Yao Meng

Zhourui Guo, Meng Yao, Yang Yu et al.

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for learning from trial and error, but it often requires a large number of interactions to achieve good performance. In some domains, such as sparse-reward tasks, an oracle that can provide useful feedback or guidance to the agent during the learning process is really of great importance. However, querying the oracle too frequently may be costly or impractical, and the oracle may not always have a clear answer for every situation. Therefore, we propose a novel method for interacting with the oracle in a selective and efficient way, using a retrieval-based approach. We assume that the interaction can be modeled as a sequence of templated questions and answers, and that there is a large corpus of previous interactions available. We use a neural network to encode the current state of the agent and the oracle, and retrieve the most relevant question from the corpus to ask the oracle. We then use the oracle's answer to update the agent's policy and value function. We evaluate our method on an object manipulation task. We show that our method can significantly improve the efficiency of RL by reducing the number of interactions needed to reach a certain level of performance, compared to baselines that do not use the oracle or use it in a naive way.

Hanchu Zhang, Leonhard Hennig, Christoph Alt et al.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) in domains like e-commerce is an understudied problem due to the lack of annotated datasets. Recognizing novel entity types in this domain, such as products, components, and attributes, is challenging because of their linguistic complexity and the low coverage of existing knowledge resources. To address this problem, we present a bootstrapped positive-unlabeled learning algorithm that integrates domain-specific linguistic features to quickly and efficiently expand the seed dictionary. The model achieves an average F1 score of 72.02% on a novel dataset of product descriptions, an improvement of 3.63% over a baseline BiLSTM classifier, and in particular exhibits better recall (4.96% on average).

Qian Zhang, Jianjun Li, Meng Yao et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel network design mechanism for efficient embedded computing. Inspired by the limited computing patterns, we propose to fix the number of channels in a group convolution, instead of the existing practice that fixing the total group numbers. Our solution based network, named Variable Group Convolutional Network (VarGNet), can be optimized easier on hardware side, due to the more unified computing schemes among the layers. Extensive experiments on various vision tasks, including classification, detection, pixel-wise parsing and face recognition, have demonstrated the practical value of our VarGNet.

Shuangyong Song, Yao Meng, Zhongguang Zheng et al.

Our FRDC_QA team participated in the QA-Lab English subtask of the NTCIR-11. In this paper, we describe our system for solving real-world university entrance exam questions, which are related to world history. Wikipedia is used as the main external resource for our system. Since problems with choosing right/wrong sentence from multiple sentence choices account for about two-thirds of the total, we individually design a classification based model for solving this type of questions. For other types of questions, we also design some simple methods.

Shuangyong Song, Yao Meng

In microblogging, hashtags are used to be topical markers, and they are adopted by users that contribute similar content or express a related idea. However, hashtags are created in a free style and there is no domain category information about them, which make users hard to get access to organized hashtag presentation. In this paper, we propose an approach that classifies hashtags with news categories, and then carry out a domain-sensitive popularity ranking to get hot hashtags in each domain. The proposed approach first trains a domain classification model with news content and news category information, then detects microblogs related to a hashtag to be its representative text, based on which we can classify this hashtag with a domain. Finally, we calculate the domain-sensitive popularity of each hashtag with multiple factors, to get most hotly discussed hashtags in each domain. Preliminary experimental results on a dataset from Sina Weibo, one of the largest Chinese microblogging websites, show usefulness of the proposed approach on describing hashtags.

Shuangyong Song, Yao Meng

In this paper, we propose a Concept-level Emotion Cause Model (CECM), instead of the mere word-level models, to discover causes of microblogging users' diversified emotions on specific hot event. A modified topic-supervised biterm topic model is utilized in CECM to detect emotion topics' in event-related tweets, and then context-sensitive topical PageRank is utilized to detect meaningful multiword expressions as emotion causes. Experimental results on a dataset from Sina Weibo, one of the largest microblogging websites in China, show CECM can better detect emotion causes than baseline methods.