Help documents are supposed to aid smartphone users in resolving queries such as “How to block calls from unknown numbers?”. However, given a query, identifying the right help document, understanding instructions from the document, and using them to resolve the issue at hand is challenging. The user experience may be enhanced by converting the instructions in the help document to a step-by-step tutorial overlaid on the phone UI. Successful execution of this task requires overcoming research challenges in retrieval, parsing, and grounding in the multilingual-multimodal setting. For example, user queries in one language may have to be matched against instructions in another language, which in turn needs to be grounded in a multimodal UI in yet another language. Moreover, there isn’t any relevant dataset for such a task. In order to bridge this gap, we introduce UGIF-DataSet, a multi-lingual, multi-modal UI grounded dataset for step-by-step task completion on the smartphone, containing 4,184 tasks across 8 languages. The instruction steps in UGIF-DataSet are available only in English, so the challenge involves operations in the cross-modal, cross-lingual setting. We compare the performance of different large language models for this task and find that the end-to-end task completion rate drops from 48% in English to 32% for other languages, demonstrating significant overall headroom for improvement. We are hopeful that UGIF-DataSet and our analysis will aid further research on the important problem of sequential task completion in the multilingual and multimodal setting.

Recent years have witnessed interest in Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA), resulting in the development of multiple methods. However, these are highly engineered, thereby limiting their generalizability, and they do not automatically discover relevant parts of the KG during multi-hop reasoning. Relational graph convolutional networks (RGCN) provide an opportunity to address both of these challenges – we explore this direction in the paper. Specifically, we propose a novel, intuitive and interpretable scheme to modulate the messages passed through a KG edge during convolution based on the relevance of its associated period to the question. We also introduce a gating device to predict if the answer to a complex temporal question is likely to be a KG entity or time and use this prediction to guide our scoring mechanism. We evaluate the resulting system, which we call TwiRGCN, on a recent challenging dataset for multi-hop complex temporal QA called TimeQuestions. We show that TwiRGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on this dataset across diverse question types. Interestingly, TwiRGCN improves accuracy by 9–10 percentage points for the most difficult ordinal and implicit question types.

Despite cross-lingual generalization demonstrated by pre-trained multilingual models, the translate-train paradigm of transferring English datasets across multiple languages remains to be a key mechanism for training task-specific multilingual models. However, for many low-resource languages, the availability of a reliable translation service entails significant amounts of costly human-annotated translation pairs. Further, translation services may continue to be brittle due to domain mismatch between task-specific input text and general-purpose text used for training translation models. For multilingual semantic parsing, we demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility offered by large language models (LLMs) for translating English datasets into several languages via few-shot prompting. Through extensive comparisons on two public datasets, MTOP and MASSIVE, spanning 50 languages and several domains, we show that our method of translating data using LLMs outperforms a strong translate-train baseline on 41 out of 50 languages. We study the key design choices that enable more effective multilingual data translation via prompted LLMs.

Salient Span Masking (SSM) has shown itself to be an effective strategy to improve closed-book question answering performance. SSM extends general masked language model pretraining by creating additional unsupervised training sentences that mask a single entity or date span, thus oversampling factual information. Despite the success of this paradigm, the span types and sampling strategies are relatively arbitrary and not widely studied for other tasks. Thus, we investigate SSM from the perspective of temporal tasks, where learning a good representation of various temporal expressions is important. To that end, we introduce Temporal Span Masking (TSM) intermediate training. First, we find that SSM alone improves the downstream performance on three temporal tasks by an avg. +5.8 points. Further, we are able to achieve additional improvements (avg. +0.29 points) by adding the TSM task. These comprise the new best reported results on the targeted tasks. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of SSM stems from the sentences chosen in the training data rather than the mask choice: sentences with entities frequently also contain temporal expressions. Nonetheless, the additional targeted spans of TSM can still improve performance, especially in a zero-shot context.

