Various NLP problems -- such as the prediction of sentence similarity, entailment, and discourse relations -- are all instances of the same general task: the modeling of semantic relations between a pair of textual elements. A popular model for such problems is to embed sentences into fixed size vectors, and use composition functions (e.g. concatenation or sum) of those vectors as features for the prediction. At the same time, composition of embeddings has been a main focus within the field of Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) whose goal is to predict relations between entities (typically from knowledge base triples). In this article, we show that previous work on relation prediction between texts implicitly uses compositions from baseline SRL models. We show that such compositions are not expressive enough for several tasks (e.g. natural language inference). We build on recent SRL models to address textual relational problems, showing that they are more expressive, and can alleviate issues from simpler compositions. The resulting models significantly improve the state of the art in both transferable sentence representation learning and relation prediction.
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in online reviews. Most recent efforts adopt attention-based neural network models to implicitly connect aspects with opinion words. However, due to the complexity of language and the existence of multiple aspects in a single sentence, these models often confuse the connections. In this paper, we address this problem by means of effective encoding of syntax information. Firstly, we define a unified aspect-oriented dependency tree structure rooted at a target aspect by reshaping and pruning an ord…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
In this paper, we propose convolutional neural networks for learning an optimal representation of question and answer sentences. Their main aspect is the use of relational information given by the matches between words from the two members of the pair. The matches are encoded as embeddings with additional parameters (dimensions), which are tuned by the network. These allows for better capturing interactions between questions and answers, resulting in a significant boost in accuracy. We test our models on two widely used answer sentence selection benchmarks. The results clearly show the effecti…
We describe our recently developed neural machine translation (NMT) system and benchmark it against our own statistical machine translation (SMT) system as well as two other general purpose online engines (statistical and neural). We present automatic and human evaluation results of the translation output provided by each system. We also analyze the effect of sentence length on the quality of output for SMT and NMT systems.
A Bi-consolidating Model for Joint Relational Triple Extraction
State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data（公共大数据国家重点实验室）；College of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Guizhou University（贵州大学）；School of Information（信息学院）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
Pre-trained embeddings such as word embeddings and sentence embeddings are fundamental tools facilitating a wide range of downstream NLP tasks. In this work, we investigate how to learn a general-purpose embedding of textual relations, defined as the shortest dependency path between entities. Textual relation embedding provides a level of knowledge between word/phrase level and sentence level, and we show that it can facilitate downstream tasks requiring relational understanding of the text. To learn such an embedding, we create the largest distant supervision dataset by linking the entire Eng…
Learning vector representation for words is an important research field which may benefit many natural language processing tasks. Two limitations exist in nearly all available models, which are the bias caused by the context definition and the lack of knowledge utilization. They are difficult to tackle because these algorithms are essentially unsupervised learning approaches. Inspired by deep learning, the authors propose a supervised framework for learning vector representation of words to provide additional supervised fine tuning after unsupervised learning. The framework is knowledge rich a…
Distantly supervised relation extraction has been widely used to find novel relational facts from plain text. To predict the relation between a pair of two target entities, existing methods solely rely on those direct sentences containing both entities. In fact, there are also many sentences containing only one of the target entities, which provide rich and useful information for relation extraction. To address this issue, we build inference chains between two target entities via intermediate entities, and propose a path-based neural relation extraction model to encode the relational semantics…
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Shenzhen Zhuiyi Technology Co., Ltd.（深圳追一科技有限公司）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Extracting relational triples from unstructured text is crucial for large-scale knowledge graph construction. However, few existing works excel in solving the overlapping triple problem where multiple relational triples in the same sentence share the same entities. In this work, we introduce a fresh perspective to revisit the relational triple extraction task and propose a novel cascade binary tagging framework (CasRel) derived from a principled problem formulation. Instead of treating relations as discrete labels as in previous works, our new framework models relations as functions that map s…
Beyond generating long and topic-coherent paragraphs in traditional captioning tasks, the medical image report composition task poses more task-oriented challenges by requiring both the highly-accurate medical term diagnosis and multiple heterogeneous forms of information including impression and findings. Current methods often generate the most common sentences due to dataset bias for individual case, regardless of whether the sentences properly capture key entities and relationships. Such limitations severely hinder their applicability and generalization capability in medical report composit…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Extracting relations is critical for knowledge base completion and construction in which distant supervised methods are widely used to extract relational facts automatically with the existing knowledge bases. However, the automatically constructed datasets comprise amounts of low-quality sentences containing noisy words, which is neglected by current distant supervised methods resulting in unacceptable precisions. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel word-level distant supervised approach for relation extraction. We first build Sub-Tree Parse(STP) to remove noisy words that are irrelev…
One of the most remarkable properties of word embeddings is the fact that they capture certain types of semantic and syntactic relationships. Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved groundbreaking results across a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, it is unclear to what extent such models capture relational knowledge beyond what is already captured by standard word embeddings. To explore this question, we propose a methodology for distilling relational knowledge from a pre-trained language model. Starting from a few seed instances of a given rela…
