Wenlin Yao

Fuxiao Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao et al. · tencent-ai

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) and their integration into large multimodal models (LMMs), there has been impressive progress in zero-shot completion of user-oriented vision-language tasks. However, a gap remains in the domain of chart image understanding due to the distinct abstract components in charts. To address this, we introduce a large-scale MultiModal Chart Instruction (\textbf{MMC-Instruction}) dataset comprising 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types. Leveraging this data, we develop MultiModal Chart Assistant (\textbf{MMCA}), an LMM that achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive evaluation of LMM chart understanding, we also propose a MultiModal Chart Benchmark (\textbf{MMC-Benchmark}), a comprehensive human-annotated benchmark with nine distinct tasks evaluating reasoning capabilities over charts. Extensive experiments on MMC-Benchmark reveal the limitations of existing LMMs on correctly interpreting charts, even for the most recent GPT-4V model. Our work provides an instruction-tuning methodology and benchmark to advance multimodal understanding of charts. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FuxiaoLiu/MMC.

Chao Zhao, Wenlin Yao, Dian Yu et al.

Comprehending a dialogue requires a model to capture diverse kinds of key information in the utterances, which are either scattered around or implicitly implied in different turns of conversations. Therefore, dialogue comprehension requires diverse capabilities such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and commonsense reasoning. Towards the objective of pre-training a zero-shot dialogue comprehension model, we develop a novel narrative-guided pre-training strategy that learns by narrating the key information from a dialogue input. However, the dialogue-narrative parallel corpus for such a pre-training strategy is currently unavailable. For this reason, we first construct a dialogue-narrative parallel corpus by automatically aligning movie subtitles and their synopses. We then pre-train a BART model on the data and evaluate its performance on four dialogue-based tasks that require comprehension. Experimental results show that our model not only achieves superior zero-shot performance but also exhibits stronger fine-grained dialogue comprehension capabilities. The data and code are available at https://github.com/zhaochaocs/Diana

Fei Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Hongming Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Abstractive summarization models typically learn to capture the salient information from scratch implicitly. Recent literature adds extractive summaries as guidance for abstractive summarization models to provide hints of salient content and achieves better performance. However, extractive summaries as guidance could be over strict, leading to information loss or noisy signals. Furthermore, it cannot easily adapt to documents with various abstractiveness. As the number and allocation of salience content pieces vary, it is hard to find a fixed threshold deciding which content should be included in the guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel summarization approach with a flexible and reliable salience guidance, namely SEASON (SaliencE Allocation as Guidance for Abstractive SummarizatiON). SEASON utilizes the allocation of salience expectation to guide abstractive summarization and adapts well to articles in different abstractiveness. Automatic and human evaluations on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed method is effective and reliable. Empirical results on more than one million news articles demonstrate a natural fifteen-fifty salience split for news article sentences, providing a useful insight for composing news articles.

Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Hongming Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Fully-parametric language models generally require a huge number of model parameters to store the necessary knowledge for solving multiple natural language tasks in zero/few-shot settings. In addition, it is hard to adapt to the evolving world knowledge without the costly model re-training. In this paper, we develop a novel semi-parametric language model architecture, Knowledge-in-Context (KiC), which empowers a parametric text-to-text language model with a knowledge-rich external memory. Specifically, the external memory contains six different types of knowledge: entity, dictionary, commonsense, event, script, and causality knowledge. For each input instance, the KiC model adaptively selects a knowledge type and retrieves the most helpful pieces of knowledge. The input instance along with its knowledge augmentation is fed into a text-to-text model (e.g., T5) to generate the output answer, where both the input and the output are in natural language forms after prompting. Interestingly, we find that KiC can be identified as a special mixture-of-experts (MoE) model, where the knowledge selector plays the role of a router that is used to determine the sequence-to-expert assignment in MoE. This key observation inspires us to develop a novel algorithm for training KiC with an instance-adaptive knowledge selector. As a knowledge-rich semi-parametric language model, KiC only needs a much smaller parametric part to achieve superior zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. By evaluating on 40+ different tasks, we show that KiC_Large with 770M parameters easily outperforms large language models (LMs) that are 4-39x larger by a large margin. We also demonstrate that KiC exhibits emergent abilities at a much smaller model scale compared to the fully-parametric models.

