Hongbo Xu


2023

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Learning to Correct Noisy Labels for Fine-Grained Entity Typing via Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning
Minghao Tang | Yongquan He | Yongxiu Xu | Hongbo Xu | Wenyuan Zhang | Yang Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Fine-grained entity typing (FET) is an essential task in natural language processing that aims to assign semantic types to entities in text. However, FET poses a major challenge known as the noise labeling problem, whereby current methods rely on estimating noise distribution to identify noisy labels but are confused by diverse noise distribution deviation. To address this limitation, we introduce Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning for noise correction in FET, which leverages multiple prediction results to identify and correct noisy labels. Specifically, we integrate prediction results to recall labeled labels and utilize a differentiated margin to identify inaccurate labels. Moreover, we design an optimization objective concerning divergent co-predictions during fine-tuning, ensuring that the model captures sufficient information and maintains robustness in noise identification. Experimental results on three widely-used FET datasets demonstrate that our noise correction approach significantly enhances the quality of various types of training samples, including those annotated using distant supervision, ChatGPT, and crowdsourcing.

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A Boundary Offset Prediction Network for Named Entity Recognition
Minghao Tang | Yongquan He | Yongxiu Xu | Hongbo Xu | Wenyuan Zhang | Yang Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to identify and classify named entities in text. However, span-based methods for NER typically assign entity types to text spans, resulting in an imbalanced sample space and neglecting the connections between non-entity and entity spans. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach for NER, named the Boundary Offset Prediction Network (BOPN), which predicts the boundary offsets between candidate spans and their nearest entity spans. By leveraging the guiding semantics of boundary offsets, BOPN establishes connections between non-entity and entity spans, enabling non-entity spans to function as additional positive samples for entity detection. Furthermore, our method integrates entity type and span representations to generate type-aware boundary offsets instead of using entity types as detection targets. We conduct experiments on eight widely-used NER datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed BOPN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

2022

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DoSEA: A Domain-specific Entity-aware Framework for Cross-Domain Named Entity Recogition
Minghao Tang | Peng Zhang | Yongquan He | Yongxiu Xu | Chengpeng Chao | Hongbo Xu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Cross-domain named entity recognition aims to improve performance in a target domain with shared knowledge from a well-studied source domain. The previous sequence-labeling based method focuses on promoting model parameter sharing among domains. However, such a paradigm essentially ignores the domain-specific information and suffers from entity type conflicts. To address these issues, we propose a novel machine reading comprehension based framework, named DoSEA, which can identify domain-specific semantic differences and mitigate the subtype conflicts between domains. Concretely, we introduce an entity existence discrimination task and an entity-aware training setting, to recognize inconsistent entity annotations in the source domain and bring additional reference to better share information across domains. Experiments on six datasets prove the effectiveness of our DoSEA. Our source code can be obtained from https://github.com/mhtang1995/DoSEA.

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Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence
Mengxiao Song | Bowen Yu | Li Quangang | Wang Yubin | Tingwen Liu | Hongbo Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multi-intent detection and slot filling joint model attracts more and more attention since it can handle multi-intent utterances, which is closer to complex real-world scenarios. Most existing joint models rely entirely on the training procedure to obtain the implicit correlation between intents and slots. However, they ignore the fact that leveraging the rich global knowledge in the corpus can determine the intuitive and explicit correlation between intents and slots. In this paper, we aim to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. To be specific, an intent-slot co-occurrence graph is constructed based on the entire training corpus to globally discover correlation between intents and slots. Based on the global intent-slot co-occurrence, we propose a novel graph neural network to model the interaction between the two subtasks. Experimental results on two public multi-intent datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

2021

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CasEE: A Joint Learning Framework with Cascade Decoding for Overlapping Event Extraction
Jiawei Sheng | Shu Guo | Bowen Yu | Qian Li | Yiming Hei | Lihong Wang | Tingwen Liu | Hongbo Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Improving Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning
Xinghua Zhang | Bowen Yu | Tingwen Liu | Zhenyu Zhang | Jiawei Sheng | Xue Mengge | Hongbo Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) efficiently reduces labor costs but meanwhile intrinsically suffers from the label noise due to the strong assumption of distant supervision. Typically, the wrongly labeled instances comprise numbers of incomplete and inaccurate annotations, while most prior denoising works are only concerned with one kind of noise and fail to fully explore useful information in the training set. To address this issue, we propose a robust learning paradigm named Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning (SCDL), which jointly trains two teacher-student networks in a mutually-beneficial manner to iteratively perform noisy label refinery. Each network is designed to exploit reliable labels via self denoising, and two networks communicate with each other to explore unreliable annotations by collaborative denoising. Extensive experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SCDL is superior to state-of-the-art DS-NER denoising methods.

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Improving Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning
Xinghua Zhang | Bowen Yu | Tingwen Liu | Zhenyu Zhang | Jiawei Sheng | Xue Mengge | Hongbo Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) efficiently reduces labor costs but meanwhile intrinsically suffers from the label noise due to the strong assumption of distant supervision. Typically, the wrongly labeled instances comprise numbers of incomplete and inaccurate annotations, while most prior denoising works are only concerned with one kind of noise and fail to fully explore useful information in the training set. To address this issue, we propose a robust learning paradigm named Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning (SCDL), which jointly trains two teacher-student networks in a mutually-beneficial manner to iteratively perform noisy label refinery. Each network is designed to exploit reliable labels via self denoising, and two networks communicate with each other to explore unreliable annotations by collaborative denoising. Extensive experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SCDL is superior to state-of-the-art DS-NER denoising methods.

2020

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Adaptive Attentional Network for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion
Jiawei Sheng | Shu Guo | Zhenyu Chen | Juwei Yue | Lihong Wang | Tingwen Liu | Hongbo Xu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes. The source code is available at https://github.com/JiaweiSheng/FAAN.