Recent advances in pretrained multilingual models such as Multilingual T5 (mT5) have facilitated cross-lingual transfer by learning shared representations across languages. Leveraging pretrained multilingual models for scaling morphology analyzers to low-resource languages is a unique opportunity that has been under-explored so far. We investigate this line of research in the context of Indian languages, focusing on two important morphological sub-tasks: root word extraction and tagging morphosyntactic descriptions (MSD), viz., gender, number, and person (GNP). We experiment with six Indian languages from two language families (Dravidian and Indo-Aryan) to train a multilingual morphology analyzers for the first time for Indian languages. We demonstrate the usability of multilingual models for few-shot cross-lingual transfer through an average 7% increase in GNP tagging in a cross-lingual setting as compared to a monolingual setting through controlled experiments. We provide an overview of the state of the datasets available related to our tasks and point-out a few modeling limitations due to datasets. Lastly, we analyze the cross-lingual transfer of morphological tags for verbs and nouns, which provides a proxy for the quality of representations of word markings learned by the model.

In order for NLP technology to be widely applicable, fair, and useful, it needs to serve a diverse set of speakers across the world’s languages, be equitable, i.e., not unduly biased towards any particular language, and be inclusive of all users, particularly in low-resource settings where compute constraints are common. In this paper, we propose an evaluation paradigm that assesses NLP technologies across all three dimensions. While diversity and inclusion have received attention in recent literature, equity is currently unexplored. We propose to address this gap using the Gini coefficient, a well-established metric used for estimating societal wealth inequality. Using our paradigm, we highlight the distressed state of current technologies for Indian (IN) languages (a linguistically large and diverse set, with a varied speaker population), across all three dimensions. To improve upon these metrics, we demonstrate the importance of region-specific choices in model building and dataset creation, and more importantly, propose a novel, generalisable approach to optimal resource allocation during fine-tuning. Finally, we discuss steps to mitigate these biases and encourage the community to employ multi-faceted evaluation when building linguistically diverse and equitable technologies.

We introduce and study the problem of Continual Multilingual Learning (CML) where a previously trained multilingual model is periodically updated using new data arriving in stages. If the new data is present only in a subset of languages, we find that the resulting model shows improved performance only on the languages included in the latest update (and a few closely related languages) while its performance on all the remaining languages degrade significantly. We address this challenge by proposing LAFT-URIEL, a parameter-efficient finetuning strategy which aims to increase the number of languages on which the model improves after an update, while reducing the magnitude of loss in performance for the remaining languages. LAFT-URIEL uses linguistic knowledge to balance overfitting and knowledge sharing across languages, allowing for an additional 25% of task languages to see an improvement in performance after an update, while also reducing the average magnitude of losses on the remaining languages by 78% relative.

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) — languages for which NLP research is particularly far behind in meeting user needs — it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks — tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text), supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models.

Language Models (LMs) pre-trained with selfsupervision on large text corpora have become the default starting point for developing models for various NLP tasks. Once the pre-training corpus has been assembled, all data samples in the corpus are treated with equal importance during LM pre-training. However, due to varying levels of relevance and quality of data, equal importance to all the data samples may not be the optimal choice. While data reweighting has been explored in the context of task-specific supervised learning and LM fine-tuning, model-driven reweighting for pretraining data has not been explored. We fill this important gap and propose PRESENCE, a method for jointly reweighting samples by leveraging self-influence (SI) scores as an indicator of sample importance and pre-training. PRESENCE promotes novelty and stability for model pre-training. Through extensive analysis spanning multiple model sizes, datasets, and tasks, we present PRESENCE as an important first step in the research direction of sample reweighting for pre-training language models.

Pre-trained multilingual language models such as mBERT and XLM-R have demonstrated great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low web-resource languages (LRL). However, due to limited model capacity, the large difference in the sizes of available monolingual corpora between high web-resource languages (HRL) and LRLs does not provide enough scope of co-embedding the LRL with the HRL, thereby affecting the downstream task performance of LRLs. In this paper, we argue that relatedness among languages in a language family along the dimension of lexical overlap may be leveraged to overcome some of the corpora limitations of LRLs. We propose Overlap BPE (OBPE), a simple yet effective modification to the BPE vocabulary generation algorithm which enhances overlap across related languages. Through extensive experiments on multiple NLP tasks and datasets, we observe that OBPE generates a vocabulary that increases the representation of LRLs via tokens shared with HRLs. This results in improved zero-shot transfer from related HRLs to LRLs without reducing HRL representation and accuracy. Unlike previous studies that dismissed the importance of token-overlap, we show that in the low-resource related language setting, token overlap matters. Synthetically reducing the overlap to zero can cause as much as a four-fold drop in zero-shot transfer accuracy.

