Extractive summarization focuses on extracting salient sentences from the source document and incorporating them in the summary without changing their wording or structure. The naive approach for extractive summarization is sentence classification, which makes independent binary decisions for each sentence, resulting in the model cannot detect the dependencies between sentences in the summary. Recent approaches introduce an autoregressive decoder to detect redundancy relationship between sentences by step-by-step sentence selection, but bring train-inference gap. To address these issues, we formulate extractive summarization as a salient sentence set recognition task. To solve the sentence set recognition task, we propose a set prediction network (SetSum), which sets up a fixed set of learnable queries to extract the entire sentence set of the summary, while capturing the dependencies between them.Different from previous methods with an auto-regressive decoder, we employ a non-autoregressive decoder to predict the sentences within the summary in parallel during both the training and inference process, which eliminates the train-inference gap. Experimental results on both single-document and multi-document extracted summary datasets show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

Inquiry conversation is a common form of conversation that aims to complete the investigation (e.g., court hearing, medical consultation and police interrogation) during which a series of focus shifts occurs. While many models have been proposed to generate a smooth response to a given conversation history, neglecting the focus can limit performance in inquiry conversation where the order of the focuses plays there a key role. In this paper, we investigate the problem of response generation in inquiry conversation by taking the focus into consideration. We propose a novel Focus-aware Response Generation (FRG) method by jointly optimizing a multi-level encoder and a set of focal decoders to generate several candidate responses that correspond to different focuses. Additionally, a focus ranking module is proposed to predict the next focus and rank the candidate responses. Experiments on two orthogonal inquiry conversation datasets (judicial, medical domain) demonstrate that our method generates results significantly better in automatic metrics and human evaluation compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Model-agnostic meta-learning has garnered attention as a promising technique for enhancing few-shot cross-lingual transfer learning in low-resource scenarios. However, little attention was paid to the impact of data selection strategies on this cross-lingual meta-transfer method, particularly the sampling of cross-lingual meta-training data (i.e. meta-tasks) at the syntactic level to reduce language gaps. In this paper, we propose a Meta-Task Collector-based Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer framework (MeTaCo-XMT) to adapt different data selection strategies to construct meta-tasks for meta-transfer learning. Syntactic differences have an effect on transfer performance, so we consider a syntactic similarity sampling strategy and propose a syntactic distance metric model consisting of a syntactic encoder block based on the pre-trained model and a distance metric block using Word Move’s Distance (WMD). Additionally, we conduct experiments with three different data selection strategies to instantiate our framework and analyze their performance impact. Experimental results on two multilingual NLP datasets, Wikiann and TydiQA, demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach compared to existing strong baselines.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has attracted increasing attention in natural language processing community. Previous work commonly first extract semantic-view features via fine-tuning PLMs, then models context-view features based on the obtained semantic-view features by various graph neural networks. However, it is difficult to fully model interaction between utterances simply through a graph neural network and the features at semantic-view and context-view are not well aligned. Moreover, the previous parametric learning paradigm struggle to learn the patterns of tail class given fewer instances. To this end, we treat the pre-trained conversation model as a prior knowledge base and from which we elicit correlations between utterances by a probing procedure. And we adopt supervised contrastive learning to align semantic-view and context-view features, these two views of features work together in a complementary manner, contributing to ERC from distinct perspectives. Meanwhile, we propose a new semi-parametric paradigm of inferencing through memorization to solve the recognition problem of tail class samples. We consistently achieve state-of-the-art results on four widely used benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed multi-view feature alignment and memorization.

The MultiCoNER II shared task aims to tackle multilingual named entity recognition (NER) in fine-grained and noisy scenarios, and it inherits the semantic ambiguity and low-context setting of the MultiCoNER I task. To cope with these problems, the previous top systems in the MultiCoNER I either incorporate the knowledge bases or gazetteers. However, they still suffer from insufficient knowledge, limited context length, single retrieval strategy. In this paper, our team DAMO-NLP proposes a unified retrieval-augmented system (U-RaNER) for fine-grained multilingual NER. We perform error analysis on the previous top systems and reveal that their performance bottleneck lies in insufficient knowledge. Also, we discover that the limited context length causes the retrieval knowledge to be invisible to the model. To enhance the retrieval context, we incorporate the entity-centric Wikidata knowledge base, while utilizing the infusion approach to broaden the contextual scope of the model. Also, we explore various search strategies and refine the quality of retrieval knowledge. Our system wins 9 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER II shared task. Additionally, we compared our system with ChatGPT, one of the large language models which have unlocked strong capabilities on many tasks. The results show that there is still much room for improvement for ChatGPT on the extraction task.