Yue Yang, Wenlin Yao, Hongming Zhang et al. · allen-ai

Large-scale pretrained language models have made significant advances in solving downstream language understanding tasks. However, they generally suffer from reporting bias, the phenomenon describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text, e.g., ''an orange is orange''. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel approach, Z-LaVI, to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities. Specifically, we leverage two complementary types of ''imaginations'': (i) recalling existing images through retrieval and (ii) synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. Jointly exploiting the language inputs and the imagination, a pretrained vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) eventually composes a zero-shot solution to the original language tasks. Notably, fueling language models with imagination can effectively leverage visual knowledge to solve plain language tasks. In consequence, Z-LaVI consistently improves the zero-shot performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks.

Xuansheng Wu, Huachi Zhou, Yucheng Shi et al.

Recommendation systems help users find matched items based on their previous behaviors. Personalized recommendation becomes challenging in the absence of historical user-item interactions, a practical problem for startups known as the system cold-start recommendation. While existing research addresses cold-start issues for either users or items, we still lack solutions for system cold-start scenarios. To tackle the problem, we propose PromptRec, a simple but effective approach based on in-context learning of language models, where we transform the recommendation task into the sentiment analysis task on natural language containing user and item profiles. However, this naive approach heavily relies on the strong in-context learning ability emerged from large language models, which could suffer from significant latency for online recommendations. To solve the challenge, we propose to enhance small language models for recommender systems with a data-centric pipeline, which consists of: (1) constructing a refined corpus for model pre-training; (2) constructing a decomposed prompt template via prompt pre-training. They correspond to the development of training data and inference data, respectively. The pipeline is supported by a theoretical framework that formalizes the connection between in-context recommendation and language modeling. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a cold-start recommendation benchmark, and the results demonstrate that the enhanced small language models can achieve comparable cold-start recommendation performance to that of large models with only $17\%$ of the inference time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to tackle the system cold-start recommendation problem. We believe our findings will provide valuable insights for future works. The benchmark and implementations are available at https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/PromptRec.

Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Xiaoman Pan et al. · tencent-ai

Reasoning in mathematical domains remains a significant challenge for relatively small language models (LMs). Many current methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely heavily on knowledge distillation from powerful but inefficient large LMs (LLMs). In this work, we explore a new direction that avoids over-reliance on LLM teachers, introducing a multi-view fine-tuning method that efficiently exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. Our approach uniquely considers the various annotation formats as different "views" and leverages them in training the model. By postpending distinct instructions to input questions, models can learn to generate solutions in diverse formats in a flexible manner. Experimental results show that our strategy enables a LLaMA-7B model to outperform prior approaches that utilize knowledge distillation, as well as carefully established baselines. Additionally, the proposed method grants the models promising generalization ability across various views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete noisy data. We hope our multi-view training paradigm could inspire future studies in other machine reasoning domains.

Chao Zhao, Faeze Brahman, Kaiqiang Song et al.

Narrative summarization aims to produce a distilled version of a narrative to describe its most salient events and characters. Summarizing a narrative is challenging as it requires an understanding of event causality and character behaviors. To encourage research in this direction, we propose NarraSum, a large-scale narrative summarization dataset. It contains 122K narrative documents, which are collected from plot descriptions of movies and TV episodes with diverse genres, and their corresponding abstractive summaries. Experiments show that there is a large performance gap between humans and the state-of-the-art summarization models on NarraSum. We hope that this dataset will promote future research in summarization, as well as broader studies of natural language understanding and generation. The dataset is available at https://github.com/zhaochaocs/narrasum.

Xiang Yue, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao et al. · tencent-ai

We consider the problem of pretraining a two-stage open-domain question answering (QA) system (retriever + reader) with strong transfer capabilities. The key challenge is how to construct a large amount of high-quality question-answer-context triplets without task-specific annotations. Specifically, the triplets should align well with downstream tasks by: (i) covering a wide range of domains (for open-domain applications), (ii) linking a question to its semantically relevant context with supporting evidence (for training the retriever), and (iii) identifying the correct answer in the context (for training the reader). Previous pretraining approaches generally fall short of one or more of these requirements. In this work, we automatically construct a large-scale corpus that meets all three criteria by consulting millions of references cited within Wikipedia. The well-aligned pretraining signals benefit both the retriever and the reader significantly. Our pretrained retriever leads to 2%-10% absolute gains in top-20 accuracy. And with our pretrained reader, the entire system improves by up to 4% in exact match.

