence accuracy, significantly improving upon the limitations and inefficiencies of traditional model building using Phenix.

Bingkun Zhao, Chenwei Zhang, Hao Peng

Promotional language has been increasingly used to aid the communication of innovative ideas in science. Yet, less is known about its role in the context of technological innovation. Here, we use a validated and domain-diagnosed lexicon of 135 promotional words to study the association between promotional language and patent evaluation outcomes among 2.7 million USPTO patent applications. Our large-scale study reveals three unexpected findings. First, in contrast to scientific evaluation, we find that a higher frequency of promotional words is negatively associated with the probability of an application being (i) granted a patent, (ii) transferred ownership, and (iii) successfully appealed. This promotional penalty holds even after accounting for a range of confounding factors and is largely robust across different technological areas. Among matched samples, the difference in the success rate between the lowest and highest promotional density quintile is 5.5, 5.9, and 5.3 percentage points for patentability, transferability, and rejection reversal. Second, contrary to institutional skepticism, we show that promotional language is not a mask of weak technology, but objectively reflects the degree of combinatorial novelty and future citation impact. Third, digging into the mechanisms, we find that the tolerance to promotional framing is strongly moderated by human factors, with men and experienced examiners showing a higher acceptance of promotional narratives than women and novice examiners. By revealing an emerging paradox in the patent system, our study offers theoretical and practical implications for improving patent evaluation through more objective scrutiny of linguistic patterns in patent filings.

Jiang Wu, Hongbo Wang, Chunhe Ni et al.

Data Pipeline plays an indispensable role in tasks such as modeling machine learning and developing data products. With the increasing diversification and complexity of Data sources, as well as the rapid growth of data volumes, building an efficient Data Pipeline has become crucial for improving work efficiency and solving complex problems. This paper focuses on exploring how to optimize data flow through automated machine learning methods by integrating AutoML with Data Pipeline. We will discuss how to leverage AutoML technology to enhance the intelligence of Data Pipeline, thereby achieving better results in machine learning tasks. By delving into the automation and optimization of Data flows, we uncover key strategies for constructing efficient data pipelines that can adapt to the ever-changing data landscape. This not only accelerates the modeling process but also provides innovative solutions to complex problems, enabling more significant outcomes in increasingly intricate data domains. Keywords- Data Pipeline Training;AutoML; Data environment; Machine learning

Chunhe Ni, Jiang Wu, Hongbo Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a class of generative AI models built using the Transformer network, capable of leveraging vast datasets to identify, summarize, translate, predict, and generate language. LLMs promise to revolutionize society, yet training these foundational models poses immense challenges. Semantic vector search within large language models is a potent technique that can significantly enhance search result accuracy and relevance. Unlike traditional keyword-based search methods, semantic search utilizes the meaning and context of words to grasp the intent behind queries and deliver more precise outcomes. Elasticsearch emerges as one of the most popular tools for implementing semantic search an exceptionally scalable and robust search engine designed for indexing and searching extensive datasets. In this article, we delve into the fundamentals of semantic search and explore how to harness Elasticsearch and Transformer models to bolster large language model processing paradigms. We gain a comprehensive understanding of semantic search principles and acquire practical skills for implementing semantic search in real-world model application scenarios.

Chenwei Zhang, Wenran Lu, Chunhe Ni et al.

With the large language model showing human-like logical reasoning and understanding ability, whether agents based on the large language model can simulate the interaction behavior of real users, so as to build a reliable virtual recommendation A/B test scene to help the application of recommendation research is an urgent, important and economic value problem. The combination of interaction design and machine learning can provide a more efficient and personalized user experience for products and services. This personalized service can meet the specific needs of users and improve user satisfaction and loyalty. Second, the interactive system can understand the user's views and needs for the product by providing a good user interface and interactive experience, and then use machine learning algorithms to improve and optimize the product. This iterative optimization process can continuously improve the quality and performance of the product to meet the changing needs of users. At the same time, designers need to consider how these algorithms and tools can be combined with interactive systems to provide a good user experience. This paper explores the potential applications of large language models, machine learning and interaction design for user interaction in recommendation systems and operating systems. By integrating these technologies, more intelligent and personalized services can be provided to meet user needs and promote continuous improvement and optimization of products. This is of great value for both recommendation research and user experience applications.