Generating mathematical equations from natural language requires an accurate understanding of the relations among math expressions. Existing approaches can be broadly categorized into token-level and expression-level generation. The former treats equations as a mathematical language, sequentially generating math tokens. Expression-level methods generate each expression one by one. However, each expression represents a solving step, and there naturally exist parallel or dependent relations between these steps, which are ignored by current sequential methods. Therefore, we integrate tree structure into the expression-level generation and advocate an expression tree decoding strategy. To generate a tree with expression as its node, we employ a layer-wise parallel decoding strategy: we decode multiple independent expressions (leaf nodes) in parallel at each layer and repeat parallel decoding layer by layer to sequentially generate these parent node expressions that depend on others. Besides, a bipartite matching algorithm is adopted to align multiple predictions with annotations for each layer. Experiments show our method outperforms other baselines, especially for these equations with complex structures.

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) aims to locate entity mentions and classify their types with only knowledge bases or gazetteers and unlabeled corpus. However, distant annotations are noisy and degrade the performance of NER models. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust prototype network named MProto for the DS-NER task. Different from previous prototype-based NER methods, MProto represents each entity type with multiple prototypes to characterize the intra-class variance among entity representations. To optimize the classifier, each token should be assigned an appropriate ground-truth prototype and we consider such token-prototype assignment as an optimal transport (OT) problem. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise from incomplete labeling, we propose a novel denoised optimal transport (DOT) algorithm. Specifically, we utilize the assignment result between *Other* class tokens and all prototypes to distinguish unlabeled entity tokens from true negatives. Experiments on several DS-NER benchmarks demonstrate that our MProto achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is now available on Github.

Cross-lingual transfer learning heavily relies on well-aligned cross-lingual representations. The syntactic structure is recognized as beneficial for cross-lingual transfer, but limited researches utilize it for aligning representation in multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs). Additionally, existing methods require syntactic labels that are difficult to obtain and of poor quality for low-resource languages. To address this gap, we propose Struct-XLM, a novel multilingual language model that leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to autonomously discover universal syntactic structures for improving the cross-lingual representation alignment of PLM. Struct-XLM integrates a policy network (PNet) and a translation ranking task. The PNet is designed to discover structural information and integrate it into the last layer of the PLM through the structural multi-head attention module to obtain structural representation. The translation ranking task obtains a delayed reward based on the structural representation to optimize the PNet while improving the alignment of cross-lingual representation. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for enhancing cross-lingual transfer of multilingual PLM on the XTREME benchmark.

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP) – a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.

In this paper, we propose DiffusionNER, which formulates the named entity recognition task as a boundary-denoising diffusion process and thus generates named entities from noisy spans. During training, DiffusionNER gradually adds noises to the golden entity boundaries by a fixed forward diffusion process and learns a reverse diffusion process to recover the entity boundaries. In inference, DiffusionNER first randomly samples some noisy spans from a standard Gaussian distribution and then generates the named entities by denoising them with the learned reverse diffusion process. The proposed boundary-denoising diffusion process allows progressive refinement and dynamic sampling of entities, empowering DiffusionNER with efficient and flexible entity generation capability. Experiments on multiple flat and nested NER datasets demonstrate that DiffusionNER achieves comparable or even better performance than previous state-of-the-art models.

