Relation extraction is a key task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to extract relations between entity pairs from given texts. Recently, relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the development of deep neural networks. Most existing research focuses on constructing explicit structured features using external knowledge such as knowledge graph and dependency tree. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract multi-granularity features based solely on the original input sentences. We show that effective structured features can be attained even without external knowledge. Three kinds of features based on the input sentences are fully exploited, which are in entity mention level, segment level, and sentence level. All the three are jointly and hierarchically modeled. We evaluate our method on three public benchmarks: SemEval 2010 Task 8, Tacred, and Tacred Revisited. To verify the effectiveness, we apply our method to different encoders such as LSTM and BERT. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models that even use external knowledge. Extensive analyses demonstrate that the performance of our model is contributed by the capture of multi-granularity features and the model of their hierarchical structure. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/xnliang98/sms}.
This paper describes a novel hierarchical attention network for reading comprehension style question answering, which aims to answer questions for a given narrative paragraph. In the proposed method, attention and fusion are conducted horizontally and vertically across layers at different levels of granularity between question and paragraph. Specifically, it first encode the question and paragraph with fine-grained language embeddings, to better capture the respective representations at semantic level. Then it proposes a multi-granularity fusion approach to fully fuse information from both glo…
Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research（微软Dynamics 365 AI研究院）
In this paper, we present Hierarchical Graph Network (HGN) for multi-hop question answering. To aggregate clues from scattered texts across multiple paragraphs, a hierarchical graph is created by constructing nodes on different levels of granularity (questions, paragraphs, sentences, entities), the representations of which are initialized with pre-trained contextual encoders. Given this hierarchical graph, the initial node representations are updated through graph propagation, and multi-hop reasoning is performed via traversing through the graph edges for each subsequent sub-task (e.g., paragr…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Distantly supervised datasets for relation extraction mostly focus on sentence-level extraction, and they cover very few relations. In this work, we propose cross-document relation extraction, where the two entities of a relation tuple appear in two different documents that are connected via a chain of common entities. Following this idea, we create a dataset for two-hop relation extraction, where each chain contains exactly two documents. Our proposed dataset covers a higher number of relations than the publicly available sentence-level datasets. We also propose a hierarchical entity graph co…
Jurtech（律典科技）；Maurer School of Law, Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校莫勒法学院）
Every lawsuit document contains the information about the party's claim, court's analysis, decision and others, and all of this information are helpful to understand the case better and predict the judge's decision on similar case in the future. However, the extraction of these information from the document is difficult because the language is too complicated and sentences varied at length. We treat this problem as a task of sequence labeling, and this paper presents the first research to extract relevant information from the civil lawsuit document in China with the hierarchical RNN framework.
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd（华为技术有限公司）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Recent works on relational triple extraction have shown the superiority of jointly extracting entities and relations over the pipelined extraction manner. However, most existing joint models fail to balance the modeling of entity features and the joint decoding strategy, and thus the interactions between the entity level and triple level are not fully investigated. In this work, we first introduce the hierarchical dependency and horizontal commonality between the two levels, and then propose an entity-enhanced dual tagging framework that enables the triple extraction (TE) task to utilize such …
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Document-level RE requires reading, inferring and aggregating over multiple sentences. From our point of view, it is necessary for document-level RE to take advantage of multi-granularity inference information: entity level, sentence level and document level. Thus, how to obtain and aggregate the inference information with different granularity is challenging for document-level RE, which has not been considered by previous work. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Inference Network (HIN) to make full use of the abundant information from entity level, sentence level and document level. Tra…
UC Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
Although distant supervision automatically generates training data for relation extraction, it also introduces false-positive (FP) and false-negative (FN) training instances to the generated datasets. Whereas both types of errors degrade the final model performance, previous work on distant supervision denoising focuses more on suppressing FP noise and less on resolving the FN problem. We here propose H-FND, a hierarchical false-negative denoising framework for robust distant supervision relation extraction, as an FN denoising solution. H-FND uses a hierarchical policy which first determines w…
Distant supervision uses triple facts in knowledge graphs to label a corpus for relation extraction, leading to wrong labeling and long-tail problems. Some works use the hierarchy of relations for knowledge transfer to long-tail relations. However, a coarse-grained relation often implies only an attribute (e.g., domain or topic) of the distant fact, making it hard to discriminate relations based solely on sentence semantics. One solution is resorting to entity types, but open questions remain about how to fully leverage the information of entity types and how to align multi-granular entity typ…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Biomedical event extraction is critical in understanding biomolecular interactions described in scientific corpus. One of the main challenges is to identify nested structured events that are associated with non-indicative trigger words. We propose to incorporate domain knowledge from Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to a pre-trained language model via Graph Edge-conditioned Attention Networks (GEANet) and hierarchical graph representation. To better recognize the trigger words, each sentence is first grounded to a sentence graph based on a jointly modeled hierarchical knowledge graph fro…
