Knowledge bases (KBs) contain plenty of structured world and commonsense knowledge. As such, they often complement distributional text-based information and facilitate various downstream tasks. Since their manual construction is resource- and time-intensive, recent efforts have tried leveraging large pretrained language models (PLMs) to generate additional monolingual knowledge facts for KBs. However, such methods have not been attempted for building and enriching multilingual KBs. Besides wider application, such multilingual KBs can provide richer combined knowledge than monolingual (e.g., English) KBs. Knowledge expressed in different languages may be complementary and unequally distributed: this implies that the knowledge available in high-resource languages can be transferred to low-resource ones. To achieve this, it is crucial to represent multilingual knowledge in a shared/unified space. To this end, we propose a unified representation model, Prix-LM, for multilingual KB construction and completion. We leverage two types of knowledge, monolingual triples and cross-lingual links, extracted from existing multilingual KBs, and tune a multilingual language encoder XLM-R via a causal language modeling objective. Prix-LM integrates useful multilingual and KB-based factual knowledge into a single model. Experiments on standard entity-related tasks, such as link prediction in multiple languages, cross-lingual entity linking and bilingual lexicon induction, demonstrate its effectiveness, with gains reported over strong task-specialised baselines.

Sentence-level relation extraction (RE) aims at identifying the relationship between two entities in a sentence. Many efforts have been devoted to this problem, while the best performing methods are still far from perfect. In this paper, we revisit two problems that affect the performance of existing RE models, namely entity representation and noisy or ill-defined labels. Our improved RE baseline, incorporated with entity representations with typed markers, achieves an F1 of 74.6% on TACRED, significantly outperforms previous SOTA methods. Furthermore, the presented new baseline achieves an F1 of 91.1% on the refined Re-TACRED dataset, demonstrating that the pretrained language models (PLMs) achieve high performance on this task. We release our code to the community for future research.

Entity types and textual context are essential properties for sentence-level relation extraction (RE). Existing work only encodes these properties within individual instances, which limits the performance of RE given the insufficient features in a single sentence. In contrast, we model these properties from the whole dataset and use the dataset-level information to enrich the semantics of every instance. We propose the GraphCache (Graph Neural Network as Caching) module, that propagates the features across sentences to learn better representations for RE. GraphCache aggregates the features from sentences in the whole dataset to learn global representations of properties, and use them to augment the local features within individual sentences. The global property features act as dataset-level prior knowledge for RE, and a complement to the sentence-level features. Inspired by the classical caching technique in computer systems, we develop GraphCache to update the property representations in an online manner. Overall, GraphCache yields significant effectiveness gains on RE and enables efficient message passing across all sentences in the dataset.

Recent literature focuses on utilizing the entity information in the sentence-level relation extraction (RE), but this risks leaking superficial and spurious clues of relations. As a result, RE still suffers from unintended entity bias, i.e., the spurious correlation between entity mentions (names) and relations. Entity bias can mislead the RE models to extract the relations that do not exist in the text. To combat this issue, some previous work masks the entity mentions to prevent the RE models from over-fitting entity mentions. However, this strategy degrades the RE performance because it loses the semantic information of entities. In this paper, we propose the CoRE (Counterfactual Analysis based Relation Extraction) debiasing method that guides the RE models to focus on the main effects of textual context without losing the entity information. We first construct a causal graph for RE, which models the dependencies between variables in RE models. Then, we propose to conduct counterfactual analysis on our causal graph to distill and mitigate the entity bias, that captures the causal effects of specific entity mentions in each instance. Note that our CoRE method is model-agnostic to debias existing RE systems during inference without changing their training processes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CoRE yields significant gains on both effectiveness and generalization for RE. The source code is provided at: https://github.com/vanoracai/CoRE.

Current question answering (QA) systems primarily consider the single-answer scenario, where each question is assumed to be paired with one correct answer. However, in many real-world QA applications, multiple answer scenarios arise where consolidating answers into a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers is a more efficient user interface. In this paper, we formulate the problem of answer consolidation, where answers are partitioned into multiple groups, each representing different aspects of the answer set. Then, given this partitioning, a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers can be constructed by picking one answer from each group. To initiate research on answer consolidation, we construct a dataset consisting of 4,699 questions and 24,006 sentences and evaluate multiple models. Despite a promising performance achieved by the best-performing supervised models, we still believe this task has room for further improvements.

Pretrained Transformers achieve remarkable performance when training and test data are from the same distribution. However, in real-world scenarios, the model often faces out-of-distribution (OOD) instances that can cause severe semantic shift problems at inference time. Therefore, in practice, a reliable model should identify such instances, and then either reject them during inference or pass them over to models that handle another distribution. In this paper, we develop an unsupervised OOD detection method, in which only the in-distribution (ID) data are used in training. We propose to fine-tune the Transformers with a contrastive loss, which improves the compactness of representations, such that OOD instances can be better differentiated from ID ones. These OOD instances can then be accurately detected using the Mahalanobis distance in the model’s penultimate layer. We experiment with comprehensive settings and achieve near-perfect OOD detection performance, outperforming baselines drastically. We further investigate the rationales behind the improvement, finding that more compact representations through margin-based contrastive learning bring the improvement. We release our code to the community for future research.

Recent information extraction approaches have relied on training deep neural models. However, such models can easily overfit noisy labels and suffer from performance degradation. While it is very costly to filter noisy labels in large learning resources, recent studies show that such labels take more training steps to be memorized and are more frequently forgotten than clean labels, therefore are identifiable in training. Motivated by such properties, we propose a simple co-regularization framework for entity-centric information extraction, which consists of several neural models with identical structures but different parameter initialization. These models are jointly optimized with the task-specific losses and are regularized to generate similar predictions based on an agreement loss, which prevents overfitting on noisy labels. Extensive experiments on two widely used but noisy benchmarks for information extraction, TACRED and CoNLL03, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We release our code to the community for future research.

In this paper, we propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification. Instead of using user-generated ratings or annotations provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as “supervision.” These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment polarity classifier to predict the sentiment polarity of each aspect given a document. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity, to the objective function, we can inject the sentiment polarity classifier to the objective via the variational lower bound. We can learn a sentiment polarity classifier by optimizing the lower bound. We show that our method can outperform weakly supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets and can be comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised method with hundreds of labels per aspect.

Due to the ability of encoding and mapping semantic information into a high-dimensional latent feature space, neural networks have been successfully used for detecting events to a certain extent. However, such a feature space can be easily contaminated by spurious features inherent in event detection. In this paper, we propose a self-regulated learning approach by utilizing a generative adversarial network to generate spurious features. On the basis, we employ a recurrent network to eliminate the fakes. Detailed experiments on the ACE 2005 and TAC-KBP 2015 corpora show that our proposed method is highly effective and adaptable.

We present a novel method of comparable corpora construction. Unlike the traditional methods which heavily rely on linguistic features, our method only takes image similarity into consid-eration. We use an image-image search engine to obtain similar images, together with the cap-tions in source language and target language. On the basis, we utilize captions of similar imag-es to construct sentence-level bilingual corpora. Experiments on 10,371 target captions show that our method achieves a precision of 0.85 in the top search results.