Hoang H. Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Ye Liu et al. · amazon-science

Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer for many languages by failing to consider the importance of language contact. Some languages are more well-connected than others, and target languages can benefit from transferring from closely related languages; for many languages, the set of closely related languages does not include English. In this work, we study the impact of source language for cross-lingual transfer, demonstrating the importance of selecting source languages that have high contact with the target language. We also construct a novel benchmark dataset for close contact Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese (CJKV) languages to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact. To comprehensively capture contact between these languages, we propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts via Contrastive Learning objectives, leading to enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.

Liyan Xu, Chenwei Zhang, Xian Li et al.

We present a new task setting for attribute mining on e-commerce products, serving as a practical solution to extract open-world attributes without extensive human intervention. Our supervision comes from a high-quality seed attribute set bootstrapped from existing resources, and we aim to expand the attribute vocabulary of existing seed types, and also to discover any new attribute types automatically. A new dataset is created to support our setting, and our approach Amacer is proposed specifically to tackle the limited supervision. Especially, given that no direct supervision is available for those unseen new attributes, our novel formulation exploits self-supervised heuristic and unsupervised latent attributes, which attains implicit semantic signals as additional supervision by leveraging product context. Experiments suggest that our approach surpasses various baselines by 12 F1, expanding attributes of existing types significantly by up to 12 times, and discovering values from 39% new types.

Xuming Hu, Aiwei Liu, Zeqi Tan et al.

Relation extraction (RE) tasks show promising performance in extracting relations from two entities mentioned in sentences, given sufficient annotations available during training. Such annotations would be labor-intensive to obtain in practice. Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences beyond limited annotations. These techniques neither preserve the semantic consistency of the original sentences when rule-based augmentations are adopted, nor preserve the syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. In this work, we propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. We adopt a generative formulation and design a multi-tasking solution to achieve synergies. Furthermore, GDA adopts entity hints as the prior knowledge of the generative model to augment diverse sentences. Experimental results in three datasets under a low-resource setting showed that GDA could bring {\em 2.0\%} F1 improvements compared with no augmentation technique. Source code and data are available.

Xuming Hu, Zhaochen Hong, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Relation extraction (RE) aims to extract potential relations according to the context of two entities, thus, deriving rational contexts from sentences plays an important role. Previous works either focus on how to leverage the entity information (e.g., entity types, entity verbalization) to inference relations, but ignore context-focused content, or use counterfactual thinking to remove the model's bias of potential relations in entities, but the relation reasoning process will still be hindered by irrelevant content. Therefore, how to preserve relevant content and remove noisy segments from sentences is a crucial task. In addition, retained content needs to be fluent enough to maintain semantic coherence and interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel rationale extraction framework named RE2, which leverages two continuity and sparsity factors to obtain relevant and coherent rationales from sentences. To solve the problem that the gold rationales are not labeled, RE2 applies an optimizable binary mask to each token in the sentence, and adjust the rationales that need to be selected according to the relation label. Experiments on four datasets show that RE2 surpasses baselines.

Xuming Hu, Chenwei Zhang, Yawen Yang et al.

Low-resource Relation Extraction (LRE) aims to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora when human annotation is scarce. Existing works either utilize self-training scheme to generate pseudo labels that will cause the gradual drift problem, or leverage meta-learning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly. To alleviate selection bias due to the lack of feedback loops in existing LRE learning paradigms, we developed a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate the gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error. We also propose a framework called GradLRE, which handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction. Besides the scenario where unlabeled data is sufficient, GradLRE handles the situation where no unlabeled data is available, by exploiting a contextualized augmentation method to generate data. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GradLRE on low resource relation extraction when comparing with baselines.

Huimin Xu, Yi Bu, Meijun Liu et al.

