In this paper, we present a fast and strong neural approach for general purpose text matching applications. We explore what is sufficient to build a fast and well-performed text matching model and propose to keep three key features available for inter-sequence alignment: original point-wise features, previous aligned features, and contextual features while simplifying all the remaining components. We conduct experiments on four well-studied benchmark datasets across tasks of natural language inference, paraphrase identification and answer selection. The performance of our model is on par with the state-of-the-art on all datasets with much fewer parameters and the inference speed is at least 6 times faster compared with similarly performed ones.
The Center for Information and Language Processing（信息与语言处理中心）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
This work studies comparatively two typical sentence matching tasks: textual entailment (TE) and answer selection (AS), observing that weaker phrase alignments are more critical in TE, while stronger phrase alignments deserve more attention in AS. The key to reach this observation lies in phrase detection, phrase representation, phrase alignment, and more importantly how to connect those aligned phrases of different matching degrees with the final classifier. Prior work (i) has limitations in phrase generation and representation, or (ii) conducts alignment at word and phrase levels by handcraf…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Large-scale semantic parsing datasets annotated with logical forms have enabled major advances in supervised approaches. But can richer supervision help even more? To explore the utility of fine-grained, lexical-level supervision, we introduce Squall, a dataset that enriches 11,276 WikiTableQuestions English-language questions with manually created SQL equivalents plus alignments between SQL and question fragments. Our annotation enables new training possibilities for encoder-decoder models, including approaches from machine translation previously precluded by the absence of alignments. We pro…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；IBM T.J. Watson Research（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；Peking University（北京大学）；Amazon AWS（亚马逊云科技）
Previous cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment studies rely on entity embeddings derived only from monolingual KG structural information, which may fail at matching entities that have different facts in two KGs. In this paper, we introduce the topic entity graph, a local sub-graph of an entity, to represent entities with their contextual information in KG. From this view, the KB-alignment task can be formulated as a graph matching problem; and we further propose a graph-attention based solution, which first matches all entities in two topic entity graphs, and then jointly model the loca…
Selecting input features of top relevance has become a popular method for building self-explaining models. In this work, we extend this selective rationalization approach to text matching, where the goal is to jointly select and align text pieces, such as tokens or sentences, as a justification for the downstream prediction. Our approach employs optimal transport (OT) to find a minimal cost alignment between the inputs. However, directly applying OT often produces dense and therefore uninterpretable alignments. To overcome this limitation, we introduce novel constrained variants of the OT prob…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）；School of Computing, University of Leeds（利兹大学计算学院）
Structural heterogeneity between knowledge graphs is an outstanding challenge for entity alignment. This paper presents Neighborhood Matching Network (NMN), a novel entity alignment framework for tackling the structural heterogeneity challenge. NMN estimates the similarities between entities to capture both the topological structure and the neighborhood difference. It provides two innovative components for better learning representations for entity alignment. It first uses a novel graph sampling method to distill a discriminative neighborhood for each entity. It then adopts a cross-graph neigh…
Entity alignment which aims at linking entities with the same meaning from different knowledge graphs (KGs) is a vital step for knowledge fusion. Existing research focused on learning embeddings of entities by utilizing structural information of KGs for entity alignment. These methods can aggregate information from neighboring nodes but may also bring noise from neighbors. Most recently, several researchers attempted to compare neighboring nodes in pairs to enhance the entity alignment. However, they ignored the relations between entities which are also important for neighborhood matching. In …
The neural attention mechanism has been incorporated into deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various domains. Most such models use multi-head self-attention which is appealing for the ability to attend to information from different perspectives. This paper introduces alignment attention that explicitly encourages self-attention to match the distributions of the key and query within each head. The resulting alignment attention networks can be optimized as an unsupervised regularization in the existing attention framework. It is simple to convert any models with self…
Sentence matching is a fundamental task of natural language processing with various applications. Most recent approaches adopt attention-based neural models to build word- or phrase-level alignment between two sentences. However, these models usually ignore the inherent structure within the sentences and fail to consider various dependency relationships among text units. To address these issues, this paper proposes a graph-based approach for sentence matching. First, we represent a sentence pair as a graph with several carefully design strategies. We then employ a novel gated graph attention n…
Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies（海德堡理论研究所）；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Universität Bielefeld（比勒费尔德大学）
Multilingual representations pre-trained with monolingual data exhibit considerably unequal task performances across languages. Previous studies address this challenge with resource-intensive contextualized alignment, which assumes the availability of large parallel data, thereby leaving under-represented language communities behind. In this work, we attribute the data hungriness of previous alignment techniques to two limitations: (i) the inability to sufficiently leverage data and (ii) these techniques are not trained properly. To address these issues, we introduce supervised and unsupervise…
Duke University（杜克大学）；Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research（微软 Dynamics 365 人工智能研究院）
Cross-domain alignment between two sets of entities (e.g., objects in an image, words in a sentence) is fundamental to both computer vision and natural language processing. Existing methods mainly focus on designing advanced attention mechanisms to simulate soft alignment, with no training signals to explicitly encourage alignment. The learned attention matrices are also dense and lacks interpretability. We propose Graph Optimal Transport (GOT), a principled framework that germinates from recent advances in Optimal Transport (OT). In GOT, cross-domain alignment is formulated as a graph matchin…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Guizhou University（贵州大学）；Shanghai Transsion Co., Ltd（上海传音有限公司）
Entity alignment (EA) aims to find entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same object in the real world. Recent studies incorporate temporal information to augment the representations of KGs. The existing methods for EA between temporal KGs (TKGs) utilize a time-aware attention mechanism to incorporate relational and temporal information into entity embeddings. The approaches outperform the previous methods by using temporal information. However, we believe that it is not necessary to learn the embeddings of temporal information in KGs since most TKGs have uniform tempo…
We propose a new algorithm called DK-vec for aligning pairs of Asian/Indo-European noisy parallel texts without sentence boundaries. DK-vec improves on previous alignment algorithms in that it handles better the non-linear nature of noisy corpora. The algorithm uses frequency, position and recency information as features for pattern matching. Dynamic Time Warping is used as the matching technique between word pairs. This algorithm produces a small bilingual lexicon which provides anchor points for alignment.
In this paper we address a method to align English-Chinese bilingual news reports from China News Service, combining both lexical and satistical approaches. Because of the sentential structure differences between English and Chinese, matching at the sentence level as in many other works may result in frequent matching of several sentences en masse. In view of this, the current work also attempts to create shorter alignment pairs by permitting finer matching between clauses from both texts if possible. The current method is based on statiscal correlation between sentence or clause length of bot…
Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学数据与网络科学组）；SAP SE Business Technology Platform - One Domain Model（SAP SE 业务技术平台 - 单一域模型）
One of the strongest signals for automated matching of ontologies and knowledge graphs are the textual descriptions of the concepts. The methods that are typically applied (such as character- or token-based comparisons) are relatively simple, and therefore do not capture the actual meaning of the texts. With the rise of transformer-based language models, text comparison based on meaning (rather than lexical features) is possible. In this paper, we model the ontology matching task as classification problem and present approaches based on transformer models. We further provide an easy to use imp…
ISTI-CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息科学与技术研究所）；Univ. of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Image-text matching is gaining a leading role among tasks involving the joint understanding of vision and language. In literature, this task is often used as a pre-training objective to forge architectures able to jointly deal with images and texts. Nonetheless, it has a direct downstream application: cross-modal retrieval, which consists in finding images related to a given query text or vice-versa. Solving this task is of critical importance in cross-modal search engines. Many recent methods proposed effective solutions to the image-text matching problem, mostly using recent large vision-lan…
Beyond Output Matching: Bidirectional Alignment for Enhanced In-Context Learning
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research（Salesforce 研究）；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore（高性能计算研究所，新加坡科技研究局）
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）
Self-supervised learning provides an opportunity to explore unlabeled chest X-rays and their associated free-text reports accumulated in clinical routine without manual supervision. This paper proposes a Joint Image Text Representation Learning Network (JoImTeRNet) for pre-training on chest X-ray images and their radiology reports. The model was pre-trained on both the global image-sentence level and the local image region-word level for visual-textual matching. Both are bidirectionally constrained on Cross-Entropy based and ranking-based Triplet Matching Losses. The region-word matching is ca…