Deep learning based techniques have been recently used with promising results for data integration problems. Some methods directly use pre-trained embeddings that were trained on a large corpus such as Wikipedia. However, they may not always be an appropriate choice for enterprise datasets with custom vocabulary. Other methods adapt techniques from natural language processing to obtain embeddings for the enterprise's relational data. However, this approach blindly treats a tuple as a sentence, thus losing a large amount of contextual information present in the tuple. We propose algorithms for …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
Recently, progress has been made towards improving relational reasoning in machine learning field. Among existing models, graph neural networks (GNNs) is one of the most effective approaches for multi-hop relational reasoning. In fact, multi-hop relational reasoning is indispensable in many natural language processing tasks such as relation extraction. In this paper, we propose to generate the parameters of graph neural networks (GP-GNNs) according to natural language sentences, which enables GNNs to process relational reasoning on unstructured text inputs. We verify GP-GNNs in relation extrac…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Relation extraction models suffer from limited qualified training data. Using human annotators to label sentences is too expensive and does not scale well especially when dealing with large datasets. In this paper, we use Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Networks (AC-GANs) to generate high-quality relational sentences and to improve the performance of relation classifier in end-to-end models. In AC-GAN, the discriminator gives not only a probability distribution over the real source, but also a probability distribution over the relation labels. This helps to generate meaningful rela…
School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University（苏州大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization（新型软件技术与产业化协同创新中心）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Heilongjiang University（黑龙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Distant supervised relation extraction is an efficient approach to scale relation extraction to very large corpora, and has been widely used to find novel relational facts from plain text. Recent studies on neural relation extraction have shown great progress on this task via modeling the sentences in low-dimensional spaces, but seldom considered syntax information to model the entities. In this paper, we propose to learn syntax-aware entity embedding for neural relation extraction. First, we encode the context of entities on a dependency tree as sentence-level entity embedding based on tree-G…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
Distant supervision for relation extraction is an efficient method to reduce labor costs and has been widely used to seek novel relational facts in large corpora, which can be identified as a multi-instance multi-label problem. However, existing distant supervision methods suffer from selecting important words in the sentence and extracting valid sentences in the bag. Towards this end, we propose a novel approach to address these problems in this paper. Firstly, we propose a linear attenuation simulation to reflect the importance of words in the sentence with respect to the distances between e…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Open relation extraction is the task of extracting open-domain relation facts from natural language sentences. Existing works either utilize heuristics or distant-supervised annotations to train a supervised classifier over pre-defined relations, or adopt unsupervised methods with additional assumptions that have less discriminative power. In this work, we proposed a self-supervised framework named SelfORE, which exploits weak, self-supervised signals by leveraging large pretrained language model for adaptive clustering on contextualized relational features, and bootstraps the self-supervised …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence（认知智能国家重点实验室）
The journey of reducing noise from distant supervision (DS) generated training data has been started since the DS was first introduced into the relation extraction (RE) task. For the past decade, researchers apply the multi-instance learning (MIL) framework to find the most reliable feature from a bag of sentences. Although the pattern of MIL bags can greatly reduce DS noise, it fails to represent many other useful sentence features in the datasets. In many cases, these sentence features can only be acquired by extra sentence-level human annotation with heavy costs. Therefore, the performance …
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Università della Svizzera italiana（提契诺大学）
Document-level relation extraction requires integrating information within and across multiple sentences of a document and capturing complex interactions between inter-sentence entities. However, effective aggregation of relevant information in the document remains a challenging research question. Existing approaches construct static document-level graphs based on syntactic trees, co-references or heuristics from the unstructured text to model the dependencies. Unlike previous methods that may not be able to capture rich non-local interactions for inference, we propose a novel model that empow…
Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify causal relations between event pairs in a document. It poses a great challenge of across-sentence reasoning without clear causal indicators. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework for DECI, which improves existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods upon two aspects. First, we formulate DECI as a node classification problem by constructing an event relational graph, without the needs of prior knowledge or tools. Second, ERGO seamlessly integrates event-pair relation classification a…
The main purpose of relation extraction is to extract the semantic relationships between tagged pairs of entities in a sentence, which plays an important role in the semantic understanding of sentences and the construction of knowledge graphs. In this paper, we propose that the key semantic information within a sentence plays a key role in the relationship extraction of entities. We propose the hypothesis that the key semantic information inside the sentence plays a key role in entity relationship extraction. And based on this hypothesis, we split the sentence into three segments according to …
The meaning of a sentence is a function of the relations that hold between its words. We instantiate this relational view of semantics in a series of neural models based on variants of relation networks (RNs) which represent a set of objects (for us, words forming a sentence) in terms of representations of pairs of objects. We propose two extensions to the basic RN model for natural language. First, building on the intuition that not all word pairs are equally informative about the meaning of a sentence, we use constraints based on both supervised and unsupervised dependency syntax to control …
Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Translation Error Detection:An English--Greek Contrastive Study
Ionian University（爱奥尼亚大学）；Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing（数字图书馆与电子出版实验室）；Centre for Literary Translation and Book Policy（文学翻译与图书政策中心）
