Publications | 王卓尔 Zhuoer Wang

2023

EMNLP
Findings
Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model

Zhuoer Wang, Yicheng Wang, Ziwei Zhu, and James Caverlee

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Dec 2023

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Question generation is a widely used data augmentation approach with extensive applications, and extracting qualified candidate answers from context passages is a critical step for most question generation systems. However, existing methods for candidate answer extraction are reliant on linguistic rules or annotated data that face the partial annotation issue and challenges in generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised candidate answer extraction approach that leverages the inherent structure of context passages through a Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor (DMR) Model with the enforcement of self-consistency for picking up salient information tokens. We curated two datasets with exhaustively-annotated answers and benchmark a comprehensive set of supervised and unsupervised candidate answer extraction methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the DMR model by showing its performance is superior among unsupervised methods and comparable to supervised methods.
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2023-dmr, title = {Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model}, author = {Wang, Zhuoer and Wang, Yicheng and Zhu, Ziwei and Caverlee, James}, booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023}, month = dec, year = {2023}, address = {Singapore}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.379/}, }
EMNLP
Findings
Co^2PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning

Xiangjue Dong, Ziwei Zhu, Zhuoer Wang, Maria Teleki, and James Caverlee

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Dec 2023

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Pre-trained Language Models are widely used in many important real-world applications. However, recent studies show that these models can encode social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biases in downstream applications. To address this challenge, we propose Co2PT, an efficient and effective debias-while-prompt tuning method for mitigating biases via counterfactual contrastive prompt tuning on downstream tasks. Our experiments conducted on three extrinsic bias benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Co2PT on bias mitigation during the prompt tuning process and its adaptability to existing upstream debiased language models. These findings indicate the strength of Co2PT and provide promising avenues for further enhancement in bias mitigation on downstream tasks.
@inproceedings{dong-etal-2023-co2pt, title = {Co^2PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning}, author = {Dong, Xiangjue and Zhu, Ziwei and Wang, Zhuoer and Teleki, Maria and Caverlee, James}, booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023}, month = dec, year = {2023}, address = {Singapore}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.390/}, }
ACL
Outstanding Paper Award
Faithful Low-Resource Data-to-Text Generation through Cycle Training

Zhuoer Wang, Marcus Collins, Nikhita Vedula, Simone Filice, Shervin Malmasi, and Oleg Rokhlenko

In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2023

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Methods to generate text from structured data have advanced significantly in recent years, primarily due to fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on large datasets. However, such models can fail to produce output faithful to the input data, particularly on out-of-domain data. Sufficient annotated data is often not available for specific domains, leading us to seek an unsupervised approach to improve the faithfulness of output text. Since the problem is fundamentally one of consistency between the representations of the structured data and text, we evaluate the effectiveness of cycle training in this work. Cycle training uses two models which are inverses of each other: one that generates text from structured data, and one which generates the structured data from natural language text. We show that cycle training, when initialized with a small amount of supervised data (100 samples in our case), achieves nearly the same performance as fully supervised approaches for the data-to-text generation task on the WebNLG, E2E, WTQ, and WSQL datasets. We perform extensive empirical analysis with automated evaluation metrics and a newly designed human evaluation schema to reveal different cycle training strategies’ effectiveness of reducing various types of generation errors.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Edillower/CycleNLG.
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2023-faithful, title = {Faithful Low-Resource Data-to-Text Generation through Cycle Training}, author = {Wang, Zhuoer and Collins, Marcus and Vedula, Nikhita and Filice, Simone and Malmasi, Shervin and Rokhlenko, Oleg}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)}, month = jul, year = {2023}, address = {Toronto, Canada}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.160}, pages = {2847--2867}, }

2022

ALEXA PRIZE
Howdy Y’all: An Alexa TaskBot

Texas A&M University

In Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Proceedings, Jul 2022

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In this paper, we present Howdy Y’all, a multi-modal task-oriented dialogue agent developed for the 2021-2022 Alexa Prize TaskBot competition. Our design principles guiding Howdy Y’all aim for high user satisfaction through friendly and trustworthy encounters, minimization of negative conversation edge cases, and wide coverage over many tasks. Hence, Howdy Y’all is built upon a rapid prototyping platform to enable fast experimentation and powered by four key innovations to enable this vision: (i) First, it combines a rules, phonetic matching, and a transformer-based approach for robust intent understanding. (ii) Second, to accurately elicit user preferences and guide users to the right task, Howdy Y’all is powered by a contrastive learning search framework over sentence embeddings and a conversational recommender for eliciting preferences. (iii) Third, to support a variety of user question types, it introduces a new data augmentation method for question generation and a self-supervised answer selection approach for improving question answering. (iv) Finally, to help motivate our users and keep them engaged, we design an emotional conversation tracker that provides empathetic responses to keep users engaged and a monitor of conversation quality.
@inproceedings{howdyyall-2022, author = {University, Texas A&M}, title = {Howdy Y’all: An Alexa TaskBot}, year = {2022}, booktitle = {Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Proceedings}, }
AAAI
Demo
RES: An Interpretable Replicability Estimation System for Research Publications

Zhuoer Wang, Qizhang Feng, Mohinish Chatterjee, Xing Zhao, Yezi Liu, Yuening Li, Abhay Kumar Singh, Frank M. Shipman, Xia Hu, and James Caverlee