Neeraj Varshney, Wenlin Yao, Hongming Zhang et al. · amazon-science

Recently developed large language models have achieved remarkable success in generating fluent and coherent text. However, these models often tend to 'hallucinate' which critically hampers their reliability. In this work, we address this crucial problem and propose an approach that actively detects and mitigates hallucinations during the generation process. Specifically, we first identify the candidates of potential hallucination leveraging the model's logit output values, check their correctness through a validation procedure, mitigate the detected hallucinations, and then continue with the generation process. Through extensive experiments with GPT-3.5 (text-davinci-003) on the 'article generation task', we first demonstrate the individual efficacy of our detection and mitigation techniques. Specifically, the detection technique achieves a recall of ~88% and the mitigation technique successfully mitigates 57.6% of the correctly detected hallucinations. Importantly, our mitigation technique does not introduce new hallucinations even in the case of incorrectly detected hallucinations, i.e., false positives. Then, we show that the proposed active detection and mitigation approach successfully reduces the hallucinations of the GPT-3.5 model from 47.5% to 14.5% on average. We further demonstrate the effectiveness and wide applicability of our approach through additional studies including performance on different types of questions (multi-hop and false premise questions) and with another LLM from a different model family (Vicuna). In summary, our work contributes to improving the reliability and trustworthiness of large language models, a crucial step en route to enabling their widespread adoption in real-world applications.

Pei Chen, Wenlin Yao, Hongming Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Knowledge base completion (KBC) aims to predict the missing links in knowledge graphs. Previous KBC tasks and approaches mainly focus on the setting where all test entities and relations have appeared in the training set. However, there has been limited research on the zero-shot KBC settings, where we need to deal with unseen entities and relations that emerge in a constantly growing knowledge base. In this work, we systematically examine different possible scenarios of zero-shot KBC and develop a comprehensive benchmark, ZeroKBC, that covers these scenarios with diverse types of knowledge sources. Our systematic analysis reveals several missing yet important zero-shot KBC settings. Experimental results show that canonical and state-of-the-art KBC systems cannot achieve satisfactory performance on this challenging benchmark. By analyzing the strength and weaknesses of these systems on solving ZeroKBC, we further present several important observations and promising future directions.

Hongming Zhang, Wenlin Yao, Dong Yu

Event extraction (EE) is the task of identifying interested event mentions from text. Conventional efforts mainly focus on the supervised setting. However, these supervised models cannot generalize to event types out of the pre-defined ontology. To fill this gap, many efforts have been devoted to the zero-shot EE problem. This paper follows the trend of modeling event-type semantics but moves one step further. We argue that using the static embedding of the event type name might not be enough because a single word could be ambiguous, and we need a sentence to define the type semantics accurately. To model the definition semantics, we use two separate transformer models to project the contextualized event mentions and corresponding definitions into the same embedding space and then minimize their embedding distance via contrastive learning. On top of that, we also propose a warming phase to help the model learn the minor difference between similar definitions. We name our approach Zero-shot Event extraction with Definition (ZED). Experiments on the MAVEN dataset show that our model significantly outperforms all previous zero-shot EE methods with fast inference speed due to the disjoint design. Further experiments also show that ZED can be easily applied to the few-shot setting when the annotation is available and consistently outperforms baseline supervised methods.

Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, Xiaoman Pan et al.

Although large-scale pre-trained language models (PTLMs) are shown to encode rich knowledge in their model parameters, the inherent knowledge in PTLMs can be opaque or static, making external knowledge necessary. However, the existing information retrieval techniques could be costly and may even introduce noisy and sometimes misleading knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the instance-level adaptive propulsion of external knowledge (IAPEK), where we only conduct the retrieval when necessary. To achieve this goal, we propose measuring whether a PTLM contains enough knowledge to solve an instance with a novel metric, Thrust, which leverages the representation distribution of a small number of seen instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that thrust is a good measurement of PTLM models' instance-level knowledgeability. Moreover, we can achieve significantly higher cost-efficiency with the Thrust score as the retrieval indicator than the naive usage of external knowledge on 88% of the evaluated tasks with 26% average performance improvement. Such findings shed light on the real-world practice of knowledge-enhanced LMs with a limited knowledge-seeking budget due to computation latency or costs.