Power dynamics influence every aspect of scientific collaboration. Team power dynamics can be measured by team power level and team power hierarchy. Team power level is conceptualized as the average level of the possession of resources, expertise, or decision-making authorities of a team. Team power hierarchy represents the vertical differences of the possessions of resources in a team. In Science of Science, few studies have looked at scientific collaboration from the perspective of team power dynamics. This research examines how team power dynamics affect team impact to fill the research gap. In this research, all co-authors of one publication are treated as one team. Team power level and team power hierarchy of one team are measured by the mean and Gini index of career age of co-authors in this team. Team impact is quantified by citations of a paper authored by this team. By analyzing over 7.7 million teams from Science (e.g., Computer Science, Physics), Social Sciences (e.g., Sociology, Library & Information Science), and Arts & Humanities (e.g., Art), we find that flat team structure is associated with higher team impact, especially when teams have high team power level. These findings have been repeated in all five disciplines except Art, and are consistent in various types of teams from Computer Science including teams from industry or academia, teams with different gender groups, teams with geographical contrast, and teams with distinct size.

Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Luna Xin Dong et al.

Text categorization is an essential task in Web content analysis. Considering the ever-evolving Web data and new emerging categories, instead of the laborious supervised setting, in this paper, we focus on the minimally-supervised setting that aims to categorize documents effectively, with a couple of seed documents annotated per category. We recognize that texts collected from the Web are often structure-rich, i.e., accompanied by various metadata. One can easily organize the corpus into a text-rich network, joining raw text documents with document attributes, high-quality phrases, label surface names as nodes, and their associations as edges. Such a network provides a holistic view of the corpus' heterogeneous data sources and enables a joint optimization for network-based analysis and deep textual model training. We therefore propose a novel framework for minimally supervised categorization by learning from the text-rich network. Specifically, we jointly train two modules with different inductive biases -- a text analysis module for text understanding and a network learning module for class-discriminative, scalable network learning. Each module generates pseudo training labels from the unlabeled document set, and both modules mutually enhance each other by co-training using pooled pseudo labels. We test our model on two real-world datasets. On the challenging e-commerce product categorization dataset with 683 categories, our experiments show that given only three seed documents per category, our framework can achieve an accuracy of about 92%, significantly outperforming all compared methods; our accuracy is only less than 2% away from the supervised BERT model trained on about 50K labeled documents.

Hoang Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Congying Xia et al.

Few-shot Intent Detection is challenging due to the scarcity of available annotated utterances. Although recent works demonstrate that multi-level matching plays an important role in transferring learned knowledge from seen training classes to novel testing classes, they rely on a static similarity measure and overly fine-grained matching components. These limitations inhibit generalizing capability towards Generalized Few-shot Learning settings where both seen and novel classes are co-existent. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Matching and Aggregation Network where semantic components are distilled from utterances via multi-head self-attention with additional dynamic regularization constraints. These semantic components capture high-level information, resulting in more effective matching between instances. Our multi-perspective matching method provides a comprehensive matching measure to enhance representations of both labeled and unlabeled instances. We also propose a more challenging evaluation setting that considers classification on the joint all-class label space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code and data are publicly available.

Xuming Hu, Chenwei Zhang, Fukun Ma et al.

To alleviate human efforts from obtaining large-scale annotations, Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction methods aim to leverage unlabeled data in addition to learning from limited samples. Existing self-training methods suffer from the gradual drift problem, where noisy pseudo labels on unlabeled data are incorporated during training. To alleviate the noise in pseudo labels, we propose a method called MetaSRE, where a Relation Label Generation Network generates quality assessment on pseudo labels by (meta) learning from the successful and failed attempts on Relation Classification Network as an additional meta-objective. To reduce the influence of noisy pseudo labels, MetaSRE adopts a pseudo label selection and exploitation scheme which assesses pseudo label quality on unlabeled samples and only exploits high-quality pseudo labels in a self-training fashion to incrementally augment labeled samples for both robustness and accuracy. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Ye Liu, Shaika Chowdhury, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Healthcare question answering assistance aims to provide customer healthcare information, which widely appears in both Web and mobile Internet. The questions usually require the assistance to have proficient healthcare background knowledge as well as the reasoning ability on the knowledge. Recently a challenge involving complex healthcare reasoning, HeadQA dataset, has been proposed, which contains multiple-choice questions authorized for the public healthcare specialization exam. Unlike most other QA tasks that focus on linguistic understanding, HeadQA requires deeper reasoning involving not only knowledge extraction, but also complex reasoning with healthcare knowledge. These questions are the most challenging for current QA systems, and the current performance of the state-of-the-art method is slightly better than a random guess. In order to solve this challenging task, we present a Multi-step reasoning with Knowledge extraction framework (MurKe). The proposed framework first extracts the healthcare knowledge as supporting documents from the large corpus. In order to find the reasoning chain and choose the correct answer, MurKe iterates between selecting the supporting documents, reformulating the query representation using the supporting documents and getting entailment score for each choice using the entailment model. The reformulation module leverages selected documents for missing evidence, which maintains interpretability. Moreover, we are striving to make full use of off-the-shelf pre-trained models. With less trainable weight, the pre-trained model can easily adapt to healthcare tasks with limited training samples. From the experimental results and ablation study, our system is able to outperform several strong baselines on the HeadQA dataset.