In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jun 2022

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Reliable and faithful research is the cornerstone of breakthrough advancements and disruptive innovations. Assessing the credibility of scientific findings and claims in research publications has long been a time-consuming and challenging task for researchers and decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce RES - an intelligent system that assists humans in analyzing the credibility of scientific findings and claims in research publications in the field of social and behavioral sciences by estimating their replicability. The pipeline of RES consists of four major modules that perform feature extraction, replicability estimation, result explanation, and sentiment analysis respectively. Our evaluation based on human experts’ assessments suggests that the RES has achieved adequate performance. The RES is also built with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that is publicly accessible at https://tamu-infolab.github.io/RES
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2022-res, title = {RES: An Interpretable Replicability Estimation System for Research Publications}, author = {Wang, Zhuoer and Feng, Qizhang and Chatterjee, Mohinish and Zhao, Xing and Liu, Yezi and Li, Yuening and Singh, Abhay Kumar and Shipman, Frank M. and Hu, Xia and Caverlee, James}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, year = {2022}, month = jun, volume = {36}, number = {11}, pages = {13230-13232}, }

2021

arXiv
Predicting the Reproducibility of Social and Behavioral Science Papers Using Supervised Learning Models

Jian Wu, Rajal Nivargi, Sree Sai Teja Lanka, Arjun Manoj Menon, Sai Ajay Modukuri, Nishanth Nakshatri, Xin Wei, Zhuoer Wang, James Caverlee, Sarah M Rajtmajer, and C. Lee Giles

arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.04580, Jun 2021

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In recent years, significant effort has been invested verifying the reproducibility and robustness of research claims in social and behavioral sciences (SBS), much of which has involved resource-intensive replication projects. In this paper, we investigate prediction of the reproducibility of SBS papers using machine learning methods based on a set of features. We propose a framework that extracts five types of features from scholarly work that can be used to support assessments of reproducibility of published research claims. Bibliometric features, venue features, and author features are collected from public APIs or extracted using open source machine learning libraries with customized parsers. Statistical features, such as p-values, are extracted by recognizing patterns in the body text. Semantic features, such as funding information, are obtained from public APIs or are extracted using natural language processing models. We analyze pairwise correlations between individual features and their importance for predicting a set of human-assessed ground truth labels. In doing so, we identify a subset of 9 top features that play relatively more important roles in predicting the reproducibility of SBS papers in our corpus. Results are verified by comparing performances of 10 supervised predictive classifiers trained on different sets of features.
@article{wu2021predicting, title = {Predicting the Reproducibility of Social and Behavioral Science Papers Using Supervised Learning Models}, author = {Wu, Jian and Nivargi, Rajal and Lanka, Sree Sai Teja and Menon, Arjun Manoj and Modukuri, Sai Ajay and Nakshatri, Nishanth and Wei, Xin and Wang, Zhuoer and Caverlee, James and Rajtmajer, Sarah M and Giles, C. Lee}, journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.04580}, year = {2021}, }

2020

EMNLP
PARADE: A New Dataset for Paraphrase Identification Requiring Computer Science Domain Knowledge

Yun He, Zhuoer Wang, Yin Zhang, Ruihong Huang, and James Caverlee

In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Nov 2020

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We present a new benchmark dataset called PARADE for paraphrase identification that requires specialized domain knowledge. PARADE contains paraphrases that overlap very little at the lexical and syntactic level but are semantically equivalent based on computer science domain knowledge, as well as non-paraphrases that overlap greatly at the lexical and syntactic level but are not semantically equivalent based on this domain knowledge. Experiments show that both state-of-the-art neural models and non-expert human annotators have poor performance on PARADE. For example, BERT after fine-tuning achieves an F1 score of 0.709, which is much lower than its performance on other paraphrase identification datasets. PARADE can serve as a resource for researchers interested in testing models that incorporate domain knowledge. We make our data and code freely available.
@inproceedings{he-etal-2020-parade, title = {{PARADE}: {A} {N}ew {D}ataset for {P}araphrase {I}dentification {R}equiring {C}omputer {S}cience {D}omain {K}nowledge}, author = {He, Yun and Wang, Zhuoer and Zhang, Yin and Huang, Ruihong and Caverlee, James}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)}, month = nov, year = {2020}, address = {Online}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.611}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.611}, pages = {7572--7582}, }

2018

NT
Fault propagation and effects analysis for designing an online monitoring system for the secondary loop of the nuclear power plant portion of a hybrid energy system

Xiaoxu Diao, Yunfei Zhao, Mike Pietrykowski, Zhuoer Wang, Shannon Bragg-Sitton, and Carol Smidts

Nuclear Technology, Nov 2018

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This paper studies the propagation and effects of faults in critical components that pertain to the secondary loop of a nuclear power plant found in nuclear hybrid energy systems (NHESs). This information is used to design an online monitoring (OLM) system that is capable of detecting and analyzing faults that are likely to occur during NHES operation. In this research, the causes, features, and effects of possible faults are investigated by simulating the propagation of faults in the secondary loop of a nuclear power plant. The simulation is conducted using Integrated System Failure Analysis (ISFA), a promising method analyzing hardware and software faults during the conceptual design phase. First, the models of system components required by ISFA are constructed. Then, fault propagation analysis is implemented, which is conducted under the bounds set by acceptance criteria derived for the design of an OLM system. The result of the fault simulation is utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of signals for fault detection and diagnosis and to propose an optimization plan for the OLM system. Finally, several experiments are designed and conducted using a hardware-in-the-loop system to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.
@article{diao2018fault, title = {Fault propagation and effects analysis for designing an online monitoring system for the secondary loop of the nuclear power plant portion of a hybrid energy system}, author = {Diao, Xiaoxu and Zhao, Yunfei and Pietrykowski, Mike and Wang, Zhuoer and Bragg-Sitton, Shannon and Smidts, Carol}, journal = {Nuclear Technology}, volume = {202}, number = {2-3}, pages = {106--123}, year = {2018}, publisher = {Taylor \& Francis}, }