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Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Singapore Management University

2021

Computational linguistics

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Full-Text Articles in Databases and Information Systems

Cosy: Counterfactual Syntax For Cross-Lingual Understanding, Sicheng Yu, Hao Zhang, Yulei Niu, Qianru Sun, Jing Jiang Aug 2021

Cosy: Counterfactual Syntax For Cross-Lingual Understanding, Sicheng Yu, Hao Zhang, Yulei Niu, Qianru Sun, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained multilingual language models, e.g., multilingual-BERT, are widely used in cross-lingual tasks, yielding the state-of-the-art performance. However, such models suffer from a large performance gap between source and target languages, especially in the zero-shot setting, where the models are fine-tuned only on English but tested on other languages for the same task. We tackle this issue by incorporating language-agnostic information, specifically, universal syntax such as dependency relations and POS tags, into language models, based on the observation that universal syntax is transferable across different languages. Our approach, named COunterfactual SYntax (COSY), includes the design of SYntax-aware networks as well as …


Modeling Transitions Of Focal Entities For Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering, Yunshi Lan, Jing Jiang Aug 2021

Modeling Transitions Of Focal Entities For Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering, Yunshi Lan, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversational KBQA is about answering a sequence of questions related to a KB. Follow-up questions in conversational KBQA often have missing information referring to entities from the conversation history. In this paper, we propose to model these implied entities, which we refer to as the focal entities of the conversation. We propose a novel graph-based model to capture the transitions of focal entities and apply a graph neural network to derive a probability distribution of focal entities for each question, which is then combined with a standard KBQA module to perform answer ranking. Our experiments on two datasets demonstrate the …