Style transfer is the task of rewriting a sentence into a target style while approximately preserving content. While most prior literature assumes access to a large style-labelled corpus, recent work (Riley et al. 2021) has attempted “few-shot” style transfer using only 3-10 sentences at inference for style extraction. In this work we study a relevant low-resource setting: style transfer for languages where no style-labelled corpora are available. We notice that existing few-shot methods perform this task poorly, often copying inputs verbatim. We push the state-of-the-art for few-shot style transfer with a new method modeling the stylistic difference between paraphrases. When compared to prior work, our model achieves 2-3x better performance in formality transfer and code-mixing addition across seven languages. Moreover, our method is better at controlling the style transfer magnitude using an input scalar knob. We report promising qualitative results for several attribute transfer tasks (sentiment transfer, simplification, gender neutralization, text anonymization) all without retraining the model. Finally, we find model evaluation to be difficult due to the lack of datasets and metrics for many languages. To facilitate future research we crowdsource formality annotations for 4000 sentence pairs in four Indic languages, and use this data to design our automatic evaluations.

Recent research has revealed undesirable biases in NLP data and models. However, these efforts focus of social disparities in West, and are not directly portable to other geo-cultural contexts. In this paper, we focus on NLP fairness in the context of India. We start with a brief account of the prominent axes of social disparities in India. We build resources for fairness evaluation in the Indian context and use them to demonstrate prediction biases along some of the axes. We then delve deeper into social stereotypes for Region and Religion, demonstrating its prevalence in corpora and models. Finally, we outline a holistic research agenda to re-contextualize NLP fairness research for the Indian context, accounting for Indian societal context, bridging technological gaps in NLP capabilities and resources, and adapting to Indian cultural values. While we focus on India, this framework can be generalized to other geo-cultural contexts.

While recent work on multilingual language models has demonstrated their capacity for cross-lingual zero-shot transfer on downstream tasks, there is a lack of consensus in the community as to what shared properties between languages enable such transfer. Analyses involving pairs of natural languages are often inconclusive and contradictory since languages simultaneously differ in many linguistic aspects. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to isolate the effects of various linguistic properties by measuring zero-shot transfer between four diverse natural languages and their counterparts constructed by modifying aspects such as the script, word order, and syntax. Among other things, our experiments show that the absence of sub-word overlap significantly affects zero-shot transfer when languages differ in their word order, and there is a strong correlation between transfer performance and word embedding alignment between languages (e.g., 𝜌_s=0.94 on the task of NLI). Our results call for focus in multilingual models on explicitly improving word embedding alignment between languages rather than relying on its implicit emergence.

Recent research in multilingual language models (LM) has demonstrated their ability to effectively handle multiple languages in a single model. This holds promise for low web-resource languages (LRL) as multilingual models can enable transfer of supervision from high resource languages to LRLs. However, incorporating a new language in an LM still remains a challenge, particularly for languages with limited corpora and in unseen scripts. In this paper we argue that relatedness among languages in a language family may be exploited to overcome some of the corpora limitations of LRLs, and propose RelateLM. We focus on Indian languages, and exploit relatedness along two dimensions: (1) script (since many Indic scripts originated from the Brahmic script), and (2) sentence structure. RelateLM uses transliteration to convert the unseen script of limited LRL text into the script of a Related Prominent Language (RPL) (Hindi in our case). While exploiting similar sentence structures, RelateLM utilizes readily available bilingual dictionaries to pseudo translate RPL text into LRL corpora. Experiments on multiple real-world benchmark datasets provide validation to our hypothesis that using a related language as pivot, along with transliteration and pseudo translation based data augmentation, can be an effective way to adapt LMs for LRLs, rather than direct training or pivoting through English.