Liqiang Jing, Zhehui Huang, Xiaoyang Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive language/vision reasoning abilities, igniting the recent trend of building agents for targeted applications such as shopping assistants or AI software engineers. Recently, many data science benchmarks have been proposed to investigate their performance in the data science domain. However, existing data science benchmarks still fall short when compared to real-world data science applications due to their simplified settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce DSBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate data science agents with realistic tasks. This benchmark includes 466 data analysis tasks and 74 data modeling tasks, sourced from Eloquence and Kaggle competitions. DSBench offers a realistic setting by encompassing long contexts, multimodal task backgrounds, reasoning with large data files and multi-table structures, and performing end-to-end data modeling tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, LVLMs, and agents shows that they struggle with most tasks, with the best agent solving only 34.12% of data analysis tasks and achieving a 34.74% Relative Performance Gap (RPG). These findings underscore the need for further advancements in developing more practical, intelligent, and autonomous data science agents.

Shuyi Xie, Wenlin Yao, Yong Dai et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various natural language tasks. However, evaluating their alignment with human preferences remains a challenge. To this end, we propose a comprehensive human evaluation framework to assess LLMs' proficiency in following instructions on diverse real-world tasks. We construct a hierarchical task tree encompassing 7 major areas covering over 200 categories and over 800 tasks, which covers diverse capabilities such as question answering, reasoning, multiturn dialogue, and text generation, to evaluate LLMs in a comprehensive and in-depth manner. We also design detailed evaluation standards and processes to facilitate consistent, unbiased judgments from human evaluators. A test set of over 3,000 instances is released, spanning different difficulty levels and knowledge domains. Our work provides a standardized methodology to evaluate human alignment in LLMs for both English and Chinese. We also analyze the feasibility of automating parts of evaluation with a strong LLM (GPT-4). Our framework supports a thorough assessment of LLMs as they are integrated into real-world applications. We have made publicly available the task tree, TencentLLMEval dataset, and evaluation methodology which have been demonstrated as effective in assessing the performance of Tencent Hunyuan LLMs. By doing so, we aim to facilitate the benchmarking of advances in the development of safe and human-aligned LLMs.

Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma et al. · tencent-ai

The rapid development of large language and multimodal models has sparked significant interest in using proprietary models, such as GPT-4o, to develop autonomous agents capable of handling real-world scenarios like web navigation. Although recent open-source efforts have tried to equip agents with the ability to explore environments and continuously improve over time, they are building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. Such agents struggle to generalize to realistic settings that require multimodal perception abilities and lack ground-truth signals. In this paper, we introduce an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development of multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself. We first train the base model with imitation learning to gain the basic abilities. We then let the agent explore the open web and collect feedback on its trajectories. After that, it further improves its policy by learning from well-performing trajectories judged by another general-purpose model. This exploration-feedback-optimization cycle can continue for several iterations. Experimental results show that our web agent successfully improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets.

Yebowen Hu, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho et al.

Reasoning is most powerful when an LLM accurately aggregates relevant information. We examine the critical role of information aggregation in reasoning by requiring the LLM to analyze sports narratives. To succeed at this task, an LLM must infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and compile key statistics to draw conclusions. We conduct comprehensive experiments with real NBA basketball data and present SportsGen, a new method to synthesize game narratives. By synthesizing data, we can rigorously evaluate LLMs' reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. Our findings show that most models, including GPT-4o, often fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns. Open-source models like Llama-3 further suffer from significant score hallucinations. Finally, the effectiveness of reasoning is influenced by narrative complexity, information density, and domain-specific terms, highlighting the challenges in analytical reasoning tasks.

Yiwei Qin, Kaiqiang Song, Yebowen Hu et al. · tencent-ai

This paper introduces the Decomposed Requirements Following Ratio (DRFR), a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to follow instructions. Addressing a gap in current methodologies, DRFR breaks down complex instructions into simpler criteria, facilitating a detailed analysis of LLMs' compliance with various aspects of tasks. Alongside this metric, we present InFoBench, a benchmark comprising 500 diverse instructions and 2,250 decomposed questions across multiple constraint categories. Our experiments compare DRFR with traditional scoring methods and explore annotation sources, including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4. The findings demonstrate DRFR's higher reliability and the effectiveness of using GPT-4 as a cost-efficient annotator. The evaluation of several advanced LLMs using this framework reveals their strengths and areas needing improvement, particularly in complex instruction-following. This study contributes a novel metric and benchmark, offering insights for future LLM development and evaluation.

Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu et al.

While reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing large language models (LLMs), it has primarily focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. Training effective web agents for multi-turn interactions remains challenging due to the complexity of long-horizon decision-making across dynamic web interfaces. In this work, we present WebAgent-R1, a simple yet effective end-to-end multi-turn RL framework for training web agents. It learns directly from online interactions with web environments by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, entirely guided by binary rewards depending on task success. Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of WebAgent-R1, boosting the task success rate of Qwen-2.5-3B from 6.1% to 33.9% and Llama-3.1-8B from 8.5% to 44.8%, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models such as OpenAI o3. In-depth analyses reveal the effectiveness of the thinking-based prompting strategy and test-time scaling through increased interactions for web tasks. We further investigate different RL initialization policies by introducing two variants, namely WebAgent-R1-Zero and WebAgent-R1-CoT, which highlight the importance of the warm-up training stage (i.e., behavior cloning) and provide insights on incorporating long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in web agents.

Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, Xiaoman Pan et al.

For a LLM to be trustworthy, its confidence level should be well-calibrated with its actual performance. While it is now common sense that LLM performances are greatly impacted by prompts, the confidence calibration in prompting LLMs has yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we explore how different prompting strategies influence LLM confidence calibration and how it could be improved. We conduct extensive experiments on six prompting methods in the question-answering context and we observe that, while these methods help improve the expected LLM calibration, they also trigger LLMs to be over-confident when responding to some instances. Inspired by human cognition, we propose Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) prompting, which improves the LLM calibration in two steps. First, FaR elicits the known "facts" that are relevant to the input prompt from the LLM. And then it asks the model to "reflect" over them to generate the final answer. Experiments show that FaR prompting achieves significantly better calibration; it lowers the Expected Calibration Error by 23.5% on our multi-purpose QA tasks. Notably, FaR prompting even elicits the capability of verbally expressing concerns in less confident scenarios, which helps trigger retrieval augmentation for solving these harder instances.

Yucheng Shi, Wenhao Yu, Wenlin Yao et al.

GUI agents, powered by large foundation models, can interact with digital interfaces, enabling various applications in web automation, mobile navigation, and software testing. However, their increasing autonomy has raised critical concerns about their security, privacy, and safety. This survey examines the trustworthiness of GUI agents in five critical dimensions: security vulnerabilities, reliability in dynamic environments, transparency and explainability, ethical considerations, and evaluation methodologies. We also identify major challenges such as vulnerability to adversarial attacks, cascading failure modes in sequential decision-making, and a lack of realistic evaluation benchmarks. These issues not only hinder real-world deployment but also call for comprehensive mitigation strategies beyond task success. As GUI agents become more widespread, establishing robust safety standards and responsible development practices is essential. This survey provides a foundation for advancing trustworthy GUI agents through systematic understanding and future research.

Xuansheng Wu, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs), while their performance after RLVR varies dramatically across different base models. This raises a fundamental question: what microscopic property of pre-trained models leads to this variation? To investigate, we formalize reasoning as chains of Horn clauses ("if-then" rules) built from features extracted from the LLM's latent space via cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs). We estimate the transition probabilities between its features, and further categorize each rule by its semantic soundness level (e.g., strict, plausible, noisy) with an LLM. Our key discovery is that high-potential models are inherently soundness-aware: their internal probability distributions systematically shift across rules' soundness levels, becoming highly distinct for "strict" versus "noisy" rules. In contrast, weaker models are soundness-agnostic, collapsing to one distribution regardless of soundness levels. To quantify this, we introduce the Soundness-Aware Level (SAL), a microscopic metric using the Jensen-Shannon Divergence to measure the separation between these distributions. We show that SAL's predictions of post-RLVR reasoning performance follow a precise empirical law (R^2=0.87) across diverse model families (Qwen, Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek) and scales (0.5B-14B). This reveals that a model's reasoning potential is tied to its intrinsic, pre-trained ability to distinguish sound knowledge from unsound ones. These findings underscore the critical role of model pre-training in shaping reasoning and offer a practical metric grounded in the model's internal mechanisms for selecting/designing stronger base models.

Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to a new era marked by the development of autonomous applications in real-world scenarios, which drives innovation in creating advanced web agents. Existing web agents typically only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebVoyager, an innovative Large Multimodal Model (LMM) powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. Moreover, we establish a new benchmark by compiling real-world tasks from 15 popular websites and introduce an automatic evaluation protocol leveraging multimodal understanding abilities of GPT-4V to evaluate open-ended web agents. We show that WebVoyager achieves a 59.1% task success rate on our benchmark, significantly surpassing the performance of both GPT-4 (All Tools) and the WebVoyager (text-only) setups, underscoring the exceptional capability of WebVoyager. The proposed automatic evaluation metric achieves 85.3% agreement with human judgment, indicating its effectiveness in providing reliable and accurate assessments of web agents.

