The existing event classification (EC) work primarily focuseson the traditional supervised learning setting in which models are unableto extract event mentions of new/unseen event types. Few-shot learninghas not been investigated in this area although it enables EC models toextend their operation to unobserved event types. To fill in this gap, inthis work, we investigate event classification under the few-shot learningsetting. We propose a novel training method for this problem that exten-sively exploit the support set during the training process of a few-shotlearning model. In particular, in addition to matching the query exam-ple with those in the support set for training, we seek to further matchthe examples within the support set themselves. This method providesmore training signals for the models and can be applied to every metric-learning-based few-shot learning methods. Our extensive experiments ontwo benchmark EC datasets show that the proposed method can improvethe best reported few-shot learning models by up to 10% on accuracyfor event classification
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Few-shot Intent Detection is challenging due to the scarcity of available annotated utterances. Although recent works demonstrate that multi-level matching plays an important role in transferring learned knowledge from seen training classes to novel testing classes, they rely on a static similarity measure and overly fine-grained matching components. These limitations inhibit generalizing capability towards Generalized Few-shot Learning settings where both seen and novel classes are co-existent. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Matching and Aggregation Network where semantic componen…
Brown University（布朗大学）；Isfahan University of Tech.（伊斯法罕理工大学）
In many practical few-shot learning problems, even though labeled examples are scarce, there are abundant auxiliary datasets that potentially contain useful information. We propose the problem of extended few-shot learning to study these scenarios. We then introduce a framework to address the challenges of efficiently selecting and effectively using auxiliary data in few-shot image classification. Given a large auxiliary dataset and a notion of semantic similarity among classes, we automatically select pseudo shots, which are labeled examples from other classes related to the target task. We s…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are one of the driving forces for the advancement of computer vision. Despite their promising performances on many tasks, CNNs still face major obstacles on the road to achieving ideal machine intelligence. One is that CNNs are complex and hard to interpret. Another is that standard CNNs require large amounts of annotated data, which is sometimes hard to obtain, and it is desirable to learn to recognize objects from few examples. In this work, we address these limitations of CNNs by developing novel, flexible, and interpretable models for few-shot learning.…
University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Current event detection models under super-vised learning settings fail to transfer to newevent types. Few-shot learning has not beenexplored in event detection even though it al-lows a model to perform well with high gener-alization on new event types. In this work, weformulate event detection as a few-shot learn-ing problem to enable to extend event detec-tion to new event types. We propose two novelloss factors that matching examples in the sup-port set to provide more training signals to themodel. Moreover, these training signals can beapplied in many metric-based few-shot learn-ing models…
Recently, pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved strong performance when fine-tuned on difficult benchmarks like SuperGLUE. However, performance can suffer when there are very few labeled examples available for fine-tuning. Pattern Exploiting Training (PET) is a recent approach that leverages patterns for few-shot learning. However, PET uses task-specific unlabeled data. In this paper, we focus on few-shot learning without any unlabeled data and introduce ADAPET, which modifies PET's objective to provide denser supervision during fine-tuning. As a result, ADAPET outperforms PET on Sup…
We propose an asymmetric affinity score for representing the complexity of utilizing the knowledge of one task for learning another one. Our method is based on the maximum bipartite matching algorithm and utilizes the Fisher Information matrix. We provide theoretical analyses demonstrating that the proposed score is mathematically well-defined, and subsequently use the affinity score to propose a novel algorithm for the few-shot learning problem. In particular, using this score, we find relevant training data labels to the test data and leverage the discovered relevant data for episodically fi…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Snap Inc.（Snap公司）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）；Tencent（腾讯）
In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning approach for few-shot classification, which learns transferable prior knowledge across tasks and directly produces network parameters for similar unseen tasks with training samples. Our approach, called LGM-Net, includes two key modules, namely, TargetNet and MetaNet. The TargetNet module is a neural network for solving a specific task and the MetaNet module aims at learning to generate functional weights for TargetNet by observing training samples. We also present an intertask normalization strategy for the training process to leverage common inf…
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) for image classification focuses on recognizing novel categories that have no labeled data available for training. The learning is generally carried out with the help of mid-level semantic descriptors associated with each class. This semantic-descriptor space is generally shared by both seen and unseen categories. However, ZSL suffers from hubness, domain discrepancy and biased-ness towards seen classes. To tackle these problems, we propose a three-step approach to zero-shot learning. Firstly, a mapping is learned from the semantic-descriptor space to the image-feature…
Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心）
Providing pretrained language models with simple task descriptions in natural language enables them to solve some tasks in a fully unsupervised fashion. Moreover, when combined with regular learning from examples, this idea yields impressive few-shot results for a wide range of text classification tasks. It is also a promising direction to improve data efficiency in generative settings, but there are several challenges to using a combination of task descriptions and example-based learning for text generation. In particular, it is crucial to find task descriptions that are easy to understand fo…