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (Temporal KGs) extend regular Knowledge Graphs by providing temporal scopes (start and end times) on each edge in the KG. While Question Answering over KG (KGQA) has received some attention from the research community, QA over Temporal KGs (Temporal KGQA) is a relatively unexplored area. Lack of broad coverage datasets has been another factor limiting progress in this area. We address this challenge by presenting CRONQUESTIONS, the largest known Temporal KGQA dataset, clearly stratified into buckets of structural complexity. CRONQUESTIONS expands the only known previous dataset by a factor of 340x. We find that various state-of-the-art KGQA methods fall far short of the desired performance on this new dataset. In response, we also propose CRONKGQA, a transformer-based solution that exploits recent advances in Temporal KG embeddings, and achieves performance superior to all baselines, with an increase of 120% in accuracy over the next best performing method. Through extensive experiments, we give detailed insights into the workings of CRONKGQA, as well as situations where significant further improvements appear possible. In addition to the dataset, we have released our code as well.

Knowledge Graphs (KG) are multi-relational graphs consisting of entities as nodes and relations among them as typed edges. Goal of the Question Answering over KG (KGQA) task is to answer natural language queries posed over the KG. Multi-hop KGQA requires reasoning over multiple edges of the KG to arrive at the right answer. KGs are often incomplete with many missing links, posing additional challenges for KGQA, especially for multi-hop KGQA. Recent research on multi-hop KGQA has attempted to handle KG sparsity using relevant external text, which isn’t always readily available. In a separate line of research, KG embedding methods have been proposed to reduce KG sparsity by performing missing link prediction. Such KG embedding methods, even though highly relevant, have not been explored for multi-hop KGQA so far. We fill this gap in this paper and propose EmbedKGQA. EmbedKGQA is particularly effective in performing multi-hop KGQA over sparse KGs. EmbedKGQA also relaxes the requirement of answer selection from a pre-specified neighborhood, a sub-optimal constraint enforced by previous multi-hop KGQA methods. Through extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, we demonstrate EmbedKGQA’s effectiveness over other state-of-the-art baselines.

Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims at automatically predicting missing links for large-scale knowledge graphs. A vast number of state-of-the-art KGC techniques have got published at top conferences in several research fields, including data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. However, we notice that several recent papers report very high performance, which largely outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we find that this can be attributed to the inappropriate evaluation protocol used by them and propose a simple evaluation protocol to address this problem. The proposed protocol is robust to handle bias in the model, which can substantially affect the final results. We conduct extensive experiments and report performance of several existing methods using our protocol. The reproducible code has been made publicly available.

The recent growth in the popularity and success of deep learning models on NLP classification tasks has accompanied the need for generating some form of natural language explanation of the predicted labels. Such generated natural language (NL) explanations are expected to be faithful, i.e., they should correlate well with the model’s internal decision making. In this work, we focus on the task of natural language inference (NLI) and address the following question: can we build NLI systems which produce labels with high accuracy, while also generating faithful explanations of its decisions? We propose Natural-language Inference over Label-specific Explanations (NILE), a novel NLI method which utilizes auto-generated label-specific NL explanations to produce labels along with its faithful explanation. We demonstrate NILE’s effectiveness over previously reported methods through automated and human evaluation of the produced labels and explanations. Our evaluation of NILE also supports the claim that accurate systems capable of providing testable explanations of their decisions can be designed. We discuss the faithfulness of NILE’s explanations in terms of sensitivity of the decisions to the corresponding explanations. We argue that explicit evaluation of faithfulness, in addition to label and explanation accuracy, is an important step in evaluating model’s explanations. Further, we demonstrate that task-specific probes are necessary to establish such sensitivity.

Knowledge Graph (KG) Embedding methods have been widely studied in the past few years and many methods have been proposed. These methods represent entities and relations in the KG as vectors in a vector space, trained to distinguish correct edges from the incorrect ones. For this distinction, simple functions of vectors’ dimensions, called interactions, are used. These interactions are used to calculate the candidate tail entity vector which is matched against all entities in the KG. However, for most of the existing methods, these interactions are fixed and manually specified. In this work, we propose an automated framework for discovering the interactions while training the KG Embeddings. The proposed method learns relevant interactions along with other parameters during training, allowing it to adapt to different datasets. Many of the existing methods can be seen as special cases of the proposed framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on link prediction task by extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets.