Distant supervision (DS) aims to generate large-scale heuristic labeling corpus, which is widely used for neural relation extraction currently. However, it heavily suffers from noisy labeling and long-tail distributions problem. Many advanced approaches usually separately address two problems, which ignore their mutual interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named RH-Net, which utilizes Reinforcement learning and Hierarchical relational searching module to improve relation extraction. We leverage reinforcement learning to instruct the model to select high-quality instances. W…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University (THUAI)（清华大学人工智能研究院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science & Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Most existing methods determine relation types only after all the entities have been recognized, thus the interaction between relation types and entity mentions is not fully modeled. This paper presents a novel paradigm to deal with relation extraction by regarding the related entities as the arguments of a relation. We apply a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework in this paradigm to enhance the interaction between entity mentions and relation types. The whole extraction process is decomposed into a hierarchy of two-level RL policies for relation detection and entity extraction …
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems（上海智能自主系统研究院）
Distant supervision assumes that any sentence containing the same entity pairs reflects identical relationships. Previous works of distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) task generally focus on sentence-level or bag-level de-noising techniques independently, neglecting the explicit interaction with cross levels. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning Framework for Distantly Supervised relation extraction (HiCLRE) to reduce noisy sentences, which integrate the global structural information and local fine-grained interaction. Specifically, we propose a three-level…
We build a reference for the task of Open Information Extraction, on five documents. We tentatively resolve a number of issues that arise, including inference and granularity. We seek to better pinpoint the requirements for the task. We produce our annotation guidelines specifying what is correct to extract and what is not. In turn, we use this reference to score existing Open IE systems. We address the non-trivial problem of evaluating the extractions produced by systems against the reference tuples, and share our evaluation script. Among seven compared extractors, we find the MinIE system to…
Few works in the literature of event extraction have gone beyond individual sentences to make extraction decisions. This is problematic when the information needed to recognize an event argument is spread across multiple sentences. We argue that document-level event extraction is a difficult task since it requires a view of a larger context to determine which spans of text correspond to event role fillers. We first investigate how end-to-end neural sequence models (with pre-trained language model representations) perform on document-level role filler extraction, as well as how the length of co…
Multimodal named entity recognition and relation extraction (MNER and MRE) is a fundamental and crucial branch in information extraction. However, existing approaches for MNER and MRE usually suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images incorporated in texts. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel Hierarchical Visual Prefix fusion NeTwork (HVPNeT) for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction, aiming to achieve more effective and robust performance. Specifically, we regard visual representation as pluggable visual prefix to guide the textual representation for error …
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）
Cluttering of SMS inbox is one of the serious problems that users today face in the digital world where every online login, transaction, along with promotions generate multiple SMS. This problem not only prevents users from searching and navigating messages efficiently but often results in users missing out the relevant information associated with the corresponding SMS like offer codes, payment reminders etc. In this paper, we propose a unique architecture to organize and extract the appropriate information from SMS and further display it in an intuitive template. In the proposed architecture,…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
The Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) task aims to extract emotions and causes as pairs from documents. We observe that the relative distance distribution of emotions and causes is extremely imbalanced in the typical ECPE dataset. Existing methods have set a fixed size window to capture relations between neighboring clauses. However, they neglect the effective semantic connections between distant clauses, leading to poor generalization ability towards position-insensitive data. To alleviate the problem, we propose a novel Multi-Granularity Semantic Aware Graph model (MGSAG) to incorporate f…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）
While Transformers have had significant success in paragraph generation, they treat sentences as linear sequences of tokens and often neglect their hierarchical information. Prior work has shown that decomposing the levels of granularity~(e.g., word, phrase, or sentence) for input tokens has produced substantial improvements, suggesting the possibility of enhancing Transformers via more fine-grained modeling of granularity. In this work, we propose a continuous decomposition of granularity for neural paraphrase generation (C-DNPG). In order to efficiently incorporate granularity into sentence …
A Multi-granularity Concept Sparse Activation and Hierarchical Knowledge Graph Fusion Framework for Rare Disease Diagnosis
School of Software, Yunnan University（云南大学软件学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Software Engineering（云南软件工程重点实验室）；Yunnan Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine（云南中医药省人民医院）
