Lexicon information and pre-trained models, such as BERT, have been combined to explore Chinese sequence labeling tasks due to their respective strengths. However, existing methods solely fuse lexicon features via a shallow and random initialized sequence layer and do not integrate them into the bottom layers of BERT. In this paper, we propose Lexicon Enhanced BERT (LEBERT) for Chinese sequence labeling, which integrates external lexicon knowledge into BERT layers directly by a Lexicon Adapter layer. Compared with existing methods, our model facilitates deep lexicon knowledge fusion at the lower layers of BERT. Experiments on ten Chinese datasets of three tasks including Named Entity Recognition, Word Segmentation, and Part-of-Speech Tagging, show that LEBERT achieves state-ofthe-art results.

Lexicon information and pre-trained models, such as BERT, have been combined to explore Chinese sequence labeling tasks due to their respective strengths. However, existing methods solely fuse lexicon features via a shallow and random initialized sequence layer and do not integrate them into the bottom layers of BERT. In this paper, we propose Lexicon Enhanced BERT (LEBERT) for Chinese sequence labeling, which integrates external lexicon knowledge into BERT layers directly by a Lexicon Adapter layer. Compared with existing methods, our model facilitates deep lexicon knowledge fusion at the lower layers of BERT. Experiments on ten Chinese datasets of three tasks including Named Entity Recognition, Word Segmentation, and Part-of-Speech Tagging, show that LEBERT achieves state-ofthe-art results.

Multimodal summarization becomes increasingly significant as it is the basis for question answering, Web search, and many other downstream tasks. However, its learning materials have been lacking a holistic organization by integrating resources from various modalities, thereby lagging behind the research progress of this field. In this study, we present a full-scale multimodal dataset comprehensively gathering documents, summaries, images, captions, videos, audios, transcripts, and titles in English from CNN and Daily Mail. To our best knowledge, this is the first collection that spans all modalities and nearly comprises all types of materials available in this community. In addition, we devise a baseline model based on the novel dataset, which employs a newly proposed Jump-Attention mechanism based on transcripts. The experimental results validate the important assistance role of the external information for multimodal summarization.

Automatic text summarization focuses on distilling summary information from texts. This research field has been considerably explored over the past decades because of its significant role in many natural language processing tasks; however, two challenging issues block its further development: (1) how to yield a summarization model embedding topic inference rather than extending with a pre-trained one and (2) how to merge the latent topics into diverse granularity levels. In this study, we propose a variational hierarchical model to holistically address both issues, dubbed VHTM. Different from the previous work assisted by a pre-trained single-grained topic model, VHTM is the first attempt to jointly accomplish summarization with topic inference via variational encoder-decoder and merge topics into multi-grained levels through topic embedding and attention. Comprehensive experiments validate the superior performance of VHTM compared with the baselines, accompanying with semantically consistent topics.

In the field of dialogue summarization, due to the lack of training data, it is often difficult for supervised summary generation methods to learn vital information from dialogue context. Several works on unsupervised summarization for document by leveraging semantic information solely or auto-encoder strategy (i.e., sentence compression), they however cannot be adapted to the dialogue scene due to the limited words in utterances and huge gap between the dialogue and its summary. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised strategy to address this challenge, which roots from the hypothetical foundation that a superior summary approximates a replacement of the original dialogue, and they are roughly equivalent for auxiliary (self-supervised) tasks, e.g., dialogue generation. The proposed strategy Rep-Sum is applied to generate both extractive and abstractive summary with the guidance of the followed n th utterance generation and classification tasks. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared with other unsupervised methods.