Xin Luna Dong, Xiang He, Andrey Kan et al.

Can one build a knowledge graph (KG) for all products in the world? Knowledge graphs have firmly established themselves as valuable sources of information for search and question answering, and it is natural to wonder if a KG can contain information about products offered at online retail sites. There have been several successful examples of generic KGs, but organizing information about products poses many additional challenges, including sparsity and noise of structured data for products, complexity of the domain with millions of product types and thousands of attributes, heterogeneity across large number of categories, as well as large and constantly growing number of products. We describe AutoKnow, our automatic (self-driving) system that addresses these challenges. The system includes a suite of novel techniques for taxonomy construction, product property identification, knowledge extraction, anomaly detection, and synonym discovery. AutoKnow is (a) automatic, requiring little human intervention, (b) multi-scalable, scalable in multiple dimensions (many domains, many products, and many attributes), and (c) integrative, exploiting rich customer behavior logs. AutoKnow has been operational in collecting product knowledge for over 11K product types.

Yuning Mao, Tong Zhao, Andrey Kan et al.

Taxonomies have found wide applications in various domains, especially online for item categorization, browsing, and search. Despite the prevalent use of online catalog taxonomies, most of them in practice are maintained by humans, which is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. While taxonomy construction from scratch is considerably studied in the literature, how to effectively enrich existing incomplete taxonomies remains an open yet important research question. Taxonomy enrichment not only requires the robustness to deal with emerging terms but also the consistency between existing taxonomy structure and new term attachment. In this paper, we present a self-supervised end-to-end framework, Octet, for Online Catalog Taxonomy EnrichmenT. Octet leverages heterogeneous information unique to online catalog taxonomies such as user queries, items, and their relations to the taxonomy nodes while requiring no other supervision than the existing taxonomies. We propose to distantly train a sequence labeling model for term extraction and employ graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture the taxonomy structure as well as the query-item-taxonomy interactions for term attachment. Extensive experiments in different online domains demonstrate the superiority of Octet over state-of-the-art methods via both automatic and human evaluations. Notably, Octet enriches an online catalog taxonomy in production to 2 times larger in the open-world evaluation.

Xuming Hu, Chenwei Zhang, Yusong Xu et al.

Open relation extraction is the task of extracting open-domain relation facts from natural language sentences. Existing works either utilize heuristics or distant-supervised annotations to train a supervised classifier over pre-defined relations, or adopt unsupervised methods with additional assumptions that have less discriminative power. In this work, we proposed a self-supervised framework named SelfORE, which exploits weak, self-supervised signals by leveraging large pretrained language model for adaptive clustering on contextualized relational features, and bootstraps the self-supervised signals by improving contextualized features in relation classification. Experimental results on three datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of SelfORE on open-domain Relation Extraction when comparing with competitive baselines.

Congying Xia, Chenwei Zhang, Hoang Nguyen et al.

In this paper, we formulate a more realistic and difficult problem setup for the intent detection task in natural language understanding, namely Generalized Few-Shot Intent Detection (GFSID). GFSID aims to discriminate a joint label space consisting of both existing intents which have enough labeled data and novel intents which only have a few examples for each class. To approach this problem, we propose a novel model, Conditional Text Generation with BERT (CG-BERT). CG-BERT effectively leverages a large pre-trained language model to generate text conditioned on the intent label. By modeling the utterance distribution with variational inference, CG-BERT can generate diverse utterances for the novel intents even with only a few utterances available. Experimental results show that CG-BERT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GFSID task with 1-shot and 5-shot settings on two real-world datasets.