Topical keyphrase extraction is used to summarize large collections of text documents. However, traditional methods cannot properly reflect the intrinsic semantics and relationships of keyphrases because they rely on a simple term-frequency-based process. Consequently, these methods are not effective in obtaining significant contextual knowledge. To resolve this, we propose a topical keyphrase extraction method based on a hierarchical semantic network and multiple centrality network measures that together reflect the hierarchical semantics of keyphrases. We conduct experiments on real data to …
Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；Cognitiv+ Ltd.（Cognitiv+有限公司）
We consider the task of detecting contractual obligations and prohibitions. We show that a self-attention mechanism improves the performance of a BILSTM classifier, the previous state of the art for this task, by allowing it to focus on indicative tokens. We also introduce a hierarchical BILSTM, which converts each sentence to an embedding, and processes the sentence embeddings to classify each sentence. Apart from being faster to train, the hierarchical BILSTM outperforms the flat one, even when the latter considers surrounding sentences, because the hierarchical model has a broader discourse…
Automated fact extraction and verification is a challenging task that involves finding relevant evidence sentences from a reliable corpus to verify the truthfulness of a claim. Existing models either (i) concatenate all the evidence sentences, leading to the inclusion of redundant and noisy information; or (ii) process each claim-evidence sentence pair separately and aggregate all of them later, missing the early combination of related sentences for more accurate claim verification. Unlike the prior works, in this paper, we propose Hierarchical Evidence Set Modeling (HESM), a framework to extr…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
The emotion cause extraction (ECE) task aims at discovering the potential causes behind a certain emotion expression in a document. Techniques including rule-based methods, traditional machine learning methods and deep neural networks have been proposed to solve this task. However, most of the previous work considered ECE as a set of independent clause classification problems and ignored the relations between multiple clauses in a document. In this work, we propose a joint emotion cause extraction framework, named RNN-Transformer Hierarchical Network (RTHN), to encode and classify multiple cla…
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（A*STAR信息通信研究所）
Document-level discourse parsing, in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), remains notoriously challenging. Challenges include the deep structure of document-level discourse trees, the requirement of subtle semantic judgments, and the lack of large-scale training corpora. To address such challenges, we propose to exploit robust representations derived from multiple levels of granularity across syntax and semantics, and in turn incorporate such representations in an end-to-end encoder-decoder neural architecture for more resourceful discourse processing. In particular, we first…
From Code to Correctness: Closing the Last Mile of Code Generation with Hierarchical Debugging
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；University of Maryland Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Many real-world video-text tasks involve different levels of granularity, such as frames and words, clip and sentences or videos and paragraphs, each with distinct semantics. In this paper, we propose a Cooperative hierarchical Transformer (COOT) to leverage this hierarchy information and model the interactions between different levels of granularity and different modalities. The method consists of three major components: an attention-aware feature aggregation layer, which leverages the local temporal context (intra-level, e.g., within a clip), a contextual transformer to learn the interaction…
State Grid Corporation of China（国家电网有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
In this paper we address a task of relation mention extraction from noisy data: extracting representative phrases for a particular relation from noisy sentences that are collected via distant supervision. Despite its significance and value in many downstream applications, this task is less studied on noisy data. The major challenges exists in 1) the lack of annotation on mention phrases, and more severely, 2) handling noisy sentences which do not express a relation at all. To address the two challenges, we formulate the task as a semi-Markov decision process and propose a novel hierarchical re…
We present here our approach to the GermEval 2019 Task 1 - Shared Task on hierarchical classification of German blurbs. We achieved first place in the hierarchical subtask B and second place on the root node, flat classification subtask A. In subtask A, we applied a simple multi-feature TF-IDF extraction method using different n-gram range and stopword removal, on each feature extraction module. The classifier on top was a standard linear SVM. For the hierarchical classification, we used a local approach, which was more light-weighted but was similar to the one used in subtask A. The key point…
Ant Financial Services Group（蚂蚁金融服务集团）；Hasso Plattner Institute（哈索·普拉特纳研究所）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Human language understanding operates at multiple levels of granularity (e.g., words, phrases, and sentences) with increasing levels of abstraction that can be hierarchically combined. However, existing deep models with stacked layers do not explicitly model any sort of hierarchical process. This paper proposes a recursive Transformer model based on differentiable CKY style binary trees to emulate the composition process. We extend the bidirectional language model pre-training objective to this architecture, attempting to predict each word given its left and right abstraction nodes. To scale u…
Beyond Single-Granularity Prompts: A Multi-Scale Chain-of-Thought Prompt Learning for Graph
School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）
Text classification has become increasingly challenging due to the continuous refinement of classification label granularity and the expansion of classification label scale. To address that, some research has been applied onto strategies that exploit the hierarchical structure in problems with a large number of categories. At present, hierarchical text classification (HTC) has received extensive attention and has broad application prospects. Making full use of the relationship between parent category and child category in text classification task can greatly improve the performance of classifi…