We study the problem of inducing interpretability in Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings. Learning KG embeddings has been an active area of research in the past few years, resulting in many different models. However, most of these methods do not address the interpretability (semantics) of individual dimensions of the learned embeddings. In this work, we study this problem and propose a method for inducing interpretability in KG embeddings using entity co-occurrence statistics. The proposed method significantly improves the interpretability, while maintaining comparable performance in other KG tasks.

Given a sentence (e.g., “I like mangoes”) and a constraint (e.g., sentiment flip), the goal of controlled text generation is to produce a sentence that adapts the input sentence to meet the requirements of the constraint (e.g., “I hate mangoes”). Going beyond such simple constraints, recent work has started exploring the incorporation of complex syntactic-guidance as constraints in the task of controlled paraphrase generation. In these methods, syntactic-guidance is sourced from a separate exemplar sentence. However, this prior work has only utilized limited syntactic information available in the parse tree of the exemplar sentence. We address this limitation in the paper and propose Syntax Guided Controlled Paraphraser (SGCP), an end-to-end framework for syntactic paraphrase generation. We find that Sgcp can generate syntax-conforming sentences while not compromising on relevance. We perform extensive automated and human evaluations over multiple real-world English language datasets to demonstrate the efficacy of Sgcp over state-of-the-art baselines. To drive future research, we have made Sgcp’s source code available.1

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) methods are effective at extracting (noun phrase, relation phrase, noun phrase) triples from text, e.g., (Barack Obama, took birth in, Honolulu). Organization of such triples in the form of a graph with noun phrases (NPs) as nodes and relation phrases (RPs) as edges results in the construction of Open Knowledge Graphs (OpenKGs). In order to use such OpenKGs in downstream tasks, it is often desirable to learn embeddings of the NPs and RPs present in the graph. Even though several Knowledge Graph (KG) embedding methods have been recently proposed, all of those methods have targeted Ontological KGs, as opposed to OpenKGs. Straightforward application of existing Ontological KG embedding methods to OpenKGs is challenging, as unlike Ontological KGs, OpenKGs are not canonicalized, i.e., a real-world entity may be represented using multiple nodes in the OpenKG, with each node corresponding to a different NP referring to the entity. For example, nodes with labels Barack Obama, Obama, and President Obama may refer to the same real-world entity Barack Obama. Even though canonicalization of OpenKGs has received some attention lately, output of such methods has not been used to improve OpenKG embed- dings. We fill this gap in the paper and propose Canonicalization-infused Representations (CaRe) for OpenKGs. Through extensive experiments, we observe that CaRe enables existing models to adapt to the challenges in OpenKGs and achieve substantial improvements for the link prediction task.

This tutorial aims to introduce recent advances in graph-based deep learning techniques such as Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) for Natural Language Processing (NLP). It provides a brief introduction to deep learning methods on non-Euclidean domains such as graphs and justifies their relevance in NLP. It then covers recent advances in applying graph-based deep learning methods for various NLP tasks, such as semantic role labeling, machine translation, relationship extraction, and many more.

Inducing diversity in the task of paraphrasing is an important problem in NLP with applications in data augmentation and conversational agents. Previous paraphrasing approaches have mainly focused on the issue of generating semantically similar paraphrases while paying little attention towards diversity. In fact, most of the methods rely solely on top-k beam search sequences to obtain a set of paraphrases. The resulting set, however, contains many structurally similar sentences. In this work, we focus on the task of obtaining highly diverse paraphrases while not compromising on paraphrasing quality. We provide a novel formulation of the problem in terms of monotone submodular function maximization, specifically targeted towards the task of paraphrasing. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for data augmentation on multiple tasks such as intent classification and paraphrase recognition. In order to drive further research, we have made the source code available.

