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Many fake news detection studies have achieved promising performance by extracting effective semantic and structure features from both content and propagation trees. However, it is challenging to apply them to practical situations, especially when using the trained propagation-based models to detect news with no propagation data. Towards this scenario, we study a new task named cold-start fake news detection, which aims to detect content-only samples with missing propagation. To achieve the task, we design a simple but effective Structure Adversarial Net (SAN) framework to learn transferable features from available propagation to boost the detection of content-only samples. SAN introduces a structure discriminator to estimate dissimilarities among learned features with and without propagation, and further learns structure-invariant features to enhance the generalization of existing propagation-based methods for content-only samples. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on three datasets. Results show the challenge of the new task and the effectiveness of our SAN framework., Comment: ICASSP 2024

This paper proposes an information-theoretic representation learning framework, named conditional information flow maximization, to extract noise-invariant sufficient representations for the input data and target task. It promotes the learned representations have good feature uniformity and sufficient predictive ability, which can enhance the generalization of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the target task. Firstly, an information flow maximization principle is proposed to learn more sufficient representations for the input and target by simultaneously maximizing both input-representation and representation-label mutual information. Unlike the information bottleneck, we handle the input-representation information in an opposite way to avoid the over-compression issue of latent representations. Besides, to mitigate the negative effect of potential redundant features from the input, we design a conditional information minimization principle to eliminate negative redundant features while preserve noise-invariant features. Experiments on 13 language understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our method effectively improves the performance of PLMs for classification and regression. Extensive experiments show that the learned representations are more sufficient, robust and transferable., Comment: 16 pages, accepted to ACL 2024 (main conference), the code is available at https://github.com/zerohd4869/CIFM

This paper presents a new supervised representation learning framework, namely structured probabilistic coding (SPC), to learn compact and informative representations from input related to the target task. SPC is an encoder-only probabilistic coding technology with a structured regularization from the target space. It can enhance the generalization ability of pre-trained language models for better language understanding. Specifically, our probabilistic coding simultaneously performs information encoding and task prediction in one module to more fully utilize the effective information from input data. It uses variational inference in the output space to reduce randomness and uncertainty. Besides, to better control the learning process of probabilistic representations, a structured regularization is proposed to promote uniformity across classes in the latent space. With the regularization term, SPC can preserve the Gaussian structure of the latent code and achieve better coverage of the hidden space with class uniformly. Experimental results on 12 natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that our SPC effectively improves the performance of pre-trained language models for classification and regression. Extensive experiments show that SPC can enhance the generalization capability, robustness to label noise, and clustering quality of output representations., Comment: 11 pages, accepted by AAAI 2024 (Oral)

Extracting generalized and robust representations is a major challenge in emotion recognition in conversations (ERC). To address this, we propose a supervised adversarial contrastive learning (SACL) framework for learning class-spread structured representations in a supervised manner. SACL applies contrast-aware adversarial training to generate worst-case samples and uses joint class-spread contrastive learning to extract structured representations. It can effectively utilize label-level feature consistency and retain fine-grained intra-class features. To avoid the negative impact of adversarial perturbations on context-dependent data, we design a contextual adversarial training (CAT) strategy to learn more diverse features from context and enhance the model's context robustness. Under the framework with CAT, we develop a sequence-based SACL-LSTM to learn label-consistent and context-robust features for ERC. Experiments on three datasets show that SACL-LSTM achieves state-of-the-art performance on ERC. Extended experiments prove the effectiveness of SACL and CAT., Comment: 16 pages, accepted by ACL 2023

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment analysis for African languages. The challenge faced by this task is the scarcity of labeled data and linguistic resources in low-resource settings. To alleviate these, we propose a generalized multilingual system SACL-XLMR for sentiment analysis on low-resource languages. Specifically, we design a lexicon-based multilingual BERT to facilitate language adaptation and sentiment-aware representation learning. Besides, we apply a supervised adversarial contrastive learning technique to learn sentiment-spread structured representations and enhance model generalization. Our system achieved competitive results, largely outperforming baselines on both multilingual and zero-shot sentiment classification subtasks. Notably, the system obtained the 1st rank on the zero-shot classification subtask in the official ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system., Comment: 9 pages, accepted by SemEval@ACL 2023

Pre-trained language models have achieved promising performance on general benchmarks, but underperform when migrated to a specific domain. Recent works perform pre-training from scratch or continual pre-training on domain corpora. However, in many specific domains, the limited corpus can hardly support obtaining precise representations. To address this issue, we propose a novel Transformer-based language model named VarMAE for domain-adaptive language understanding. Under the masked autoencoding objective, we design a context uncertainty learning module to encode the token's context into a smooth latent distribution. The module can produce diverse and well-formed contextual representations. Experiments on science- and finance-domain NLU tasks demonstrate that VarMAE can be efficiently adapted to new domains with limited resources., Comment: 11 pages, accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2022