Tingyi Wanyan, Chenwei Zhang, Ariful Azad et al.

We present a multi-filtering Graph Convolution Neural Network (GCN) framework for network embedding task. It uses multiple local GCN filters to do feature extraction in every propagation layer. We show this approach could capture different important aspects of node features against the existing attribute embedding based method. We also show that with multi-filtering GCN approach, we can achieve significant improvement against baseline methods when training data is limited. We also perform many empirical experiments and demonstrate the benefit of using multiple filters against single filter as well as most current existing network embedding methods for both the link prediction and node classification tasks.

Shaika Chowdhury, Chenwei Zhang, Philip S. Yu et al.

Distributed representations of medical concepts have been used to support downstream clinical tasks recently. Electronic Health Records (EHR) capture different aspects of patients' hospital encounters and serve as a rich source for augmenting clinical decision making by learning robust medical concept embeddings. However, the same medical concept can be recorded in different modalities (e.g., clinical notes, lab results)-with each capturing salient information unique to that modality-and a holistic representation calls for relevant feature ensemble from all information sources. We hypothesize that representations learned from heterogeneous data types would lead to performance enhancement on various clinical informatics and predictive modeling tasks. To this end, our proposed approach makes use of meta-embeddings, embeddings aggregated from learned embeddings. Firstly, modality-specific embeddings for each medical concept is learned with graph autoencoders. The ensemble of all the embeddings is then modeled as a meta-embedding learning problem to incorporate their correlating and complementary information through a joint reconstruction. Empirical results of our model on both quantitative and qualitative clinical evaluations have shown improvements over state-of-the-art embedding models, thus validating our hypothesis.

Yue Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Shen Wang et al.

We formalize networks with evolving structures as temporal networks and propose a generative link prediction model, Generative Link Sequence Modeling (GLSM), to predict future links for temporal networks. GLSM captures the temporal link formation patterns from the observed links with a sequence modeling framework and has the ability to generate the emerging links by inferring from the probability distribution on the potential future links. To avoid overfitting caused by treating each link as a unique token, we propose a self-tokenization mechanism to transform each raw link in the network to an abstract aggregation token automatically. The self-tokenization is seamlessly integrated into the sequence modeling framework, which allows the proposed GLSM model to have the generalization capability to discover link formation patterns beyond raw link sequences. We compare GLSM with the existing state-of-art methods on five real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that GLSM obtains future positive links effectively in a generative fashion while achieving the best performance (2-10\% improvements on AUC) among other alternatives.

Shaika Chowdhury, Chenwei Zhang, Philip S. Yu et al.

Predicting patient mortality is an important and challenging problem in the healthcare domain, especially for intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Electronic health notes serve as a rich source for learning patient representations, that can facilitate effective risk assessment. However, a large portion of clinical notes are unstructured and also contain domain specific terminologies, from which we need to extract structured information. In this paper, we introduce an embedding framework to learn semantically-plausible distributed representations of clinical notes that exploits the semantic correspondence between the unstructured texts and their corresponding structured knowledge, known as semantic frame, in a hierarchical fashion. Our approach integrates text modeling and semantic correspondence learning into a single model that comprises 1) an unstructured embedding module that makes use of self-similarity matrix representations in order to inject structural regularities of different segments inherent in clinical texts to promote local coherence, 2) a structured embedding module to embed the semantic frames (e.g., UMLS semantic types) with deep ConvNet and 3) a hierarchical semantic correspondence module that embeds by enhancing the interactions between text-semantic frame embedding pairs at multiple levels (i.e., words, sentence, note). Evaluations on multiple embedding benchmarks on post discharge intensive care patient mortality prediction tasks demonstrate its effectiveness compared to approaches that do not exploit the semantic interactions between structured and unstructured information present in clinical notes.

Shaika Chowdhury, Chenwei Zhang, Philip S. Yu et al.

Distributed representations have been used to support downstream tasks in healthcare recently. Healthcare data (e.g., electronic health records) contain multiple modalities of data from heterogeneous sources that can provide complementary information, alongside an added dimension to learning personalized patient representations. To this end, in this paper we propose a novel unsupervised encoder-decoder model, namely Mixed Pooling Multi-View Attention Autoencoder (MPVAA), that generates patient representations encapsulating a holistic view of their medical profile. Specifically, by first learning personalized graph embeddings pertaining to each patient's heterogeneous healthcare data, it then integrates the non-linear relationships among them into a unified representation through multi-view attention mechanism. Additionally, a mixed pooling strategy is incorporated in the encoding step to learn diverse information specific to each data modality. Experiments conducted for multiple tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art representation learning methods in healthcare.