Prompt learning is a new paradigm for utilizing pre-trained language models and has achieved great success in many tasks. To adopt prompt learning in the NER task, two kinds of methods have been explored from a pair of symmetric perspectives, populating the template by enumerating spans to predict their entity types or constructing type-specific prompts to locate entities. However, these methods not only require a multi-round prompting manner with a high time overhead and computational cost, but also require elaborate prompt templates, that are difficult to apply in practical scenarios. In this paper, we unify entity locating and entity typing into prompt learning, and design a dual-slot multi-prompt template with the position slot and type slot to prompt locating and typing respectively. Multiple prompts can be input to the model simultaneously, and then the model extracts all entities by parallel predictions on the slots. To assign labels for the slots during training, we design a dynamic template filling mechanism that uses the extended bipartite graph matching between prompts and the ground-truth entities. We conduct experiments in various settings, including resource-rich flat and nested NER datasets and low-resource in-domain and cross-domain datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a significant performance improvement, especially in the cross-domain few-shot setting, which outperforms the state-of-the-art model by +7.7% on average.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task to recognize specific types of entities from a given sentence. Depending on how the entities appear in the sentence, it can be divided into three subtasks, namely, Flat NER, Nested NER, and Discontinuous NER. Among the existing approaches, only the generative model can be uniformly adapted to these three subtasks. However, when the generative model is applied to NER, its optimization objective is not consistent with the task, which makes the model vulnerable to the incorrect biases. In this paper, we analyze the incorrect biases in the generation process from a causality perspective and attribute them to two confounders: pre-context confounder and entity-order confounder. Furthermore, we design Intra- and Inter-entity Deconfounding Data Augmentation methods to eliminate the above confounders according to the theory of backdoor adjustment. Experiments show that our method can improve the performance of the generative NER model in various datasets.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent works treat named entity recognition as a reading comprehension task, constructing type-specific queries manually to extract entities. This paradigm suffers from three issues. First, type-specific queries can only extract one type of entities per inference, which is inefficient. Second, the extraction for different types of entities is isolated, ignoring the dependencies between them. Third, query construction relies on external knowledge and is difficult to apply to realistic scenarios with hundreds of entity types. To deal with them, we propose Parallel Instance Query Network (PIQN), which sets up global and learnable instance queries to extract entities from a sentence in a parallel manner. Each instance query predicts one entity, and by feeding all instance queries simultaneously, we can query all entities in parallel. Instead of being constructed from external knowledge, instance queries can learn their different query semantics during training. For training the model, we treat label assignment as a one-to-many Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) and dynamically assign gold entities to instance queries with minimal assignment cost. Experiments on both nested and flat NER datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

The MultiCoNER shared task aims at detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities in short and low-context settings for multiple languages. The lack of contexts makes the recognition of ambiguous named entities challenging. To alleviate this issue, our team DAMO-NLP proposes a knowledge-based system, where we build a multilingual knowledge base based on Wikipedia to provide related context information to the named entity recognition (NER) model. Given an input sentence, our system effectively retrieves related contexts from the knowledge base. The original input sentences are then augmented with such context information, allowing significantly better contextualized token representations to be captured. Our system wins 10 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER shared task.

Relation Induction is a very practical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) area. In practical application scenarios, people want to induce more entity pairs having the same relation from only a few seed entity pairs. Thus, instead of the laborious supervised setting, in this paper, we focus on the minimally-supervised setting where only a couple of seed entity pairs per relation are provided. Although the conventional relation induction methods have made some success, their performance depends heavily on the quality of word embeddings. The great success of Pre-trained Language Models, such as BERT, changes the NLP area a lot, and they are proven to be able to better capture relation knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel method to induce relation with BERT under the minimally-supervised setting. Specifically, we firstly extract proper templates from the corpus by using the mask-prediction task in BERT to build pseudo-sentences as the context of entity pairs. Then we use BERT attention weights to better represent the pseudo-sentences. In addition, We also use the IntegratedGradient of entity pairs to iteratively select better templates further. Finally, with the high-quality pseudo-sentences, we can train a better classifier for relation induction. Experiments onGoogle Analogy Test Sets (GATS), Bigger Analogy TestSet (BATS) and DiffVec demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Math word problem solver requires both precise relation reasoning about quantities in the text and reliable generation for the diverse equation. Current sequence-to-tree or relation extraction methods regard this only from a fixed view, struggling to simultaneously handle complex semantics and diverse equations. However, human solving naturally involves two consistent reasoning views: top-down and bottom-up, just as math equations also can be expressed in multiple equivalent forms: pre-order and post-order. We propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning for a more complete semantics-to-equation mapping. The entire process is decoupled into two independent but consistent views: top-down decomposition and bottom-up construction, and the two reasoning views are aligned in multi-granularity for consistency, enhancing global generation and precise reasoning. Experiments on multiple datasets across two languages show our approach significantly outperforms the existing baselines, especially on complex problems. We also show after consistent alignment, multi-view can absorb the merits of both views and generate more diverse results consistent with the mathematical laws.

Complex knowledge base question answering can be achieved by converting questions into sequences of predefined actions. However, there is a significant semantic and structural gap between natural language and action sequences, which makes this conversion difficult. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-enhanced complex question answering framework, called ALCQA, which mitigates this gap through question-to-action alignment and question-to-question alignment. We train a question rewriting model to align the question and each action, and utilize a pretrained language model to implicitly align the question and KG artifacts. Moreover, considering that similar questions correspond to similar action sequences, we retrieve top-k similar question-answer pairs at the inference stage through question-to-question alignment and propose a novel reward-guided action sequence selection strategy to select from candidate action sequences. We conduct experiments on CQA and WQSP datasets, and the results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains a 9.88% improvements in the F1 metric on CQA dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/TTTTTTTTy/ALCQA.

