Portrait de Bang Liu

Bang Liu

Membre académique associé
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle

Biographie

Bang Liu est professeur adjoint au Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle (DIRO) de l'Université de Montréal. Il est membre du Laboratoire de recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique (RALI) du DIRO, membre associé de Mila – Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle, et titulaire d'une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR.

Il a obtenu un baccalauréat en ingénierie de l'Université des sciences et technologies de Chine (USTC) en 2013, ainsi qu’une maîtrise ès sciences et un doctorat de l'Université de l'Alberta en 2015 et en 2020, respectivement. Ses recherches portent principalement sur le traitement du langage naturel, l'apprentissage multimodal et incarné, la théorie et les techniques de l'intelligence artificielle (par exemple, la compréhension et l'amélioration de grands modèles de langage) et l'intelligence artificielle pour la science (par exemple, la santé, la science des matériaux et la radiologie).

Étudiants actuels

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Stagiaire de recherche - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal

Publications

Semantic and Syntactic Enhanced Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Zhexue Chen
Hong Huang
Xuanhua Feng Shi
Hai-nan Jin
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract triplets from sentences, where each triplet includes an entity, its associated se… (voir plus)ntiment, and the opinion span explaining the reason for the sentiment. Most existing research addresses this problem in a multi-stage pipeline manner, which neglects the mutual information between such three elements and has the problem of error propagation. In this paper, we propose a Semantic and Syntactic Enhanced aspect Sentiment triplet Extraction model (S3E2) to fully exploit the syntactic and semantic relationships between the triplet elements and jointly extract them. Specifically, we design a Graph-Sequence duel representation and modeling paradigm for the task of ASTE: we represent the semantic and syntactic relationships between word pairs in a sentence by graph and encode it by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), as well as modeling the original sentence by LSTM to preserve the sequential information. Under this setting, we further apply a more efficient inference strategy for the extraction of triplets. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets show that S3E2 significantly outperforms existing approaches, which proves our S3E2's superiority and flexibility in an end-to-end fashion.
Encoder-Decoder Neural Architecture Optimization for Keyword Spotting
Tong Mo
Enquire One’s Parent and Child Before Decision: Fully Exploit Hierarchical Structure for Self-Supervised Taxonomy Expansion
Suyuchen Wang
Ruihui Zhao
Xi Chen
Yefeng Zheng
Taxonomy is a hierarchically structured knowledge graph that plays a crucial role in machine intelligence. The taxonomy expansion task aims … (voir plus)to find a position for a new term in an existing taxonomy to capture the emerging knowledge in the world and keep the taxonomy dynamically updated. Previous taxonomy expansion solutions neglect valuable information brought by the hierarchical structure and evaluate the correctness of merely an added edge, which downgrade the problem to node-pair scoring or mini-path classification. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchy Expansion Framework (HEF), which fully exploits the hierarchical structure’s properties to maximize the coherence of expanded taxonomy. HEF makes use of taxonomy’s hierarchical structure in multiple aspects: i) HEF utilizes subtrees containing most relevant nodes as self-supervision data for a complete comparison of parental and sibling relations; ii) HEF adopts a coherence modeling module to evaluate the coherence of a taxonomy’s subtree by integrating hypernymy relation detection and several tree-exclusive features; iii) HEF introduces the Fitting Score for position selection, which explicitly evaluates both path and level selections and takes full advantage of parental relations to interchange information for disambiguation and self-correction. Extensive experiments show that by better exploiting the hierarchical structure and optimizing taxonomy’s coherence, HEF vastly surpasses the prior state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets by an average improvement of 46.7% in accuracy and 32.3% in mean reciprocal rank.
Imperfect also Deserves Reward: Multi-Level and Sequential Reward Modeling for Better Dialog Management
Zhengxu Hou
Ruihui Zhao
Zijing Ou
Yafei Liu
Xi Chen
Yefeng Zheng
For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency a… (voir plus)nd slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL. To solve this problem, many strategies have been proposed to give proper rewards when training RL, but their rewards lack interpretability and cannot accurately estimate the distribution of state-action pairs in real dialogs. In this paper, we propose a multi-level reward modeling approach that factorizes a reward into a three-level hierarchy: domain, act, and slot. Based on inverse adversarial reinforcement learning, our designed reward model can provide more accurate and explainable reward signals for state-action pairs. Extensive evaluations show that our approach can be applied to a wide range of reinforcement learning-based dialog systems and significantly improves both the performance and the speed of convergence.