Distant supervision (DS) has been widely used to automatically construct (noisy) labeled data for relation extraction (RE). Given two entities, distant supervision exploits sentences that directly mention them for predicting their semantic relation. We refer to this strategy as 1-hop DS, which unfortunately may not work well for long-tail entities with few supporting sentences. In this paper, we introduce a new strategy named 2-hop DS to enhance distantly supervised RE, based on the observation that there exist a large number of relational tables on the Web which contain entity pairs that shar…
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Extracting relational triples from unstructured text is an essential task in natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. Existing approaches usually contain two fundamental steps: (1) finding the boundary positions of head and tail entities; (2) concatenating specific tokens to form triples. However, nearly all previous methods suffer from the problem of error accumulation, i.e., the boundary recognition error of each entity in step (1) will be accumulated into the final combined triples. To solve the problem, in this paper, we introduce a fresh perspective to revisit the tri…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Beijing Unisound Information Technology Co., Ltd（北京云知声信息技术有限公司）
The joint entity and relation extraction task aims to extract all relational triples from a sentence. In essence, the relational triples contained in a sentence are unordered. However, previous seq2seq based models require to convert the set of triples into a sequence in the training phase. To break this bottleneck, we treat joint entity and relation extraction as a direct set prediction problem, so that the extraction model can get rid of the burden of predicting the order of multiple triples. To solve this set prediction problem, we propose networks featured by transformers with non-autoregr…
Table filling based relational triple extraction methods are attracting growing research interests due to their promising performance and their abilities on extracting triples from complex sentences. However, this kind of methods are far from their full potential because most of them only focus on using local features but ignore the global associations of relations and of token pairs, which increases the possibility of overlooking some important information during triple extraction. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a global feature-oriented triple extraction model that makes full use of…
Describing images with text is a fundamental problem in vision-language research. Current studies in this domain mostly focus on single image captioning. However, in various real applications (e.g., image editing, difference interpretation, and retrieval), generating relational captions for two images, can also be very useful. This important problem has not been explored mostly due to lack of datasets and effective models. To push forward the research in this direction, we first introduce a new language-guided image editing dataset that contains a large number of real image pairs with correspo…
According to the distributional inclusion hypothesis, entailment between words can be measured via the feature inclusions of their distributional vectors. In recent work, we showed how this hypothesis can be extended from words to phrases and sentences in the setting of compositional distributional semantics. This paper focuses on inclusion properties of tensors; its main contribution is a theoretical and experimental analysis of how feature inclusion works in different concrete models of verb tensors. We present results for relational, Frobenius, projective, and holistic methods and compare t…
Hallucination-Resistant Relation Extraction via Dependency-Aware Sentence Simplification and Two-tiered Hierarchical Refinement
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Relation extraction (RE) is a sub-discipline of information extraction (IE) which focuses on the prediction of a relational predicate from a natural-language input unit (such as a sentence, a clause, or even a short paragraph consisting of multiple sentences and/or clauses). Together with named-entity recognition (NER) and disambiguation (NED), RE forms the basis for many advanced IE tasks such as knowledge-base (KB) population and verification. In this work, we explore how recent approaches for open information extraction (OpenIE) may help to improve the task of RE by encoding structured info…
Document-level relation extraction aims to extract relations among entities within a document. Compared with its sentence-level counterpart, Document-level relation extraction requires inference over multiple sentences to extract complex relational triples. Previous research normally complete reasoning through information propagation on the mention-level or entity-level document-graphs, regardless of the correlations between the relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Document-level Relation Extraction model based on a Masked Image Reconstruction network (DRE-MIR), which models infere…
TALAS: Teacher-Anchored Layer Alignment with Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Embedding Distillation
Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科技大学）；VNU University of Engineering and Technology（越南国立大学工程与技术大学）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Deep neural networks have become the dominant approach in natural language processing (NLP). However, in recent years, it has become apparent that there are shortcomings in systematicity that limit the performance and data efficiency of deep learning in NLP. These shortcomings can be clearly shown in lower-level artificial tasks, mostly on synthetic data. Abstract patterns are the best known examples of a hard problem for neural networks in terms of generalisation to unseen data. They are defined by relations between items, such as equality, rather than their values. It has been argued that th…
When coping with literary texts such as novels or short stories, the extraction of structured information in the form of a knowledge graph might be hindered by the huge number of possible relations between the entities corresponding to the characters in the novel and the consequent hurdles in gathering supervised information about them. Such issue is addressed here as an unsupervised task empowered by transformers: relational sentences in the original text are embedded (with SBERT) and clustered in order to merge together semantically similar relations. All the sentences in the same cluster ar…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Relations between entities can be represented by different instances, e.g., a sentence containing both entities or a fact in a Knowledge Graph (KG). However, these instances may not well capture the general relations between entities, may be difficult to understand by humans, even may not be found due to the incompleteness of the knowledge source. In this paper, we introduce the Open Relation Modeling problem - given two entities, generate a coherent sentence describing the relation between them. To solve this problem, we propose to teach machines to generate definition-like relation descripti…
Applying Relation Extraction and Graph Matching to Answering Multiple Choice Questions
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息科学研究生院）；Center for Innovative Research and Education in Data Science, Kyoto University（京都大学数据科学创新研究与教育中心）
