State-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) still have limited performance in structural knowledge extraction, such as relations between objects. In this work, we present ViStruct, a training framework to learn VLMs for effective visual structural knowledge extraction. Two novel designs are incorporated. First, we propose to leverage the inherent structure of programming language to depict visual structural information. This approach enables explicit and consistent representation of visual structural information of multiple granularities, such as concepts, relations, and events, in a well-organized structured format. Second, we introduce curriculum-based learning for VLMs to progressively comprehend visual structures, from fundamental visual concepts to intricate event structures. Our intuition is that lower-level knowledge may contribute to complex visual structure understanding. Furthermore, we compile and release a collection of datasets tailored for visual structural knowledge extraction. We adopt a weakly-supervised approach to directly generate visual event structures from captions for ViStruct training, capitalizing on abundant image-caption pairs from the web. In experiments, we evaluate ViStruct on visual structure prediction tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving the understanding of visual structures. The code will be made public to facilitate future research.

Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a particular goal, which is an essential task to assist robots or humans in performing stereotypical activities. An important aspect of this process is the ability to capture historical states visually, which provides detailed information that is not covered by text and will guide subsequent steps. Therefore, we propose a new task, Multimedia Generative Script Learning, to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities, as well as presenting the first benchmark containing 5,652 tasks and 79,089 multimedia steps. This task is challenging in three aspects: the multimedia challenge of capturing the visual states in images, the induction challenge of performing unseen tasks, and the diversity challenge of covering different information in individual steps. We propose to encode visual state changes through a selective multimedia encoder to address the multimedia challenge, transfer knowledge from previously observed tasks using a retrieval-augmented decoder to overcome the induction challenge, and further present distinct information at each step by optimizing a diversity-oriented contrastive learning objective. We define metrics to evaluate both generation and inductive quality. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines.

Procedure planning, or the ability to predict a series of steps that can achieve a given goal conditioned on the current observation, is critical for building intelligent embodied agents that can assist users in everyday tasks. Encouraged by the recent success of language models (LMs) for zero-shot and few-shot planning, we hypothesize that LMs may be equipped with stronger priors for planning compared to their visual counterparts. To this end, we propose a language-first procedure planning framework with a modularized design: we first align the current and goal observations with corresponding steps and then use a pre-trained LM to predict the intermediate steps. Under this framework, we find that using an image captioning model for alignment can already match state-of-the-art performance and by designing a double retrieval model conditioned over current and goal observations jointly, we can achieve large improvements (19.2%-98.9% relatively higher success rate than state-of-the-art) on both COIN and CrossTask benchmarks. Our work verifies the planning ability of LMs and demonstrates how LMs can serve as a powerful “reasoning engine” even when the input is provided in another modality.

The recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history. This has resulted in concerns that the field will become homogenized and resource-intensive. This new status quo has put many academic researchers, especially PhD students, at a disadvantage. This paper aims to define a new NLP playground by proposing 20+ PhD-dissertation-worthy research directions, covering theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications.

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating “branching”. In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

Event schemas are a form of world knowledge about the typical progression of events. Recent methods for event schema induction use information extraction systems to construct a large number of event graph instances from documents, and then learn to generalize the schema from such instances. In contrast, we propose to treat event schemas as a form of commonsense knowledge that can be derived from large language models (LLMs). This new paradigm greatly simplifies the schema induction process and allows us to handle both hierarchical relations and temporal relations between events in a straightforward way. Since event schemas have complex graph structures, we design an incremental prompting and verification method IncPrompt to break down the construction of a complex event graph into three stages: event skeleton construction, event expansion, and event-event relation verification. Compared to directly using LLMs to generate a linearized graph, IncSchema can generate large and complex schemas with 7.2% F1 improvement in temporal relations and 31.0% F1 improvement in hierarchical relations. In addition, compared to the previous state-of-the-art closed-domain schema induction model, human assessors were able to cover ~10% more events when translating the schemas into coherent stories and rated our schemas 1.3 points higher (on a 5-point scale) in terms of readability.

