Ziyun Wang

Ziyun Wang, Xuan Liu, Peiji Yang et al.

Cross-lingual text classification aims at training a classifier on the source language and transferring the knowledge to target languages, which is very useful for low-resource languages. Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLM) achieve impressive results in cross-lingual classification tasks, but rarely consider factors beyond semantic similarity, causing performance degradation between some language pairs. In this paper we propose a simple yet effective method to incorporate heterogeneous information within and across languages for cross-lingual text classification using graph convolutional networks (GCN). In particular, we construct a heterogeneous graph by treating documents and words as nodes, and linking nodes with different relations, which include part-of-speech roles, semantic similarity, and document translations. Extensive experiments show that our graph-based method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on all tasks, and also achieves consistent performance gain over baselines in low-resource settings where external tools like translators are unavailable.

Ziyun Wang, Brenden M. Lake

People ask questions that are far richer, more informative, and more creative than current AI systems. We propose a neuro-symbolic framework for modeling human question asking, which represents questions as formal programs and generates programs with an encoder-decoder based deep neural network. From extensive experiments using an information-search game, we show that our method can predict which questions humans are likely to ask in unconstrained settings. We also propose a novel grammar-based question generation framework trained with reinforcement learning, which is able to generate creative questions without supervised human data.