Low-resource Taxonomy Enrichment with Pretrained Language Models

Kunihiro Takeoka, Kosuke Akimoto, Masafumi Oyamada


Abstract
Taxonomies are symbolic representations of hierarchical relationships between terms or entities. While taxonomies are useful in broad applications, manually updating or maintaining them is labor-intensive and difficult to scale in practice. Conventional supervised methods for this enrichment task fail to find optimal parents of new terms in low-resource settings where only small taxonomies are available because of overfitting to hierarchical relationships in the taxonomies. To tackle the problem of low-resource taxonomy enrichment, we propose Musubu, an efficient framework for taxonomy enrichment in low-resource settings with pretrained language models (LMs) as knowledge bases to compensate for the shortage of information. Musubu leverages an LM-based classifier to determine whether or not inputted term pairs have hierarchical relationships. Musubu also utilizes Hearst patterns to generate queries to leverage implicit knowledge from the LM efficiently for more accurate prediction. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in extensive experiments on taxonomies from both a SemEval task and real-world retailer datasets.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.217
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2747–2758
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.217
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.217
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kunihiro Takeoka, Kosuke Akimoto, and Masafumi Oyamada. 2021. Low-resource Taxonomy Enrichment with Pretrained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2747–2758, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Low-resource Taxonomy Enrichment with Pretrained Language Models (Takeoka et al., EMNLP 2021)
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