Saiping Guan


2022

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Complex Evolutional Pattern Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Zixuan Li | Saiping Guan | Xiaolong Jin | Weihua Peng | Yajuan Lyu | Yong Zhu | Long Bai | Wei Li | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) is a sequence of KGs corresponding to different timestamps. TKG reasoning aims to predict potential facts in the future given the historical KG sequences. One key of this task is to mine and understand evolutional patterns of facts from these sequences. The evolutional patterns are complex in two aspects, length-diversity and time-variability. Existing models for TKG reasoning focus on modeling fact sequences of a fixed length, which cannot discover complex evolutional patterns that vary in length. Furthermore, these models are all trained offline, which cannot well adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns from then on. Thus, we propose a new model, called Complex Evolutional Network (CEN), which uses a length-aware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to handle evolutional patterns of different lengths via an easy-to-difficult curriculum learning strategy. Besides, we propose to learn the model under the online setting so that it can adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CEN obtains substantial performance improvement under both the traditional offline and the proposed online settings.

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MetaSLRCL: A Self-Adaptive Learning Rate and Curriculum Learning Based Framework for Few-Shot Text Classification
Kailin Zhao | Xiaolong Jin | Saiping Guan | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Due to the lack of labeled data in many realistic scenarios, a number of few-shot learning methods for text classification have been proposed, among which the meta learning based ones have recently attracted much attention. Such methods usually consist of a learner as the classifier and a meta learner for specializing the learner to different tasks. For the learner, learning rate is crucial to its performance. However, existing methods treat it as a hyper parameter and adjust it manually, which is time-consuming and laborious. Intuitively, for different tasks and neural network layers, the learning rates should be different and self-adaptive. For the meta learner, it requires a good generalization ability so as to quickly adapt to new tasks. Motivated by these issues, we propose a novel meta learning framework, called MetaSLRCL, for few-shot text classification. Specifically, we present a novel meta learning mechanism to obtain different learning rates for different tasks and neural network layers so as to enable the learner to quickly adapt to new training data. Moreover, we propose a task-oriented curriculum learning mechanism to help the meta learner achieve a better generalization ability by learning from different tasks with increasing difficulties. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaSLRCL.

2021

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Search from History and Reason for Future: Two-stage Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Zixuan Li | Xiaolong Jin | Saiping Guan | Wei Li | Jiafeng Guo | Yuanzhuo Wang | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) have been developed and used in many different areas. Reasoning on TKGs that predicts potential facts (events) in the future brings great challenges to existing models. When facing a prediction task, human beings usually search useful historical information (i.e., clues) in their memories and then reason for future meticulously. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose CluSTeR to predict future facts in a two-stage manner, Clue Searching and Temporal Reasoning, accordingly. Specifically, at the clue searching stage, CluSTeR learns a beam search policy via reinforcement learning (RL) to induce multiple clues from historical facts. At the temporal reasoning stage, it adopts a graph convolution network based sequence method to deduce answers from clues. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the substantial advantages of CluSTeR compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the clues found by CluSTeR further provide interpretability for the results.

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Integrating Deep Event-Level and Script-Level Information for Script Event Prediction
Long Bai | Saiping Guan | Jiafeng Guo | Zixuan Li | Xiaolong Jin | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Scripts are structured sequences of events together with the participants, which are extracted from the texts. Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the historical events in the script. Two kinds of information facilitate this task, namely, the event-level information and the script-level information. At the event level, existing studies view an event as a verb with its participants, while neglecting other useful properties, such as the state of the participants. At the script level, most existing studies only consider a single event sequence corresponding to one common protagonist. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model, called MCPredictor, which integrates deep event-level and script-level information for script event prediction. At the event level, MCPredictor utilizes the rich information in the text to obtain more comprehensive event semantic representations. At the script-level, it considers multiple event sequences corresponding to different participants of the subsequent event. The experimental results on the widely-used New York Times corpus demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.

2020

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NeuInfer: Knowledge Inference on N-ary Facts
Saiping Guan | Xiaolong Jin | Jiafeng Guo | Yuanzhuo Wang | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Knowledge inference on knowledge graph has attracted extensive attention, which aims to find out connotative valid facts in knowledge graph and is very helpful for improving the performance of many downstream applications. However, researchers have mainly poured attention to knowledge inference on binary facts. The studies on n-ary facts are relatively scarcer, although they are also ubiquitous in the real world. Therefore, this paper addresses knowledge inference on n-ary facts. We represent each n-ary fact as a primary triple coupled with a set of its auxiliary descriptive attribute-value pair(s). We further propose a neural network model, NeuInfer, for knowledge inference on n-ary facts. Besides handling the common task to infer an unknown element in a whole fact, NeuInfer can cope with a new type of task, flexible knowledge inference. It aims to infer an unknown element in a partial fact consisting of the primary triple coupled with any number of its auxiliary description(s). Experimental results demonstrate the remarkable superiority of NeuInfer.

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Event Coreference Resolution with their Paraphrases and Argument-aware Embeddings
Yutao Zeng | Xiaolong Jin | Saiping Guan | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Event coreference resolution aims to classify all event mentions that refer to the same real-world event into the same group, which is necessary to information aggregation and many downstream applications. To resolve event coreference, existing methods usually calculate the similarities between event mentions and between specific kinds of event arguments. However, they fail to accurately identify paraphrase relations between events and may suffer from error propagation while extracting event components (i.e., event mentions and their arguments). Therefore, we propose a new model based on Event-specific Paraphrases and Argument-aware Semantic Embeddings, thus called EPASE, for event coreference resolution. EPASE recognizes deep paraphrase relations in an event-specific context of sentences and can cover event paraphrases of more situations, bringing about a better generalization. Additionally, the embeddings of argument roles are encoded into event embedding without relying on a fixed number and type of arguments, which results in the better scalability of EPASE. Experiments on both within- and cross-document event coreference demonstrate its consistent and significant superiority compared to existing methods.