Word embeddings have been widely adopted across several NLP applications. Most existing word embedding methods utilize sequential context of a word to learn its embedding. While there have been some attempts at utilizing syntactic context of a word, such methods result in an explosion of the vocabulary size. In this paper, we overcome this problem by proposing SynGCN, a flexible Graph Convolution based method for learning word embeddings. SynGCN utilizes the dependency context of a word without increasing the vocabulary size. Word embeddings learned by SynGCN outperform existing methods on various intrinsic and extrinsic tasks and provide an advantage when used with ELMo. We also propose SemGCN, an effective framework for incorporating diverse semantic knowledge for further enhancing learned word representations. We make the source code of both models available to encourage reproducible research.

What is the relationship between sentence representations learned by deep recurrent models against those encoded by the brain? Is there any correspondence between hidden layers of these recurrent models and brain regions when processing sentences? Can these deep models be used to synthesize brain data which can then be utilized in other extrinsic tasks? We investigate these questions using sentences with simple syntax and semantics (e.g., The bone was eaten by the dog.). We consider multiple neural network architectures, including recently proposed ELMo and BERT. We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain recording data collected from human subjects when they were reading these simple sentences. Overall, we find that BERT’s activations correlate the best with MEG brain data. We also find that the deep network representation can be used to generate brain data from new sentences to augment existing brain data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work showing that the MEG brain recording when reading a word in a sentence can be used to distinguish earlier words in the sentence. Our exploration is also the first to use deep neural network representations to generate synthetic brain data and to show that it helps in improving subsequent stimuli decoding task accuracy.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a long-standing but open problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). WSD corpora are typically small in size, owing to an expensive annotation process. Current supervised WSD methods treat senses as discrete labels and also resort to predicting the Most-Frequent-Sense (MFS) for words unseen during training. This leads to poor performance on rare and unseen senses. To overcome this challenge, we propose Extended WSD Incorporating Sense Embeddings (EWISE), a supervised model to perform WSD by predicting over a continuous sense embedding space as opposed to a discrete label space. This allows EWISE to generalize over both seen and unseen senses, thus achieving generalized zero-shot learning. To obtain target sense embeddings, EWISE utilizes sense definitions. EWISE learns a novel sentence encoder for sense definitions by using WordNet relations and also ConvE, a recently proposed knowledge graph embedding method. We also compare EWISE against other sentence encoders pretrained on large corpora to generate definition embeddings. EWISE achieves new state-of-the-art WSD performance.

Entity Linking (EL) systems aim to automatically map mentions of an entity in text to the corresponding entity in a Knowledge Graph (KG). Degree of connectivity of an entity in the KG directly affects an EL system’s ability to correctly link mentions in text to the entity in KG. This causes many EL systems to perform well for entities well connected to other entities in KG, bringing into focus the role of KG density in EL. In this paper, we propose Entity Linking using Densified Knowledge Graphs (ELDEN). ELDEN is an EL system which first densifies the KG with co-occurrence statistics from a large text corpus, and then uses the densified KG to train entity embeddings. Entity similarity measured using these trained entity embeddings result in improved EL. ELDEN outperforms state-of-the-art EL system on benchmark datasets. Due to such densification, ELDEN performs well for sparsely connected entities in the KG too. ELDEN’s approach is simple, yet effective. We have made ELDEN’s code and data publicly available.

Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction (RE) methods train an extractor by automatically aligning relation instances in a Knowledge Base (KB) with unstructured text. In addition to relation instances, KBs often contain other relevant side information, such as aliases of relations (e.g., founded and co-founded are aliases for the relation founderOfCompany). RE models usually ignore such readily available side information. In this paper, we propose RESIDE, a distantly-supervised neural relation extraction method which utilizes additional side information from KBs for improved relation extraction. It uses entity type and relation alias information for imposing soft constraints while predicting relations. RESIDE employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode syntactic information from text and improves performance even when limited side information is available. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate RESIDE’s effectiveness. We have made RESIDE’s source code available to encourage reproducible research.

Knowledge of the creation date of documents facilitates several tasks such as summarization, event extraction, temporally focused information extraction etc. Unfortunately, for most of the documents on the Web, the time-stamp metadata is either missing or can’t be trusted. Thus, predicting creation time from document content itself is an important task. In this paper, we propose Attentive Deep Document Dater (AD3), an attention-based neural document dating system which utilizes both context and temporal information in documents in a flexible and principled manner. We perform extensive experimentation on multiple real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of AD3 over neural and non-neural baselines.

