Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understanding

In this work, we tackle the scenario of understanding characters in scripts, which aims to learn the characters' personalities and identities from their utterances. We begin by analyzing several challenges in this scenario, and then propose a multi-level contrastive learning framework to capture characters' global information in a fine-grained manner. To validate the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three character understanding sub-tasks by comparing with strong pre-trained language models, including SpanBERT, Longformer, BigBird and ChatGPT-3.5. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the performances by a considerable margin. Through further in-depth analysis, we show the effectiveness of our method in addressing the challenges and provide more hints on the scenario of character understanding. We will open-source our work on github at https://github.com/David-Li0406/Script-based-Character-Understanding.

Bridging the Gap: Deciphering Tabular Data Using Large Language Model

In the realm of natural language processing, the understanding of tabular data has perpetually stood as a focal point of scholarly inquiry. The emergence of expansive language models, exemplified by the likes of ChatGPT, has ushered in a wave of endeavors wherein researchers aim to harness these models for tasks related to table-based question answering. Central to our investigative pursuits is the elucidation of methodologies that amplify the aptitude of such large language models in discerning both the structural intricacies and inherent content of tables, ultimately facilitating their capacity to provide informed responses to pertinent queries. To this end, we have architected a distinctive module dedicated to the serialization of tables for seamless integration with expansive language models. Additionally, we've instituted a corrective mechanism within the model to rectify potential inaccuracies. Experimental results indicate that, although our proposed method trails the SOTA by approximately 11.7% in overall metrics, it surpasses the SOTA by about 1.2% in tests on specific datasets. This research marks the first application of large language models to table-based question answering tasks, enhancing the model's comprehension of both table structures and content.

Assisting Language Learners: Automated Trans-Lingual Definition Generation via Contrastive Prompt Learning

The standard definition generation task requires to automatically produce mono-lingual definitions (e.g., English definitions for English words), but ignores that the generated definitions may also consist of unfamiliar words for language learners. In this work, we propose a novel task of Trans-Lingual Definition Generation (TLDG), which aims to generate definitions in another language, i.e., the native speaker's language. Initially, we explore the unsupervised manner of this task and build up a simple implementation of fine-tuning the multi-lingual machine translation model. Then, we develop two novel methods, Prompt Combination and Contrastive Prompt Learning, for further enhancing the quality of the generation. Our methods are evaluated against the baseline Pipeline method in both rich- and low-resource settings, and we empirically establish its superiority in generating higher-quality trans-lingual definitions.

Robust Human Identity Anonymization using Pose Estimation

Many outdoor autonomous mobile platforms require more human identity anonymized data to power their data-driven algorithms. The human identity anonymization should be robust so that less manual intervention is needed, which remains a challenge for current face detection and anonymization systems. In this paper, we propose to use the skeleton generated from the state-of-the-art human pose estimation model to help localize human heads. We develop criteria to evaluate the performance and compare it with the face detection approach. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reduce missed faces and thus better protect the identity information for the pedestrians. We also develop a confidence-based fusion method to further improve the performance.

Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Definition Generation

Recently, pre-trained transformer-based models have achieved great success in the task of definition generation (DG). However, previous encoder-decoder models lack effective representation learning to contain full semantic components of the given word, which leads to generating under-specific definitions. To address this problem, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, encouraging the model to capture more detailed semantic representations from the definition sequence encoding. According to both automatic and manual evaluation, the experimental results on three mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method could generate more specific and high-quality definitions compared with several state-of-the-art models.

BLCU-ICALL at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Cross-Attention Multitasking Framework for Definition Modeling

This paper describes the BLCU-ICALL system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 1 Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings, the Definition Modeling subtrack, achieving 1st on Italian, 2nd on Spanish and Russian, and 3rd on English and French. We propose a transformer-based multitasking framework to explore the task. The framework integrates multiple embedding architectures through the cross-attention mechanism, and captures the structure of glosses through a masking language model objective. Additionally, we also investigate a simple but effective model ensembling strategy to further improve the robustness. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of our solution. We release our code at: https://github.com/blcuicall/SemEval2022-Task1-DM.

Multitasking Framework for Unsupervised Simple Definition Generation

The definition generation task can help language learners by providing explanations for unfamiliar words. This task has attracted much attention in recent years. We propose a novel task of Simple Definition Generation (SDG) to help language learners and low literacy readers. A significant challenge of this task is the lack of learner's dictionaries in many languages, and therefore the lack of data for supervised training. We explore this task and propose a multitasking framework SimpDefiner that only requires a standard dictionary with complex definitions and a corpus containing arbitrary simple texts. We disentangle the complexity factors from the text by carefully designing a parameter sharing scheme between two decoders. By jointly training these components, the framework can generate both complex and simple definitions simultaneously. We demonstrate that the framework can generate relevant, simple definitions for the target words through automatic and manual evaluations on English and Chinese datasets. Our method outperforms the baseline model by a 1.77 SARI score on the English dataset, and raises the proportion of the low level (HSK level 1-3) words in Chinese definitions by 3.87%.

TridentNet: A Conditional Generative Model for Dynamic Trajectory Generation

In recent years, various state of the art autonomous vehicle systems and architectures have been introduced. These methods include planners that depend on high-definition (HD) maps and models that learn an autonomous agent's controls in an end-to-end fashion. While end-to-end models are geared towards solving the scalability constraints from HD maps, they do not generalize for different vehicles and sensor configurations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce an approach that leverages lightweight map representations, explicitly enforcing geometric constraints, and learns feasible trajectories using a conditional generative model. Additional contributions include a new dataset that is used to verify our proposed models quantitatively. The results indicate low relative errors that can potentially translate to traversable trajectories. The dataset created as part of this work has been made available online.

Probabilistic Semantic Mapping for Urban Autonomous Driving Applications

Recent advancement in statistical learning and computational ability has enabled autonomous vehicle technology to develop at a much faster rate and become widely adopted. While many of the architectures previously introduced are capable of operating under highly dynamic environments, many of these are constrained to smaller-scale deployments and require constant maintenance due to the associated scalability cost with high-definition (HD) maps. HD maps provide critical information for self-driving cars to drive safely. However, traditional approaches for creating HD maps involves tedious manual labeling. As an attempt to tackle this problem, we fuse 2D image semantic segmentation with pre-built point cloud maps collected from a relatively inexpensive 16 channel LiDAR sensor to construct a local probabilistic semantic map in bird's eye view that encodes static landmarks such as roads, sidewalks, crosswalks, and lanes in the driving environment. Experiments from data collected in an urban environment show that this model can be extended for automatically incorporating road features into HD maps with potential future work directions.