Zeqian Ju


2022

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TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method
Zeqian Ju | Peiling Lu | Xu Tan | Rui Wang | Chen Zhang | Songruoyao Wu | Kejun Zhang | Xiang-Yang Li | Tao Qin | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Lyric-to-melody generation is an important task in automatic songwriting. Previous lyric-to-melody generation systems usually adopt end-to-end models that directly generate melodies from lyrics, which suffer from several issues: 1) lack of paired lyric-melody training data; 2) lack of control on generated melodies. In this paper, we develop TeleMelody, a two-stage lyric-to-melody generation system with music template (e.g., tonality, chord progression, rhythm pattern, and cadence) to bridge the gap between lyrics and melodies (i.e., the system consists of a lyric-to-template module and a template-to-melody module). TeleMelody has two advantages. First, it is data efficient. The template-to-melody module is trained in a self-supervised way (i.e., the source template is extracted from the target melody) that does not need any lyric-melody paired data. The lyric-to-template module is made up of some rules and a lyric-to-rhythm model, which is trained with paired lyric-rhythm data that is easier to obtain than paired lyric-melody data. Second, it is controllable. The design of the template ensures that the generated melodies can be controlled by adjusting the musical elements in the template. Both subjective and objective experimental evaluations demonstrate that TeleMelody generates melodies with higher quality, better controllability, and less requirement on paired lyric-melody data than previous generation systems.

2021

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On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19
Meng Zhou | Zechen Li | Bowen Tan | Guangtao Zeng | Wenmian Yang | Xuehai He | Zeqian Ju | Subrato Chakravorty | Shu Chen | Xingyi Yang | Yichen Zhang | Qingyang Wu | Zhou Yu | Kun Xu | Eric Xing | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialog datasets – CovidDialog – (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COVID-19. While the largest of their kind, these two datasets are still relatively small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. Training complex dialog generation models on small datasets bears high risk of overfitting. To alleviate overfitting, we develop a multi-task learning approach, which regularizes the data-deficient dialog generation task with a masked token prediction task. Experiments on the CovidDialog datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We perform both human evaluation and automatic evaluation of dialogs generated by our method. Results show that the generated responses are promising in being doctor-like, relevant to conversation history, clinically informative and correct. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/COVID-Dialogue.

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MusicBERT: Symbolic Music Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training
Mingliang Zeng | Xu Tan | Rui Wang | Zeqian Ju | Tao Qin | Tie-Yan Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets
Guangtao Zeng | Wenmian Yang | Zeqian Ju | Yue Yang | Sicheng Wang | Ruisi Zhang | Meng Zhou | Jiaqi Zeng | Xiangyu Dong | Ruoyu Zhang | Hongchao Fang | Penghui Zhu | Shu Chen | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Medical dialogue systems are promising in assisting in telemedicine to increase access to healthcare services, improve the quality of patient care, and reduce medical costs. To facilitate the research and development of medical dialogue systems, we build large-scale medical dialogue datasets – MedDialog, which contain 1) a Chinese dataset with 3.4 million conversations between patients and doctors, 11.3 million utterances, 660.2 million tokens, covering 172 specialties of diseases, and 2) an English dataset with 0.26 million conversations, 0.51 million utterances, 44.53 million tokens, covering 96 specialties of diseases. To our best knowledge, MedDialog is the largest medical dialogue dataset to date. We pretrain several dialogue generation models on the Chinese MedDialog dataset, including Transformer, GPT, BERT-GPT, and compare their performance. It is shown that models trained on MedDialog are able to generate clinically correct and doctor-like medical dialogues. We also study the transferability of models trained on MedDialog to low-resource medical dialogue generation tasks. It is shown that via transfer learning which finetunes the models pretrained on MedDialog, the performance on medical dialogue generation tasks with small datasets can be greatly improved, as shown in human evaluation and automatic evaluation. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/Medical-Dialogue-System