Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continually learn new relations from a class-incremental data stream. CRE model usually suffers from catastrophic forgetting problem, i.e., the performance of old relations seriously degrades when the model learns new relations. Most previous work attributes catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come, with an implicit assumption that the CRE models have adequately learned the old relations. In this paper, through empirical studies we argue that this assumption may not hold, and an important reason for catastrophic forgetting is that the learned representations do not have good robustness against the appearance of analogous relations in the subsequent learning process. To address this issue, we encourage the model to learn more precise and robust representations through a simple yet effective adversarial class augmentation mechanism (ACA), which is easy to implement and model-agnostic. Experimental results show that ACA can consistently improve the performance of state-of-the-art CRE models on two popular benchmarks.
Continual relation extraction (CRE) requires the model to continually learn new relations from class-incremental data streams. In this paper, we propose a Frustratingly easy but Effective Approach (FEA) method with two learning stages for CRE: 1) Fast Adaption (FA) warms up the model with only new data. 2) Balanced Tuning (BT) finetunes the model on the balanced memory data. Despite its simplicity, FEA achieves comparable (on TACRED or superior (on FewRel) performance compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. With careful examinations, we find that the data imbalance between new and old re…
National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University（北京大学软件工程国家工程研究中心）；School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）
Sequence generation demonstrates promising performance in recent information extraction efforts, by incorporating large-scale pre-trained Seq2Seq models. This paper investigates the merits of employing sequence generation in relation extraction, finding that with relation names or synonyms as generation targets, their textual semantics and the correlation (in terms of word sequence pattern) among them affect model performance. We then propose Relation Extraction with Label Augmentation (RELA), a Seq2Seq model with automatic label augmentation for RE. By saying label augmentation, we mean prod …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Hebei University of Science and Technology（河北科技大学）
Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continuously train a model on data with new relations while avoiding forgetting old ones. Some previous work has proved that storing a few typical samples of old relations and replaying them when learning new relations can effectively avoid forgetting. However, these memory-based methods tend to overfit the memory samples and perform poorly on imbalanced datasets. To solve these challenges, a consistent representation learning method is proposed, which maintains the stability of the relation embedding by adopting contrastive learning and knowledge di…
Continual Event Extraction with Semantic Confusion Rectification
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；National Institute of Healthcare Data Science, Nanjing University（南京大学健康医疗大数据国家研究院）
DP-CRE: Continual Relation Extraction via Decoupled Contrastive Learning and Memory Structure Preservation
Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院）
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Ministry of Industry and Information Technology（工业和信息化部）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
Thomson Reuters Special Services, LLC（汤森路透特别服务有限责任公司）
We introduce a hybrid human-automated system that provides scalable entity-risk relation extractions across large data sets. Given an expert-defined keyword taxonomy, entities, and data sources, the system returns text extractions based on bidirectional token distances between entities and keywords and expands taxonomy coverage with word vector encodings. Our system represents a more simplified architecture compared to alerting focused systems - motivated by high coverage use cases in the risk mining space such as due diligence activities and intelligence gathering. We provide an overview of t…
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies（广东省新型安全智能技术重点实验室）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Paradigm. Inc.（第四范式公司）
We present Mask-then-Fill, a flexible and effective data augmentation framework for event extraction. Our approach allows for more flexible manipulation of text and thus can generate more diverse data while keeping the original event structure unchanged as much as possible. Specifically, it first randomly masks out an adjunct sentence fragment and then infills a variable-length text span with a fine-tuned infilling model. The main advantage lies in that it can replace a fragment of arbitrary length in the text with another fragment of variable length, compared to the existing methods which can…
Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction via Open Information Extraction
Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科技大学）；Oraichain Labs Inc.（Oraichain实验室公司）；VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）；Bytedance（字节跳动）；VNU University of Engineering and Technology（越南国家大学工程技术大学）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
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）
Relation extraction that is the task of predicting semantic relation type between entities in a sentence or document is an important task in natural language processing. Although there are many researches and datasets for English, Persian suffers from sufficient researches and comprehensive datasets. The only available Persian dataset for this task is PERLEX, which is a Persian expert-translated version of the SemEval-2010-Task-8 dataset. In this paper, we present our augmented dataset and the results and findings of our system, participated in the Persian relation Extraction shared task of NS…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Gamma Lab, Ping An OneConnect（平安壹账通伽马实验室）
Continual relation extraction is an important task that focuses on extracting new facts incrementally from unstructured text. Given the sequential arrival order of the relations, this task is prone to two serious challenges, namely catastrophic forgetting and order-sensitivity. We propose a novel curriculum-meta learning method to tackle the above two challenges in continual relation extraction. We combine meta learning and curriculum learning to quickly adapt model parameters to a new task and to reduce interference of previously seen tasks on the current task. We design a novel relation repr…
Integrating extracted knowledge from the Web to knowledge graphs (KGs) can facilitate tasks like question answering. We study relation integration that aims to align free-text relations in subject-relation-object extractions to relations in a target KG. To address the challenge that free-text relations are ambiguous, previous methods exploit neighbor entities and relations for additional context. However, the predictions are made independently, which can be mutually inconsistent. We propose a two-stage Collective Relation Integration (CoRI) model, where the first stage independently makes cand…
With increasing applications in areas such as biomedical information extraction pipelines and social media analytics, Named Entity Recognition (NER) has become an indispensable tool for knowledge extraction. However, with the gradual shift in language structure and vocabulary, NERs are plagued with distribution shifts, making them redundant or not as profitable without re-training. Re-training NERs based on Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch over newly acquired data poses economic disadvantages. In contrast, re-training only with newly acquired data will result in Catastrophic Forgettin…