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) has a large harmful impact and is difficult to detect, both for human judges and existing NLP systems. At SemEval-2022 Task 4, we propose a novel Transformer-based model and its ensembles to accurately understand such language context for PCL detection. To facilitate comprehension of the subtle and subjective nature of PCL, two fine-tuning strategies are applied to capture discriminative features from diverse linguistic behaviour and categorical distribution. The system achieves remarkable results on the official ranking, including 1st in Subtask 1 and 5th in Subtask 2. Extensive experiments on the task demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and its strategies., Comment: 8 pages, submitted in SemEval-2022 Workshop (co-located with NAACL)

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has considerable prospects for developing empathetic machines. For multimodal ERC, it is vital to understand context and fuse modality information in conversations. Recent graph-based fusion methods generally aggregate multimodal information by exploring unimodal and cross-modal interactions in a graph. However, they accumulate redundant information at each layer, limiting the context understanding between modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel Multimodal Dynamic Fusion Network (MM-DFN) to recognize emotions by fully understanding multimodal conversational context. Specifically, we design a new graph-based dynamic fusion module to fuse multimodal contextual features in a conversation. The module reduces redundancy and enhances complementarity between modalities by capturing the dynamics of contextual information in different semantic spaces. Extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MM-DFN., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2022

Detecting rumors on social media is a very critical task with significant implications to the economy, public health, etc. Previous works generally capture effective features from texts and the propagation structure. However, the uncertainty caused by unreliable relations in the propagation structure is common and inevitable due to wily rumor producers and the limited collection of spread data. Most approaches neglect it and may seriously limit the learning of features. Towards this issue, this paper makes the first attempt to explore propagation uncertainty for rumor detection. Specifically, we propose a novel Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Network (EBGCN) to capture robust structural features. The model adaptively rethinks the reliability of latent relations by adopting a Bayesian approach. Besides, we design a new edge-wise consistency training framework to optimize the model by enforcing consistency on relations. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than baseline methods on both rumor detection and early rumor detection tasks., Comment: Accepted by ACL 2021 main conference

Session-based recommendation aims to predict user the next action based on historical behaviors in an anonymous session. For better recommendations, it is vital to capture user preferences as well as their dynamics. Besides, user preferences evolve over time dynamically and each preference has its own evolving track. However, most previous works neglect the evolving trend of preferences and can be easily disturbed by the effect of preference drifting. In this paper, we propose a novel Preference Evolution Networks for session-based Recommendation (PEN4Rec) to model preference evolving process by a two-stage retrieval from historical contexts. Specifically, the first-stage process integrates relevant behaviors according to recent items. Then, the second-stage process models the preference evolving trajectory over time dynamically and infer rich preferences. The process can strengthen the effect of relevant sequential behaviors during the preference evolution and weaken the disturbance from preference drifting. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model., Comment: 12 pages, accepted by KSEM 2021

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has gained increasing attention for developing empathetic machines. Recently, many approaches have been devoted to perceiving conversational context by deep learning models. However, these approaches are insufficient in understanding the context due to lacking the ability to extract and integrate emotional clues. In this work, we propose novel Contextual Reasoning Networks (DialogueCRN) to fully understand the conversational context from a cognitive perspective. Inspired by the Cognitive Theory of Emotion, we design multi-turn reasoning modules to extract and integrate emotional clues. The reasoning module iteratively performs an intuitive retrieving process and a conscious reasoning process, which imitates human unique cognitive thinking. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model., Comment: 11 pages, accepted by ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Although character-based models using lexicon have achieved promising results for Chinese named entity recognition (NER) task, some lexical words would introduce erroneous information due to wrongly matched words. Existing researches proposed many strategies to integrate lexicon knowledge. However, they performed with simple first-order lexicon knowledge, which provided insufficient word information and still faced the challenge of matched word boundary conflicts; or explored the lexicon knowledge with graph where higher-order information introducing negative words may disturb the identification. To alleviate the above limitations, we present new insight into second-order lexicon knowledge (SLK) of each character in the sentence to provide more lexical word information including semantic and word boundary features. Based on these, we propose a SLK-based model with a novel strategy to integrate the above lexicon knowledge. The proposed model can exploit more discernible lexical words information with the help of global context. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the validity of SLK. The proposed model achieves more excellent performance than the state-of-the-art comparison methods., Comment: 5 pages, The work is accepted by SEKE2020

Document-level Sentiment Analysis (DSA) is more challenging due to vague semantic links and complicate sentiment information. Recent works have been devoted to leveraging text summarization and have achieved promising results. However, these summarization-based methods did not take full advantage of the summary including ignoring the inherent interactions between the summary and document. As a result, they limited the representation to express major points in the document, which is highly indicative of the key sentiment. In this paper, we study how to effectively generate a discriminative representation with explicit subject patterns and sentiment contexts for DSA. A Hierarchical Interaction Networks (HIN) is proposed to explore bidirectional interactions between the summary and document at multiple granularities and learn subject-oriented document representations for sentiment classification. Furthermore, we design a Sentiment-based Rethinking mechanism (SR) by refining the HIN with sentiment label information to learn a more sentiment-aware document representation. We extensively evaluate our proposed models on three public datasets. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models and show that HIN-SR outperforms various state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 17 pages, accepted by ECML-PKDD 2020