Noised Consistency Training for Text Summarization
J. Liu
Qianren Mao
Hao Peng
Hongdong Zhu
Jianxin Li
Neural abstractive summarization methods often require large quantities of labeled training data. However, labeling large amounts of summari… (voir plus)zation data is often prohibitive due to time, financial, and expertise constraints, which has limited the usefulness of summarization systems to practical applications. In this paper, we argue that this limitation can be overcome by a semi-supervised approach: consistency training which is to leverage large amounts of unlabeled data to improve the performance of supervised learning over a small corpus. The consistency regularization semi-supervised learning can regularize model predictions to be invariant to small noise applied to input articles. By adding noised unlabeled corpus to help regularize consistency training, this framework obtains comparative performance without using the full dataset. In particular, we have verified that leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data decently improves the performance of supervised learning over an insufficient labeled dataset.
QBSUM: a Large-Scale Query-Based Document Summarization Dataset from Real-world Applications
Mingjun Zhao
Shengli Yan
Xinwang Zhong
Qian Hao
Haolan Chen
Di Niu
Bowei Long
Wei-dong Guo
GIANT: Scalable Creation of a Web-scale Ontology
Weidong Guo
Di Niu
Jinwen Luo
Chaoyue Wang
Zhen Wen
Yu Xu
Story Forest
Fred X. Han
Di Niu
Linglong Kong
Kunfeng Lai
Yu Xu
Extracting events accurately from vast news corpora and organize events logically is critical for news apps and search engines, which aim to… (voir plus) organize news information collected from the Internet and present it to users in the most sensible forms. Intuitively speaking, an event is a group of news documents that report the same news incident possibly in different ways. In this article, we describe our experience of implementing a news content organization system at Tencent to discover events from vast streams of breaking news and to evolve news story structures in an online fashion. Our real-world system faces unique challenges in contrast to previous studies on topic detection and tracking (TDT) and event timeline or graph generation, in that we (1) need to accurately and quickly extract distinguishable events from massive streams of long text documents, and (2) must develop the structures of event stories in an online manner, in order to guarantee a consistent user viewing experience. In solving these challenges, we propose Story Forest, a set of online schemes that automatically clusters streaming documents into events, while connecting related events in growing trees to tell evolving stories. A core novelty of our Story Forest system is EventX, a semi-supervised scheme to extract events from massive Internet news corpora. EventX relies on a two-layered, graph-based clustering procedure to group documents into fine-grained events. We conducted extensive evaluations based on (1) 60 GB of real-world Chinese news data, (2) a large Chinese Internet news dataset that contains 11,748 news articles with truth event labels, and (3) the 20 News Groups English dataset, through detailed pilot user experience studies. The results demonstrate the superior capabilities of Story Forest to accurately identify events and organize news text into a logical structure that is appealing to human readers.
Asking Questions the Human Way: Scalable Question-Answer Generation from Text Corpus
Haojie Wei
Di Niu
Haolan Chen
Yancheng He
The ability to ask questions is important in both human and machine intelligence. Learning to ask questions helps knowledge acquisition, imp… (voir plus)roves question-answering and machine reading comprehension tasks, and helps a chatbot to keep the conversation flowing with a human. Existing question generation models are ineffective at generating a large amount of high-quality question-answer pairs from unstructured text, since given an answer and an input passage, question generation is inherently a one-to-many mapping. In this paper, we propose Answer-Clue-Style-aware Question Generation (ACS-QG), which aims at automatically generating high-quality and diverse question-answer pairs from unlabeled text corpus at scale by imitating the way a human asks questions. Our system consists of: i) an information extractor, which samples from the text multiple types of assistive information to guide question generation; ii) neural question generators, which generate diverse and controllable questions, leveraging the extracted assistive information; and iii) a neural quality controller, which removes low-quality generated data based on text entailment. We compare our question generation models with existing approaches and resort to voluntary human evaluation to assess the quality of the generated question-answer pairs. The evaluation results suggest that our system dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art neural question generation models in terms of the generation quality, while being scalable in the meantime. With models trained on a relatively smaller amount of data, we can generate 2.8 million quality-assured question-answer pairs from a million sentences found in Wikipedia.
Natural Language Processing and Text Mining with Graph-Structured Representations