Yue Wang, Yao Wan, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Counterfactual thinking describes a psychological phenomenon that people re-infer the possible results with different solutions about things that have already happened. It helps people to gain more experience from mistakes and thus to perform better in similar future tasks. This paper investigates the counterfactual thinking for agents to find optimal decision-making strategies in multi-agent reinforcement learning environments. In particular, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning model with a structure which mimics the human-psychological counterfactual thinking process to improve the competitive abilities for agents. To this end, our model generates several possible actions (intent actions) with a parallel policy structure and estimates the rewards and regrets for these intent actions based on its current understanding of the environment. Our model incorporates a scenario-based framework to link the estimated regrets with its inner policies. During the iterations, our model updates the parallel policies and the corresponding scenario-based regrets for agents simultaneously. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on two different environments with real-world applications. Experimental results show that counterfactual thinking can actually benefit the agents to obtain more accumulative rewards from the environments with fair information by comparing to their opponents while keeping high performing efficiency.

Ye Liu, Chenwei Zhang, Xiaohui Yan et al.

In real-world question-answering (QA) systems, ill-formed questions, such as wrong words, ill word order, and noisy expressions, are common and may prevent the QA systems from understanding and answering them accurately. In order to eliminate the effect of ill-formed questions, we approach the question refinement task and propose a unified model, QREFINE, to refine the ill-formed questions to well-formed question. The basic idea is to learn a Seq2Seq model to generate a new question from the original one. To improve the quality and retrieval performance of the generated questions, we make two major improvements: 1) To better encode the semantics of ill-formed questions, we enrich the representation of questions with character embedding and the recent proposed contextual word embedding such as BERT, besides the traditional context-free word embeddings; 2) To make it capable to generate desired questions, we train the model with deep reinforcement learning techniques that considers an appropriate wording of the generation as an immediate reward and the correlation between generated question and answer as time-delayed long-term rewards. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that the proposed QREFINE method can generate refined questions with more readability but fewer mistakes than the original questions provided by users. Moreover, the refined questions also significantly improve the accuracy of answer retrieval.

Chenwei Zhang

Nowadays, with the booming development of the Internet, people benefit from its convenience due to its open and sharing nature. A large volume of natural language texts is being generated by users in various forms, such as search queries, documents, and social media posts. As the unstructured text corpus is usually noisy and messy, it becomes imperative to correctly identify and accurately annotate structured information in order to obtain meaningful insights or better understand unstructured texts. On the other hand, the existing structured information, which embodies our knowledge such as entity or concept relations, often suffers from incompleteness or quality-related issues. Given a gigantic collection of texts which offers rich semantic information, it is also important to harness the massiveness of the unannotated text corpus to expand and refine existing structured knowledge with fewer annotation efforts. In this dissertation, I will introduce principles, models, and algorithms for effective structured knowledge discovery from the massive text corpus. We are generally interested in obtaining insights and better understanding unstructured texts with the help of structured annotations or by structure-aware modeling. Also, given the existing structured knowledge, we are interested in expanding its scale and improving its quality harnessing the massiveness of the text corpus. In particular, four problems are studied in this dissertation: Structured Intent Detection for Natural Language Understanding, Structure-aware Natural Language Modeling, Generative Structured Knowledge Expansion, and Synonym Refinement on Structured Knowledge.

Congying Xia, Chenwei Zhang, Tao Yang et al.

This paper presents a novel framework, MGNER, for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. Different from traditional approaches regarding NER as a sequential labeling task and annotate entities consecutively, MGNER detects and recognizes entities on multiple granularities: it is able to recognize named entities without explicitly assuming non-overlapping or totally nested structures. MGNER consists of a Detector that examines all possible word segments and a Classifier that categorizes entities. In addition, contextual information and a self-attention mechanism are utilized throughout the framework to improve the NER performance. Experimental results show that MGNER outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines up to 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks.