Towards Visual-Prompt Temporal Answering Grounding in Medical Instructional Video

The temporal answering grounding in the video (TAGV) is a new task naturally derived from temporal sentence grounding in the video (TSGV). Given an untrimmed video and a text question, this task aims at locating the matching span from the video that can semantically answer the question. Existing methods tend to formulate the TAGV task with a visual span-based question answering (QA) approach by matching the visual frame span queried by the text question. However, due to the weak correlations and huge gaps of the semantic features between the textual question and visual answer, existing methods adopting visual span predictor perform poorly in the TAGV task. To bridge these gaps, we propose a visual-prompt text span localizing (VPTSL) method, which introduces the timestamped subtitles as a passage to perform the text span localization for the input text question, and prompts the visual highlight features into the pre-trained language model (PLM) for enhancing the joint semantic representations. Specifically, the context query attention is utilized to perform cross-modal interaction between the extracted textual and visual features. Then, the highlight features are obtained through the video-text highlighting for the visual prompt. To alleviate semantic differences between textual and visual features, we design the text span predictor by encoding the question, the subtitles, and the prompted visual highlight features with the PLM. As a result, the TAGV task is formulated to predict the span of subtitles matching the visual answer. Extensive experiments on the medical instructional dataset, namely MedVidQA, show that the proposed VPTSL outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method by 28.36% in terms of mIOU with a large margin, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed visual prompt and the text span predictor.

Prompt-based Pre-trained Model for Personality and Interpersonal Reactivity Prediction

This paper describes the LingJing team's method to the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA) 2022 shared task on Personality Prediction (PER) and Reactivity Index Prediction (IRI). In this paper, we adopt the prompt-based method with the pre-trained language model to accomplish these tasks. Specifically, the prompt is designed to provide the extra knowledge for enhancing the pre-trained model. Data augmentation and model ensemble are adopted for obtaining better results. Extensive experiments are performed, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method. On the final submission, our system achieves a Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.2301 and 0.2546 on Track 3 and Track 4 respectively. We ranked Top-1 on both sub-tasks.

PSG: Prompt-based Sequence Generation for Acronym Extraction

Acronym extraction aims to find acronyms (i.e., short-forms) and their meanings (i.e., long-forms) from the documents, which is important for scientific document understanding (SDU@AAAI-22) tasks. Previous works are devoted to modeling this task as a paragraph-level sequence labeling problem. However, it lacks the effective use of the external knowledge, especially when the datasets are in a low-resource setting. Recently, the prompt-based method with the vast pre-trained language model can significantly enhance the performance of the low-resourced downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a Prompt-based Sequence Generation (PSG) method for the acronym extraction task. Specifically, we design a template for prompting the extracted acronym texts with auto-regression. A position extraction algorithm is designed for extracting the position of the generated answers. The results on the acronym extraction of Vietnamese and Persian in a low-resource setting show that the proposed method outperforms all other competitive state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

SimCLAD: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Acronym Disambiguation

Acronym disambiguation means finding the correct meaning of an ambiguous acronym in a given sentence from the dictionary, which is one of the key points for scientific document understanding (SDU@AAAI-22). Recently, many attempts have tried to solve this problem via fine-tuning the pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) in order to obtain a better acronym representation. However, the acronym meaning is varied under different contexts, whose corresponded sentence representation is the anisotropic distribution occupied with a narrow subset of the entire representation space. Such representations from pre-trained MLMs are not ideal for the acronym disambiguation from the given dictionary. In this paper, we propose a Simple framework for Contrastive Learning of Acronym Disambiguation (SimCLAD) method to better understand the acronym meanings. Specifically, we design a novel continual contrastive pre-training method that enhances the pre-trained model's generalization ability by learning the isotropic and discriminative distribution of the acronym sentence representations. The results on the acronym disambiguation of the scientific domain in English show that the proposed method outperforms all other competitive state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Hybrid Mutimodal Fusion for Dimensional Emotion Recognition

In this paper, we extensively present our solutions for the MuSe-Stress sub-challenge and the MuSe-Physio sub-challenge of Multimodal Sentiment Challenge (MuSe) 2021. The goal of MuSe-Stress sub-challenge is to predict the level of emotional arousal and valence in a time-continuous manner from audio-visual recordings and the goal of MuSe-Physio sub-challenge is to predict the level of psycho-physiological arousal from a) human annotations fused with b) galvanic skin response (also known as Electrodermal Activity (EDA)) signals from the stressed people. The Ulm-TSST dataset which is a novel subset of the audio-visual textual Ulm-Trier Social Stress dataset that features German speakers in a Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) induced stress situation is used in both sub-challenges. For the MuSe-Stress sub-challenge, we highlight our solutions in three aspects: 1) the audio-visual features and the bio-signal features are used for emotional state recognition. 2) the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with the self-attention mechanism is utilized to capture complex temporal dependencies within the feature sequences. 3) the late fusion strategy is adopted to further boost the model's recognition performance by exploiting complementary information scattered across multimodal sequences. Our proposed model achieves CCC of 0.6159 and 0.4609 for valence and arousal respectively on the test set, which both rank in the top 3. For the MuSe-Physio sub-challenge, we first extract the audio-visual features and the bio-signal features from multiple modalities. Then, the LSTM module with the self-attention mechanism, and the Gated Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNN) as well as the LSTM network are utilized for modeling the complex temporal dependencies in the sequence. Finally, the late fusion strategy is used. Our proposed method also achieves CCC of 0.5412 on the test set, which ranks in the top 3.

More but Correct: Generating Diversified and Entity-revised Medical Response

Medical Dialogue Generation (MDG) is intended to build a medical dialogue system for intelligent consultation, which can communicate with patients in real-time, thereby improving the efficiency of clinical diagnosis with broad application prospects. This paper presents our proposed framework for the Chinese MDG organized by the 2021 China conference on knowledge graph and semantic computing (CCKS) competition, which requires generating context-consistent and medically meaningful responses conditioned on the dialogue history. In our framework, we propose a pipeline system composed of entity prediction and entity-aware dialogue generation, by adding predicted entities to the dialogue model with a fusion mechanism, thereby utilizing information from different sources. At the decoding stage, we propose a new decoding mechanism named Entity-revised Diverse Beam Search (EDBS) to improve entity correctness and promote the length and quality of the final response. The proposed method wins both the CCKS and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021 Workshop Machine Learning for Preventing and Combating Pandemics (MLPCP) Track 1 Entity-aware MED competitions, which demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of our method.

Bilateral Personalized Dialogue Generation with Dynamic Persona-Aware Fusion

Generating personalized responses is one of the major challenges in natural human-robot interaction. Current researches in this field mainly focus on generating responses consistent with the robot's pre-assigned persona, while ignoring the user's persona. Such responses may be inappropriate or even offensive, which may lead to the bad user experience. Therefore, we propose a bilateral personalized dialogue generation (BPDG) method with dynamic persona-aware fusion via multi-task transfer learning to generate responses consistent with both personas. The proposed method aims to accomplish three learning tasks: 1) an encoder is trained with dialogue utterances added with corresponded personalized attributes and relative position (language model task), 2) a dynamic persona-aware fusion module predicts the persona presence to adaptively fuse the contextual and bilateral personas encodings (persona prediction task) and 3) a decoder generates natural, fluent and personalized responses (dialogue generation task). To make the generated responses more personalized and bilateral persona-consistent, the Conditional Mutual Information Maximum (CMIM) criterion is adopted to select the final response from the generated candidates. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both automatic and manual evaluations.