Biqing Zeng

Zongwei Zhen, Biqing Zeng

This paper addresses the task of interactive, conversational text-to-image retrieval. Our DIR-TIR framework progressively refines the target image search through two specialized modules: the Dialog Refiner Module and the Image Refiner Module. The Dialog Refiner actively queries users to extract essential information and generate increasingly precise descriptions of the target image. Complementarily, the Image Refiner identifies perceptual gaps between generated images and user intentions, strategically reducing the visual-semantic discrepancy. By leveraging multi-turn dialogues, DIR-TIR provides superior controllability and fault tolerance compared to conventional single-query methods, significantly improving target image hit accuracy. Comprehensive experiments across diverse image datasets demonstrate our dialogue-based approach substantially outperforms initial-description-only baselines, while the synergistic module integration achieves both higher retrieval precision and enhanced interactive experience.

Biqing Zeng, Zehan Li, Aladdin Ayesh

Catastrophic forgetting is a pervasive issue for pre-trained language models (PLMs) during continual learning, where models lose previously acquired knowledge when sequentially trained on a series of tasks. The model's ability to retain old tasks is referred to as stability, while its adaptability to new tasks is called plasticity. Therefore, the key to solving this problem is to find a trade-off between the plasticity and stability of the model. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel method to achieve a balance between model stability and plasticity, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. More specifically, our proposed approach leverages parameter isolation and a subsequent combination strategy. Initially, in the training stage, the model adapts to each downstream task via a parameter isolation method to prevent potential interference among different tasks. We then combine all trained parameters, which contain acquired knowledge, using the task arithmetic method and finally apply them to the backbone model. Empirical evaluations on continual language learning benchmarks substantiate the effectiveness of our approach, revealing a marked enhancement over existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Heng Yang, Biqing Zeng

Target-oriented sentiment classification is a fine-grained task of natural language processing to analyze the sentiment polarity of the targets. To improve the performance of sentiment classification, many approaches proposed various attention mechanisms to capture the important context words of a target. However, previous approaches ignored the significant relatedness of a target's sentiment and its local context. This paper proposes a local context-aware network (LCA-Net), equipped with the local context embedding and local context prediction loss, to strengthen the model by emphasizing the sentiment information of the local context. The experimental results on three common datasets show that local context-aware network performs superior to existing approaches in extracting local context features. Besides, the local context-aware framework is easy to adapt to many models, with the potential to improve other target-level tasks.

Heng Yang, Biqing Zeng, JianHao Yang et al.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task is a multi-grained task of natural language processing and consists of two subtasks: aspect term extraction (ATE) and aspect polarity classification (APC). Most of the existing work focuses on the subtask of aspect term polarity inferring and ignores the significance of aspect term extraction. Besides, the existing researches do not pay attention to the research of the Chinese-oriented ABSA task. Based on the local context focus (LCF) mechanism, this paper firstly proposes a multi-task learning model for Chinese-oriented aspect-based sentiment analysis, namely LCF-ATEPC. Compared with existing models, this model equips the capability of extracting aspect term and inferring aspect term polarity synchronously, moreover, this model is effective to analyze both Chinese and English comments simultaneously and the experiment on a multilingual mixed dataset proved its availability. By integrating the domain-adapted BERT model, the LCF-ATEPC model achieved the state-of-the-art performance of aspect term extraction and aspect polarity classification in four Chinese review datasets. Besides, the experimental results on the most commonly used SemEval-2014 task4 Restaurant and Laptop datasets outperform the state-of-the-art performance on the ATE and APC subtask.