Event schema depicts the typical structure of complex events, serving as a scaffolding to effectively analyze, predict, and possibly intervene in the ongoing events. To induce event schemas from historical events, previous work uses an event-by-event scheme, ignoring the global structure of the entire schema graph. We propose a new event schema induction framework using double graph autoencoders, which captures the global dependencies among nodes in event graphs. Specifically, we first extract the event skeleton from an event graph and design a variational directed acyclic graph (DAG) autoencoder to learn its global structure. Then we further fill in the event arguments for the skeleton, and use another Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based autoencoder to reconstruct entity-entity relations as well as to detect coreferential entities. By performing this two-stage induction decomposition, the model can avoid reconstructing the entire graph in one step, allowing it to focus on learning global structures between events. Experimental results on three event graph datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and induces high-quality event schemas with global consistency.

We introduce RESIN-11, a new schema-guided event extraction&prediction framework that can be applied to a large variety of newsworthy scenarios. The framework consists of two parts: (1) an open-domain end-to-end multimedia multilingual information extraction system with weak-supervision and zero-shot learningbased techniques. (2) schema matching and schema-guided event prediction based on our curated schema library. We build a demo website based on our dockerized system and schema library publicly available for installation (https://github.com/RESIN-KAIROS/RESIN-11). We also include a video demonstrating the system.

This tutorial targets researchers and practitioners who are interested in AI and ML technologies for structural information extraction (IE) from unstructured textual sources. Particularly, this tutorial will provide audience with a systematic introduction to recent advances of IE, by answering several important research questions. These questions include (i) how to develop an robust IE system from noisy, insufficient training data, while ensuring the reliability of its prediction? (ii) how to foster the generalizability of IE through enhancing the system’s cross-lingual, cross-domain, cross-task and cross-modal transferability? (iii) how to precisely support extracting structural information with extremely fine-grained, diverse and boundless labels? (iv) how to further improve IE by leveraging indirect supervision from other NLP tasks, such as NLI, QA or summarization, and pre-trained language models? (v) how to acquire knowledge to guide the inference of IE systems? We will discuss several lines of frontier research that tackle those challenges, and will conclude the tutorial by outlining directions for further investigation.

To tackle the challenge of accurate and timely communication regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we present a COVID-19 Claim Radar to automatically extract supporting and refuting claims on a daily basis. We provide a comprehensive structured view of claims, including rich claim attributes (such as claimers and claimer affiliations) and associated knowledge elements as claim semantics (such as events, relations and entities), enabling users to explore equivalent, refuting, or supporting claims with structural evidence, such as shared claimers, similar centroid events and arguments. In order to consolidate claim structures at the corpus-level, we leverage Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements. The system automatically provides users a comprehensive exposure to COVID-19 related claims, their importance, and their interconnections. The system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation.

Despite achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, existing vision-language models still fall short of few-shot transfer ability on domain-specific problems. Classical fine-tuning often fails to prevent highly expressive models from exploiting spurious correlations. Although model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) presents as a natural alternative for few-shot transfer learning, the expensive computation due to implicit second-order optimization limits its use on large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP. While much literature has been devoted to exploring alternative optimization strategies, we identify another essential aspect towards effective few-shot transfer learning, task sampling, which is previously only be viewed as part of data pre-processing in MAML. To show the impact of task sampling, we propose a simple algorithm, Model-Agnostic Multitask Fine-tuning (MAMF), which differentiates classical fine-tuning only on uniformly sampling multiple tasks. Despite its simplicity, we show that MAMF consistently outperforms classical fine-tuning on five few-shot image classification tasks. We further show that the effectiveness of the bi-level optimization in MAML is highly sensitive to the zero-shot performance of a task in the context of few-shot vision-language classification. The goal of this paper is to provide new insights on what makes few-shot learning work, and encourage more research into investigating better task sampling strategies.