Towards real-world information extraction scenario, research of relation extraction is advancing to document-level relation extraction(DocRE). Existing approaches for DocRE aim to extract relation by encoding various information sources in the long context by novel model architectures. However, the inherent long-tailed distribution problem of DocRE is overlooked by prior work. We argue that mitigating the long-tailed distribution problem is crucial for DocRE in the real-world scenario. Motivated by the long-tailed distribution problem, we propose an Easy Relation Augmentation(ERA) method for i…
SSDAU: Structured Semantic Data Augmentation for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China（南京大学新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；Amap, Alibaba Group, China（阿里巴巴集团阿地图）；University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada（阿尔伯塔大学）；The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan（东京大学）
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
While pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved noticeable success on many NLP tasks, they still struggle for tasks that require event temporal reasoning, which is essential for event-centric applications. We present a continual pre-training approach that equips PTLMs with targeted knowledge about event temporal relations. We design self-supervised learning objectives to recover masked-out event and temporal indicators and to discriminate sentences from their corrupted counterparts (where event or temporal indicators got replaced). By further pre-training a PTLM with these objectives j…
VaeDiff-DocRE: End-to-end Data Augmentation Framework for Document-level Relation Extraction
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）；Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学数据科学与人工智能系）
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）
Contrastive learning has been used to learn a high-quality representation of the image in computer vision. However, contrastive learning is not widely utilized in natural language processing due to the lack of a general method of data augmentation for text data. In this work, we explore the method of employing contrastive learning to improve the text representation from the BERT model for relation extraction. The key knob of our framework is a unique contrastive pre-training step tailored for the relation extraction tasks by seamlessly integrating linguistic knowledge into the data augmentatio…
Contextually aware intelligent agents are often required to understand the users and their surroundings in real-time. Our goal is to build Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that can assist children in their learning process. Within such complex frameworks, Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) are crucial building blocks to handle efficient task-oriented communication with children in game-based learning settings. We are working towards a multimodal dialogue system for younger kids learning basic math concepts. Our focus is on improving the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module of the task-or…
We describe our system for SemEval-2018 Shared Task on Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification in Scientific Papers where we focus on the Classification task. Our simple piecewise convolution neural encoder performs decently in an end to end manner. A simple inter-task data augmentation signifi- cantly boosts the performance of the model. Our best-performing systems stood 8th out of 20 teams on the classification task on noisy data and 12th out of 28 teams on the classification task on clean data.
Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）
University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
We propose a simple and effective strategy for data augmentation for low-resource machine reading comprehension (MRC). Our approach first pretrains the answer extraction components of a MRC system on the augmented data that contains approximate context of the correct answers, before training it on the exact answer spans. The approximate context helps the QA method components in narrowing the location of the answers. We demonstrate that our simple strategy substantially improves both document retrieval and answer extraction performance by providing larger context of the answers and additional t…
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
Question Generation (QG), as a challenging Natural Language Processing task, aims at generating questions based on given answers and context. Existing QG methods mainly focus on building or training models for specific QG datasets. These works are subject to two major limitations: (1) They are dedicated to specific QG formats (e.g., answer-extraction or multi-choice QG), therefore, if we want to address a new format of QG, a re-design of the QG model is required. (2) Optimal performance is only achieved on the dataset they were just trained on. As a result, we have to train and keep various QG…
Data Augmented Pipeline for Legal Information Extraction and Reasoning
Center for Juris-Informatics, ROIS-DS（司法信息中心，ROIS-DS）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本先进科学研究所）；Research and Development Center for LLMs, NII（大语言模型研发中心，NII）
Existing continual relation learning (CRL) methods rely on plenty of labeled training data for learning a new task, which can be hard to acquire in real scenario as getting large and representative labeled data is often expensive and time-consuming. It is therefore necessary for the model to learn novel relational patterns with very few labeled data while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of previous task knowledge. In this paper, we formulate this challenging yet practical problem as continual few-shot relation learning (CFRL). Based on the finding that learning for new emerging few-shot tasks…
In many applications of machine learning, certain categories of examples may be underrepresented in the training data, causing systems to underperform on such "few-shot" cases at test time. A common remedy is to perform data augmentation, such as by duplicating underrepresented examples, or heuristically synthesizing new examples. But these remedies often fail to cover the full diversity and complexity of real examples. We propose a data augmentation approach that performs neural Example Extrapolation (Ex2). Given a handful of exemplars sampled from some distribution, Ex2 synthesizes new examp…
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…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Sinovation Ventures（创新工场）
Aspect term extraction aims to extract aspect terms from review texts as opinion targets for sentiment analysis. One of the big challenges with this task is the lack of sufficient annotated data. While data augmentation is potentially an effective technique to address the above issue, it is uncontrollable as it may change aspect words and aspect labels unexpectedly. In this paper, we formulate the data augmentation as a conditional generation task: generating a new sentence while preserving the original opinion targets and labels. We propose a masked sequence-to-sequence method for conditional…
University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
Keyphrase extraction is one of the essential tasks for document understanding in NLP. While the majority of the prior works are dedicated to the formal setting, e.g., books, news or web-blogs, informal texts such as video transcripts are less explored. To address this limitation, in this work we present a novel corpus and method for keyphrase extraction from the transcripts of the videos streamed on the Behance platform. More specifically, in this work, a novel data augmentation is proposed to enrich the model with the background knowledge about the keyphrase extraction task from other domains…
