Author name cluster

Yafang Wang

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5 papers

2 author rows

ECAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

DAN: Dual-View Representation Learning for Adapting Stance Classifiers to New Domains

Chang Xu 0002
Cécile Paris
Surya Nepal
Ross Sparks
Chong Long
Yafang Wang

We address the issue of having a limited number of annotations for stance classification in a new domain, by adapting out-of-domain classifiers with domain adaptation. Existing approaches often align different domains in a single, global feature space (or view), which may fail to fully capture the richness of the languages used for expressing stances, leading to reduced adaptability on stance data. In this paper, we identify two major types of stance expressions that are linguistically distinct, and we propose a tailored dual-view adaptation network (DAN) to adapt these expressions across domains. The proposed model first learns a separate view for domain transfer in each expression channel and then selects the best adapted parts of both views for optimal transfer. We find that the learned view features can be more easily aligned and more stance-discriminative in either or both views, leading to more transferable overall features after combining the views. Results from extensive experiments show that our method can enhance the state-of-the-art single-view methods in matching stance data across different domains, and that it consistently improves those methods on various adaptation tasks.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Long Short-Term Sample Distillation

Liang Jiang
Zujie Wen
Zhongping Liang
Yafang Wang
Gerard de Melo
Zhe Li
Liangzhuang Ma
Jiaxing Zhang

In the past decade, there has been substantial progress at training increasingly deep neural networks. Recent advances within the teacher–student training paradigm have established that information about past training updates show promise as a source of guidance during subsequent training steps. Based on this notion, in this paper, we propose Long Short- Term Sample Distillation, a novel training policy that simultaneously leverages multiple phases of the previous training process to guide the later training updates to a neural network, while efﬁciently proceeding in just one single generation pass. With Long Short-Term Sample Distillation, the supervision signal for each sample is decomposed into two parts: a long-term signal and a short-term one. The long-term teacher draws on snapshots from several epochs ago in order to provide steadfast guidance and to guarantee teacher– student differences, while the short-term one yields more upto-date cues with the goal of enabling higher-quality updates. Moreover, the teachers for each sample are unique, such that, overall, the model learns from a very diverse set of teachers. Comprehensive experimental results across a range of vision and NLP tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of this new training method.

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IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Two-stage Behavior Cloning for Spoken Dialogue System in Debt Collection

Zihao Wang
Jia Liu
Hengbin Cui
Chunxiang Jin
Minghui Yang
Yafang Wang
Xiaolong Li
Renxin Mao

With the rapid growth of internet finance and the booming of financial lending, the intelligent calling for debt collection in FinTech companies has driven increasing attention. Nowadays, the widely used intelligent calling system is based on dialogue flow, namely configuring the interaction flow with the finite-state machine. In our scenario of debt collection, the completed dialogue flow contains more than one thousand interactive paths. All the dialogue procedures are artificially specified, with extremely high maintenance costs and error-prone. To solve this problem, we propose the behavior-cloning-based collection robot framework without any dialogue flow configuration, called two-stage behavior cloning (TSBC). In the first stage, we use multi-label classification model to obtain policies that may be able to cope with the current situation according to the dialogue state; in the second stage, we score several scripts under each obtained policy to select the script with the highest score as the reply for the current state. This framework makes full use of the massive manual collection records without labeling and fully absorbs artificial wisdom and experience. We have conducted extensive experiments in both single-round and multi-round scenarios and showed the effectiveness of the proposed system. The accuracy of a single round of dialogue can be improved by 5%, and the accuracy of multiple rounds of dialogue can be increased by 3. 1%.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

CRSRL: Customer Routing System Using Reinforcement Learning

Chong Long
Zining Liu
Xiaolu Lu
Zehong Hu
Yafang Wang

Allocating resources to customers in the customer service is a difficult problem, because designing an optimal strategy to achieve an optimal trade-off between available resources and customers' satisfaction is non-trivial. In this paper, we formalize the customer routing problem, and propose a novel framework based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) to address this problem. To make it more practical, a demo is provided to show and compare different models, which visualizes all decision process, and in particular, the system shows how the optimal strategy is reached. Besides, our demo system also ships with a variety of models that users can choose based on their needs.

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ECAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

ShapeLearner: Towards Shape-Based Visual Knowledge Harvesting

Huayong Xu
Yafang Wang
Kang Feng
Gerard de Melo
Wei Wu
Andrei Sharf
Baoquan Chen

The deluge of images on the Web has led to a number of efforts to organize images semantically and mine visual knowledge. Despite enormous progress on categorizing entire images or bounding boxes, only few studies have targeted fine-grained image understanding at the level of specific shape contours. For instance, beyond recognizing that an image portrays a cat, we may wish to distinguish its legs, head, tail, and so on. To this end, we present ShapeLearner, a system that acquires such visual knowledge about object shapes and their parts in a semantic taxonomy, and then is able to exploit this hierarchy in order to analyze new kinds of objects that it has not observed before. ShapeLearner jointly learns this knowledge from sets of segmented images. The space of label and segmentation hypotheses is pruned and then evaluated using Integer Linear Programming. Experiments on a variety of shape classes show the accuracy and effectiveness of our method.

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