Yu Yan


2021

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FastSeq: Make Sequence Generation Faster
Yu Yan | Fei Hu | Jiusheng Chen | Nikhil Bhendawade | Ting Ye | Yeyun Gong | Nan Duan | Desheng Cui | Bingyu Chi | Ruofei Zhang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Transformer-based models have made tremendous impacts in natural language generation. However the inference speed is a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process. We develop FastSeq framework to accelerate sequence generation without accuracy loss. The proposed optimization techniques include an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O. These optimizations are general enough to be applicable to Transformer-based models (e.g., T5, GPT2, and UniLM). Our benchmark results on a set of widely used and diverse models demonstrate 4-9x inference speed gain. Additionally, FastSeq is easy to use with a simple one-line code change. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/fastseq.

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ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation
Weizhen Qi | Yeyun Gong | Yu Yan | Can Xu | Bolun Yao | Bartuer Zhou | Biao Cheng | Daxin Jiang | Jiusheng Chen | Ruofei Zhang | Houqiang Li | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Now, the pre-training technique is ubiquitous in natural language processing field. ProphetNet is a pre-training based natural language generation method which shows powerful performance on English text summarization and question generation tasks. In this paper, we extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages, and present the ProphetNet family pre-training models, named ProphetNet-X, where X can be English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, and so on. We pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi, a Chinese generation model ProphetNet-Zh, two open-domain dialog generation models ProphetNet-Dialog-En and ProphetNet-Dialog-Zh. And also, we provide a PLG (Programming Language Generation) model ProphetNet-Code to show the generation performance besides NLG (Natural Language Generation) tasks. In our experiments, ProphetNet-X models achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 10 benchmarks. All the models of ProphetNet-X share the same model structure, which allows users to easily switch between different models. We make the code and models publicly available, and we will keep updating more pre-training models and finetuning scripts.

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GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark
Dayiheng Liu | Yu Yan | Yeyun Gong | Weizhen Qi | Hang Zhang | Jian Jiao | Weizhu Chen | Jie Fu | Linjun Shou | Ming Gong | Pengcheng Wang | Jiusheng Chen | Daxin Jiang | Jiancheng Lv | Ruofei Zhang | Winnie Wu | Ming Zhou | Nan Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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RikiNet: Reading Wikipedia Pages for Natural Question Answering
Dayiheng Liu | Yeyun Gong | Jie Fu | Yu Yan | Jiusheng Chen | Daxin Jiang | Jiancheng Lv | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Reading long documents to answer open-domain questions remains challenging in natural language understanding. In this paper, we introduce a new model, called RikiNet, which reads Wikipedia pages for natural question answering. RikiNet contains a dynamic paragraph dual-attention reader and a multi-level cascaded answer predictor. The reader dynamically represents the document and question by utilizing a set of complementary attention mechanisms. The representations are then fed into the predictor to obtain the span of the short answer, the paragraph of the long answer, and the answer type in a cascaded manner. On the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset, a single RikiNet achieves 74.3 F1 and 57.9 F1 on long-answer and short-answer tasks. To our best knowledge, it is the first single model that outperforms the single human performance. Furthermore, an ensemble RikiNet obtains 76.1 F1 and 61.3 F1 on long-answer and short-answer tasks, achieving the best performance on the official NQ leaderboard.

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ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training
Weizhen Qi | Yu Yan | Yeyun Gong | Dayiheng Liu | Nan Duan | Jiusheng Chen | Ruofei Zhang | Ming Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

This paper presents a new sequence-to-sequence pre-training model called ProphetNet, which introduces a novel self-supervised objective named future n-gram prediction and the proposed n-stream self-attention mechanism. Instead of optimizing one-step-ahead prediction in the traditional sequence-to-sequence model, the ProphetNet is optimized by n-step ahead prediction that predicts the next n tokens simultaneously based on previous context tokens at each time step. The future n-gram prediction explicitly encourages the model to plan for the future tokens and prevent overfitting on strong local correlations. We pre-train ProphetNet using a base scale dataset (16GB) and a large-scale dataset (160GB), respectively. Then we conduct experiments on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks for abstractive summarization and question generation tasks. Experimental results show that ProphetNet achieves new state-of-the-art results on all these datasets compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus.

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Tell Me How to Ask Again: Question Data Augmentation with Controllable Rewriting in Continuous Space
Dayiheng Liu | Yeyun Gong | Jie Fu | Yu Yan | Jiusheng Chen | Jiancheng Lv | Nan Duan | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method, referred to as Controllable Rewriting based Question Data Augmentation (CRQDA), for machine reading comprehension (MRC), question generation, and question-answering natural language inference tasks. We treat the question data augmentation task as a constrained question rewriting problem to generate context-relevant, high-quality, and diverse question data samples. CRQDA utilizes a Transformer Autoencoder to map the original discrete question into a continuous embedding space. It then uses a pre-trained MRC model to revise the question representation iteratively with gradient-based optimization. Finally, the revised question representations are mapped back into the discrete space, which serve as additional question data. Comprehensive experiments on SQuAD 2.0, SQuAD 1.1 question generation, and QNLI tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of CRQDA.

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Diverse, Controllable, and Keyphrase-Aware: A Corpus and Method for News Multi-Headline Generation
Dayiheng Liu | Yeyun Gong | Yu Yan | Jie Fu | Bo Shao | Daxin Jiang | Jiancheng Lv | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

News headline generation aims to produce a short sentence to attract readers to read the news. One news article often contains multiple keyphrases that are of interest to different users, which can naturally have multiple reasonable headlines. However, most existing methods focus on the single headline generation. In this paper, we propose generating multiple headlines with keyphrases of user interests, whose main idea is to generate multiple keyphrases of interest to users for the news first, and then generate multiple keyphrase-relevant headlines. We propose a multi-source Transformer decoder, which takes three sources as inputs: (a) keyphrase, (b) keyphrase-filtered article, and (c) original article to generate keyphrase-relevant, high-quality, and diverse headlines. Furthermore, we propose a simple and effective method to mine the keyphrases of interest in the news article and build a first large-scale keyphrase-aware news headline corpus, which contains over 180K aligned triples of <news article, headline, keyphrase>. Extensive experimental comparisons on the real-world dataset show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of quality and diversity.