Knowledge Graph (KG) embedding has emerged as an active area of research resulting in the development of several KG embedding methods. Relational facts in KG often show temporal dynamics, e.g., the fact (Cristiano_Ronaldo, playsFor, Manchester_United) is valid only from 2003 to 2009. Most of the existing KG embedding methods ignore this temporal dimension while learning embeddings of the KG elements. In this paper, we propose HyTE, a temporally aware KG embedding method which explicitly incorporates time in the entity-relation space by associating each timestamp with a corresponding hyperplane. HyTE not only performs KG inference using temporal guidance, but also predicts temporal scopes for relational facts with missing time annotations. Through extensive experimentation on temporal datasets extracted from real-world KGs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model over both traditional as well as temporal KG embedding methods.

Knowledge Graph (KG) embedding has emerged as a very active area of research over the last few years, resulting in the development of several embedding methods. These KG embedding methods represent KG entities and relations as vectors in a high-dimensional space. Despite this popularity and effectiveness of KG embeddings in various tasks (e.g., link prediction), geometric understanding of such embeddings (i.e., arrangement of entity and relation vectors in vector space) is unexplored – we fill this gap in the paper. We initiate a study to analyze the geometry of KG embeddings and correlate it with task performance and other hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we discover several insights. For example, we find that there are sharp differences between the geometry of embeddings learnt by different classes of KG embeddings methods. We hope that this initial study will inspire other follow-up research on this important but unexplored problem.

Relation Schema Induction (RSI) is the problem of identifying type signatures of arguments of relations from unlabeled text. Most of the previous work in this area have focused only on binary RSI, i.e., inducing only the subject and object type signatures per relation. However, in practice, many relations are high-order, i.e., they have more than two arguments and inducing type signatures of all arguments is necessary. For example, in the sports domain, inducing a schema win(WinningPlayer, OpponentPlayer, Tournament, Location) is more informative than inducing just win(WinningPlayer, OpponentPlayer). We refer to this problem as Higher-order Relation Schema Induction (HRSI). In this paper, we propose Tensor Factorization with Back-off and Aggregation (TFBA), a novel framework for the HRSI problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at inducing higher-order relation schemata from unlabeled text. Using the experimental analysis on three real world datasets we show how TFBA helps in dealing with sparsity and induce higher-order schemata.

Document date is essential for many important tasks, such as document retrieval, summarization, event detection, etc. While existing approaches for these tasks assume accurate knowledge of the document date, this is not always available, especially for arbitrary documents from the Web. Document Dating is a challenging problem which requires inference over the temporal structure of the document. Prior document dating systems have largely relied on handcrafted features while ignoring such document-internal structures. In this paper, we propose NeuralDater, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based document dating approach which jointly exploits syntactic and temporal graph structures of document in a principled way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of deep learning for the problem of document dating. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we find that NeuralDater significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline by 19% absolute (45% relative) accuracy points.

Automatic construction of large knowledge graphs (KG) by mining web-scale text datasets has received considerable attention recently. Estimating accuracy of such automatically constructed KGs is a challenging problem due to their size and diversity. This important problem has largely been ignored in prior research – we fill this gap and propose KGEval. KGEval uses coupling constraints to bind facts and crowdsources those few that can infer large parts of the graph. We demonstrate that the objective optimized by KGEval is submodular and NP-hard, allowing guarantees for our approximation algorithm. Through experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that KGEval best estimates KG accuracy compared to other baselines, while requiring significantly lesser number of human evaluations.

RLIE-DQN is a recently proposed Reinforcement Learning-based Information Extraction (IE) technique which is able to incorporate external evidence during the extraction process. RLIE-DQN trains a single agent sequentially, training on one instance at a time. This results in significant training slowdown which is undesirable. We leverage recent advances in parallel RL training using asynchronous methods and propose RLIE-A3C. RLIE-A3C trains multiple agents in parallel and is able to achieve upto 6x training speedup over RLIE-DQN, while suffering no loss in average accuracy.