This tutorial targets researchers and practitioners who are interested in AI technologies that help machines understand natural language text, particularly real-world events described in the text. These include methods to extract the internal structures of an event regarding its protagonist(s), participant(s) and properties, as well as external structures concerning memberships, temporal and causal relations of multiple events. This tutorial will provide audience with a systematic introduction of (i) knowledge representations of events, (ii) various methods for automated extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations, (iii) induction of event processes and properties, and (iv) a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks that benefit from aforementioned techniques. We will conclude the tutorial by outlining emerging research problems in this area.

Visual and textual modalities contribute complementary information about events described in multimedia documents. Videos contain rich dynamics and detailed unfoldings of events, while text describes more high-level and abstract concepts. However, existing event extraction methods either do not handle video or solely target video while ignoring other modalities. In contrast, we propose the first approach to jointly extract events from both video and text articles. We introduce the new task of Video MultiMedia Event Extraction and propose two novel components to build the first system towards this task. First, we propose the first self-supervised cross-modal event coreference model that can determine coreference between video events and text events without any manually annotated pairs. Second, we introduce the first cross-modal transformer architecture, which extracts structured event information from both videos and text documents. We also construct and will publicly release a new benchmark of video-article pairs, consisting of 860 video-article pairs with extensive annotations for evaluating methods on this task. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on our new benchmark dataset. We achieve 6.0% and 5.8% absolute F-score gain on multimodal event coreference resolution and multimedia event extraction.

Current methods for event representation ignore related events in a corpus-level global context. For a deep and comprehensive understanding of complex events, we introduce a new task, Event Network Embedding, which aims to represent events by capturing the connections among events. We propose a novel framework, Global Event Network Embedding (GENE), that encodes the event network with a multi-view graph encoder while preserving the graph topology and node semantics. The graph encoder is trained by minimizing both structural and semantic losses. We develop a new series of structured probing tasks, and show that our approach effectively outperforms baseline models on node typing, argument role classification, and event coreference resolution.

To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in literature to understand the disease mechanism and the related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities, relations and events) from scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence. All of the data, KGs, reports.

We present a new information extraction system that can automatically construct temporal event graphs from a collection of news documents from multiple sources, multiple languages (English and Spanish for our experiment), and multiple data modalities (speech, text, image and video). The system advances state-of-the-art from two aspects: (1) extending from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-lingual cross-media event extraction, coreference resolution and temporal event tracking; (2) using human curated event schema library to match and enhance the extraction output. We have made the dockerlized system publicly available for research purpose at GitHub, with a demo video.

Event coreference resolution is critical to understand events in the growing number of online news with multiple modalities including text, video, speech, etc. However, the events and entities depicting in different modalities may not be perfectly aligned and can be difficult to annotate, which makes the task especially challenging with little supervision available. To address the above issues, we propose a supervised model based on attention mechanism and an unsupervised model based on statistical machine translation, capable of learning the relative importance of modalities for event coreference resolution. Experiments on a video multimedia event dataset show that our multimodal models outperform text-only systems in event coreference resolution tasks. A careful analysis reveals that the performance gain of the multimodal model especially under unsupervised settings comes from better learning of visually salient events.

Event schemas encode knowledge of stereotypical structures of events and their connections. As events unfold, schemas are crucial to act as a scaffolding. Previous work on event schema induction focuses either on atomic events or linear temporal event sequences, ignoring the interplay between events via arguments and argument relations. We introduce a new concept of Temporal Complex Event Schema: a graph-based schema representation that encompasses events, arguments, temporal connections and argument relations. In addition, we propose a Temporal Event Graph Model that predicts event instances following the temporal complex event schema. To build and evaluate such schemas, we release a new schema learning corpus containing 6,399 documents accompanied with event graphs, and we have manually constructed gold-standard schemas. Intrinsic evaluations by schema matching and instance graph perplexity, prove the superior quality of our probabilistic graph schema library compared to linear representations. Extrinsic evaluation on schema-guided future event prediction further demonstrates the predictive power of our event graph model, significantly outperforming human schemas and baselines by more than 17.8% on HITS@1.

