Qiang Fang

Yi Sun, Xin Xu, Jian Li et al.

It's challenging to balance the networks stability and plasticity in continual learning scenarios, considering stability suffers from the update of model and plasticity benefits from it. Existing works usually focus more on the stability and restrict the learning plasticity of later tasks to avoid catastrophic forgetting of learned knowledge. Differently, we propose a continual learning method named Split2MetaFusion which can achieve better trade-off by employing a two-stage strategy: splitting and meta-weighted fusion. In this strategy, a slow model with better stability, and a fast model with better plasticity are learned sequentially at the splitting stage. Then stability and plasticity are both kept by fusing the two models in an adaptive manner. Towards this end, we design an optimizer named Task-Preferred Null Space Projector(TPNSP) to the slow learning process for narrowing the fusion gap. To achieve better model fusion, we further design a Dreaming-Meta-Weighted fusion policy for better maintaining the old and new knowledge simultaneously, which doesn't require to use the previous datasets. Experimental results and analysis reported in this work demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for maintaining networks stability and keeping its plasticity. Our code will be released.

Qiongqiong Liu, Tianqiao Liu, Jiafu Zhao et al.

Sentence completion (SC) questions present a sentence with one or more blanks that need to be filled in, three to five possible words or phrases as options. SC questions are widely used for students learning English as a Second Language (ESL) and building computational approaches to automatically solve such questions is beneficial to language learners. In this work, we propose a neural framework to solve SC questions in English examinations by utilizing pre-trained language models. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world K-12 ESL SC question dataset and the results demonstrate the superiority of our model in terms of prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we run precision-recall trade-off analysis to discuss the practical issues when deploying it in real-life scenarios. To encourage reproducible results, we make our code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/AIED2021/ESL-SentenceCompletion}.

Tianqiao Liu, Qiang Fang, Wenbiao Ding et al.

There is an increasing interest in the use of mathematical word problem (MWP) generation in educational assessment. Different from standard natural question generation, MWP generation needs to maintain the underlying mathematical operations between quantities and variables, while at the same time ensuring the relevance between the output and the given topic. To address above problem, we develop an end-to-end neural model to generate diverse MWPs in real-world scenarios from commonsense knowledge graph and equations. The proposed model (1) learns both representations from edge-enhanced Levi graphs of symbolic equations and commonsense knowledge; (2) automatically fuses equation and commonsense knowledge information via a self-planning module when generating the MWPs. Experiments on an educational gold-standard set and a large-scale generated MWP set show that our approach is superior on the MWP generation task, and it outperforms the SOTA models in terms of both automatic evaluation metrics, i.e., BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, Self-BLEU, and human evaluation metrics, i.e., equation relevance, topic relevance, and language coherence. To encourage reproducible results, we make our code and MWP dataset public available at \url{https://github.com/tal-ai/MaKE_EMNLP2021}.