To mitigate the impact of the scarcity of labelled data on fact-checking systems, we focus on few-shot claim verification. Despite recent work on few-shot classification by proposing advanced language models, there is a dearth of research in data annotation prioritisation that improves the selection of the few shots to be labelled for optimal model performance. We propose Active PETs, a novel weighted approach that utilises an ensemble of Pattern Exploiting Training (PET) models based on various language models, to actively select unlabelled data as candidates for annotation. Using Active PETs…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）
The stance detection task aims to classify the stance toward given documents and topics. Since the topics can be implicit in documents and unseen in training data for zero-shot settings, we propose to boost the transferability of the stance detection model by using sentiment and commonsense knowledge, which are seldom considered in previous studies. Our model includes a graph autoencoder module to obtain commonsense knowledge and a stance detection module with sentiment and commonsense. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the zero-shot and few-s…
Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心）；Sulzer GmbH（苏尔寿有限公司）
Some NLP tasks can be solved in a fully unsupervised fashion by providing a pretrained language model with "task descriptions" in natural language (e.g., Radford et al., 2019). While this approach underperforms its supervised counterpart, we show in this work that the two ideas can be combined: We introduce Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), a semi-supervised training procedure that reformulates input examples as cloze-style phrases to help language models understand a given task. These phrases are then used to assign soft labels to a large set of unlabeled examples. Finally, standard supervis…
Fraunhofer IAIS（弗劳恩霍夫智能分析与信息系统研究所）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；PWC GmbH WPG（普华永道会计师事务所（德国））
Natural language processing methods have several applications in automated auditing, including document or passage classification, information retrieval, and question answering. However, training such models requires a large amount of annotated data which is scarce in industrial settings. At the same time, techniques like zero-shot and unsupervised learning allow for application of models pre-trained using general domain data to unseen domains. In this work, we study the efficiency of unsupervised text matching using Sentence-Bert, a transformer-based model, by applying it to the semantic simi…
In this paper, we propose a novel one-shot template-matching algorithm to automatically capture data from business documents with an aim to minimize manual data entry. Given one annotated document, our algorithm can automatically extract similar data from other documents having the same format. Based on a set of engineered visual and textual features, our method is invariant to changes in position and value. Experiments on a dataset of 595 real invoices demonstrate 86.4% accuracy.
llmNER: (Zero|Few)-Shot Named Entity Recognition, Exploiting the Power of Large Language Models
University of Chile（智利大学）；Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data（数据基础研究千年研究所）；Catholic University of Chile（智利天主教大学）；Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, University of Chile（智利大学物理与数学学院）
本文提出 llmNER 库，通过简化提示构建与结果解析，支持基于大型语言模型的零样本和少样本命名实体识别，并在两个 NER 任务上验证其灵活性与有效性。
National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing（语音及语言信息处理国家工程实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
This paper presents a multi-level matching and aggregation network (MLMAN) for few-shot relation classification. Previous studies on this topic adopt prototypical networks, which calculate the embedding vector of a query instance and the prototype vector of each support set independently. In contrast, our proposed MLMAN model encodes the query instance and each support set in an interactive way by considering their matching information at both local and instance levels. The final class prototype for each support set is obtained by attentive aggregation over the representations of its support i…
Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Text classification struggles to generalize to unseen classes with very few labeled text instances per class. In such a few-shot learning (FSL) setting, metric-based meta-learning approaches have shown promising results. Previous studies mainly aim to derive a prototype representation for each class. However, they neglect that it is challenging-yet-unnecessary to construct a compact representation which expresses the entire meaning for each class. They also ignore the importance to capture the inter-dependency between query and the support set for few-shot text classification. To deal with the…
We consider the task of multimodal one-shot speech-image matching. An agent is shown a picture along with a spoken word describing the object in the picture, e.g. cookie, broccoli and ice-cream. After observing one paired speech-image example per class, it is shown a new set of unseen pictures, and asked to pick the "ice-cream". Previous work attempted to tackle this problem using transfer learning: supervised models are trained on labelled background data not containing any of the one-shot classes. Here we compare transfer learning to unsupervised models trained on unlabelled in-domain data. …
Selecting Demonstrations for Many-Shot In-Context Learning via Gradient Matching
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China（北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Meituan, Inc.（美团公司）；Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, China（北京通用人工智能研究院）；Ping An Technology, China（平安科技）；Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP)（普适知识处理实验室（UKP））；Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学计算机科学系）；www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de（www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de（注：该网址非机构，按要求不应提取，此处原数据可能有误））
We study the zero-shot transfer capabilities of text matching models on a massive scale, by self-supervised training on 140 source domains from community question answering forums in English. We investigate the model performances on nine benchmarks of answer selection and question similarity tasks, and show that all 140 models transfer surprisingly well, where the large majority of models substantially outperforms common IR baselines. We also demonstrate that considering a broad selection of source domains is crucial for obtaining the best zero-shot transfer performances, which contrasts the s…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）
Low-shot relation extraction~(RE) aims to recognize novel relations with very few or even no samples, which is critical in real scenario application. Few-shot and zero-shot RE are two representative low-shot RE tasks, which seem to be with similar target but require totally different underlying abilities. In this paper, we propose Multi-Choice Matching Networks to unify low-shot relation extraction. To fill in the gap between zero-shot and few-shot RE, we propose the triplet-paraphrase meta-training, which leverages triplet paraphrase to pre-train zero-shot label matching ability and uses meta…