Timeline Summarization identifies major events from a news collection and describes them following temporal order, with key dates tagged. Previous methods generally generate summaries separately for each date after they determine the key dates of events. These methods overlook the events’ intra-structures (arguments) and inter-structures (event-event connections). Following a different route, we propose to represent the news articles as an event-graph, thus the summarization becomes compressing the whole graph to its salient sub-graph. The key hypothesis is that the events connected through shared arguments and temporal order depict the skeleton of a timeline, containing events that are semantically related, temporally coherent and structurally salient in the global event graph. A time-aware optimal transport distance is then introduced for learning the compression model in an unsupervised manner. We show that our approach significantly improves on the state of the art on three real-world datasets, including two public standard benchmarks and our newly collected Timeline100 dataset.

We introduce a new task, MultiMedia Event Extraction, which aims to extract events and their arguments from multimedia documents. We develop the first benchmark and collect a dataset of 245 multimedia news articles with extensively annotated events and arguments. We propose a novel method, Weakly Aligned Structured Embedding (WASE), that encodes structured representations of semantic information from textual and visual data into a common embedding space. The structures are aligned across modalities by employing a weakly supervised training strategy, which enables exploiting available resources without explicit cross-media annotation. Compared to uni-modal state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves 4.0% and 9.8% absolute F-score gains on text event argument role labeling and visual event extraction. Compared to state-of-the-art multimedia unstructured representations, we achieve 8.3% and 5.0% absolute F-score gains on multimedia event extraction and argument role labeling, respectively. By utilizing images, we extract 21.4% more event mentions than traditional text-only methods.

We present the first comprehensive, open source multimedia knowledge extraction system that takes a massive stream of unstructured, heterogeneous multimedia data from various sources and languages as input, and creates a coherent, structured knowledge base, indexing entities, relations, and events, following a rich, fine-grained ontology. Our system, GAIA, enables seamless search of complex graph queries, and retrieves multimedia evidence including text, images and videos. GAIA achieves top performance at the recent NIST TAC SM-KBP2019 evaluation. The system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with a narrated video that documents the system.

Event schemas can guide our understanding and ability to make predictions with respect to what might happen next. We propose a new Event Graph Schema, where two event types are connected through multiple paths involving entities that fill important roles in a coherent story. We then introduce Path Language Model, an auto-regressive language model trained on event-event paths, and select salient and coherent paths to probabilistically construct these graph schemas. We design two evaluation metrics, instance coverage and instance coherence, to evaluate the quality of graph schema induction, by checking when coherent event instances are covered by the schema graph. Intrinsic evaluations show that our approach is highly effective at inducing salient and coherent schemas. Extrinsic evaluations show the induced schema repository provides significant improvement to downstream end-to-end Information Extraction over a state-of-the-art joint neural extraction model, when used as additional global features to unfold instance graphs.

Transcripts of natural, multi-person meetings differ significantly from documents like news articles, which can make Natural Language Generation models for generating summaries unfocused. We develop an abstractive meeting summarizer from both videos and audios of meeting recordings. Specifically, we propose a multi-modal hierarchical attention across three levels: segment, utterance and word. To narrow down the focus into topically-relevant segments, we jointly model topic segmentation and summarization. In addition to traditional text features, we introduce new multi-modal features derived from visual focus of attention, based on the assumption that the utterance is more important if the speaker receives more attention. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art with both BLEU and ROUGE measures.

This paper demonstrates a state-of-the-art end-to-end multilingual (English, Russian, and Ukrainian) knowledge extraction system that can perform entity discovery and linking, relation extraction, event extraction, and coreference. It extracts and aggregates knowledge elements across multiple languages and documents as well as provides visualizations of the results along three dimensions: temporal (as displayed in an event timeline), spatial (as displayed in an event heatmap), and relational (as displayed in entity-relation networks). For our system to further support users’ analyses of causal sequences of events in complex situations, we also integrate a wide range of human moral value measures, independently derived from region-based survey, into the event heatmap. This system is publicly available as a docker container and a live demo.