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is a fundamental task in legal AI, which aims to assist the judge to hear the case and determine the judgment. The legal judgment usually consists of the law article, charge, and term of penalty. In the real trial scenario, the judge usually makes the decision step-by-step: first concludes the rationale according to the case’s facts and then determines the judgment. Recently, many models have been proposed and made tremendous progress in LJP, but most of them adopt an end-to-end manner that cannot be manually intervened by the judge for practical use. Moreover, existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process. Following the judge’s real trial logic, in this paper, we propose a novel Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction (RLJP) framework. In the RLJP framework, the LJP process is split into two steps. In the first phase, the model generates the rationales according to the fact description. Then it predicts the judgment based on the fact and the generated rationales. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show RLJP achieves the best results compared to the state-of-the-art models. Meanwhile, the proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.

Joint entity and relation extraction has been a core task in the field of information extraction. Recent approaches usually consider the extraction of relational triples from a stereoscopic perspective, either learning a relation-specific tagger or separate classifiers for each relation type. However, they still suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections between triples. To address these issues, we propose a novel query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples. By metric-based comparison between query embeddings and token embeddings, we can extract all types of triples in one step, thus eliminating the error propagation problem. In addition, we learn the instance-level representation of relational triples via contrastive learning. In this way, relational triples can not only enclose rich class-level semantics but also access to high-order global connections. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state of the art on five widely used benchmarks.

Prerequisite relations among concepts are crucial for educational applications, such as curriculum planning and intelligent tutoring. In this paper, we propose a novel concept prerequisite relation learning approach, named CPRL, which combines both concept representation learned from a heterogeneous graph and concept pairwise features. Furthermore, we extend CPRL under weakly supervised settings to make our method more practical, including learning prerequisite relations from learning object dependencies and generating training data with data programming. Our experiments on four datasets show that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art results comparing with existing methods.

Entity retrieval, which aims at disambiguating mentions to canonical entities from massive KBs, is essential for many tasks in natural language processing. Recent progress in entity retrieval shows that the dual-encoder structure is a powerful and efficient framework to nominate candidates if entities are only identified by descriptions. However, they ignore the property that meanings of entity mentions diverge in different contexts and are related to various portions of descriptions, which are treated equally in previous works. In this work, we propose Multi-View Entity Representations (MuVER), a novel approach for entity retrieval that constructs multi-view representations for entity descriptions and approximates the optimal view for mentions via a heuristic searching method. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on ZESHEL and improves the quality of candidates on three standard Entity Linking datasets.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. Traditional NER research only deals with flat entities and ignores nested entities. The span-based methods treat entity recognition as a span classification task. Although these methods have the innate ability to handle nested NER, they suffer from high computational cost, ignorance of boundary information, under-utilization of the spans that partially match with entities, and difficulties in long entity recognition. To tackle these issues, we propose a two-stage entity identifier. First we generate span proposals by filtering and boundary regression on the seed spans to locate the entities, and then label the boundary-adjusted span proposals with the corresponding categories. Our method effectively utilizes the boundary information of entities and partially matched spans during training. Through boundary regression, entities of any length can be covered theoretically, which improves the ability to recognize long entities. In addition, many low-quality seed spans are filtered out in the first stage, which reduces the time complexity of inference. Experiments on nested NER datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

In this paper, we study a new task of synonym expansion using transitivity, and propose a novel approach named SynET, which considers both the contexts of two given synonym pairs. It introduces an auxiliary task to reduce the impact of noisy sentences, and proposes a Multi-Perspective Entity Matching Network to match entities from multiple perspectives. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show the effectiveness of our approach.

Large pre-trained transformer-based language models have achieved impressive results on a wide range of NLP tasks. In the past few years, Knowledge Distillation(KD) has become a popular paradigm to compress a computationally expensive model to a resource-efficient lightweight model. However, most KD algorithms, especially in NLP, rely on the accessibility of the original training dataset, which may be unavailable due to privacy issues. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel two-stage data-free distillation method, named Adversarial self-Supervised Data-Free Distillation (AS-DFD), which is designed for compressing large-scale transformer-based models (e.g., BERT). To avoid text generation in discrete space, we introduce a Plug & Play Embedding Guessing method to craft pseudo embeddings from the teacher’s hidden knowledge. Meanwhile, with a self-supervised module to quantify the student’s ability, we adapt the difficulty of pseudo embeddings in an adversarial training manner. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first data-free distillation framework designed for NLP tasks. We verify the effectiveness of our method on several text classification datasets.