James Y. Huang, Wenlin Yao, Kaiqiang Song et al.

Traditional sentence embedding models encode sentences into vector representations to capture useful properties such as the semantic similarity between sentences. However, in addition to similarity, sentence semantics can also be interpreted via compositional operations such as sentence fusion or difference. It is unclear whether the compositional semantics of sentences can be directly reflected as compositional operations in the embedding space. To more effectively bridge the continuous embedding and discrete text spaces, we explore the plausibility of incorporating various compositional properties into the sentence embedding space that allows us to interpret embedding transformations as compositional sentence operations. We propose InterSent, an end-to-end framework for learning interpretable sentence embeddings that supports compositional sentence operations in the embedding space. Our method optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks over existing approaches while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks.

Wenlin Yao, Xiaoman Pan, Lifeng Jin et al.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to automatically identify the exact meaning of one word according to its context. Existing supervised models struggle to make correct predictions on rare word senses due to limited training data and can only select the best definition sentence from one predefined word sense inventory (e.g., WordNet). To address the data sparsity problem and generalize the model to be independent of one predefined inventory, we propose a gloss alignment algorithm that can align definition sentences (glosses) with the same meaning from different sense inventories to collect rich lexical knowledge. We then train a model to identify semantic equivalence between a target word in context and one of its glosses using these aligned inventories, which exhibits strong transfer capability to many WSD tasks. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method improves predictions on both frequent and rare word senses, outperforming prior work by 1.2% on the All-Words WSD Task and 4.3% on the Low-Shot WSD Task. Evaluation on WiC Task also indicates that our method can better capture word meanings in context.

Wenlin Yao, Ruihong Huang

Inspired by the double temporality characteristic of narrative texts, we propose a novel approach for acquiring rich temporal "before/after" event knowledge across sentences in narrative stories. The double temporality states that a narrative story often describes a sequence of events following the chronological order and therefore, the temporal order of events matches with their textual order. We explored narratology principles and built a weakly supervised approach that identifies 287k narrative paragraphs from three large text corpora. We then extracted rich temporal event knowledge from these narrative paragraphs. Such event knowledge is shown useful to improve temporal relation classification and outperform several recent neural network models on the narrative cloze task.

Zeyu Dai, Wenlin Yao, Ruihong Huang

Focusing on the task of identifying event temporal status, we find that events directly or indirectly governing the target event in a dependency tree are most important contexts. Therefore, we extract dependency chains containing context events and use them as input in neural network models, which consistently outperform previous models using local context words as input. Visualization verifies that the dependency chain representation can effectively capture the context events which are closely related to the target event and play key roles in predicting event temporal status.

Wenlin Yao, Saipravallika Nettyam, Ruihong Huang

Capabilities of detecting temporal relations between two events can benefit many applications. Most of existing temporal relation classifiers were trained in a supervised manner. Instead, we explore the observation that regular event pairs show a consistent temporal relation despite of their various contexts, and these rich contexts can be used to train a contextual temporal relation classifier, which can further recognize new temporal relation contexts and identify new regular event pairs. We focus on detecting after and before temporal relations and design a weakly supervised learning approach that extracts thousands of regular event pairs and learns a contextual temporal relation classifier simultaneously. Evaluation shows that the acquired regular event pairs are of high quality and contain rich commonsense knowledge and domain specific knowledge. In addition, the weakly supervised trained temporal relation classifier achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art supervised systems.

Wenlin Yao, Zeyu Dai, Ruihong Huang et al.

The lack of large realistic datasets presents a bottleneck in online deception detection studies. In this paper, we apply a data collection method based on social network analysis to quickly identify high-quality deceptive and truthful online reviews from Amazon. The dataset contains more than 10,000 deceptive reviews and is diverse in product domains and reviewers. Using this dataset, we explore effective general features for online deception detection that perform well across domains. We demonstrate that with generalized features - advertising speak and writing complexity scores - deception detection performance can be further improved by adding additional deceptive reviews from assorted domains in training. Finally, reviewer level evaluation gives an interesting insight into different deceptive reviewers' writing styles.