Xinyu Zuo


2022

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Type-enriched Hierarchical Contrastive Strategy for Fine-Grained Entity Typing
Xinyu Zuo | Haijin Liang | Ning Jing | Shuang Zeng | Zhou Fang | Yu Luo
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Fine-grained entity typing (FET) aims to deduce specific semantic types of the entity mentions in the text. Modern methods for FET mainly focus on learning what a certain type looks like. And few works directly model the type differences, that is, let models know the extent that which one type is different from others. To alleviate this problem, we propose a type-enriched hierarchical contrastive strategy for FET. Our method can directly model the differences between hierarchical types and improve the ability to distinguish multi-grained similar types. On the one hand, we embed type into entity contexts to make type information directly perceptible. On the other hand, we design a constrained contrastive strategy on the hierarchical structure to directly model the type differences, which can simultaneously perceive the distinguishability between types at different granularity. Experimental results on three benchmarks, BBN, OntoNotes, and FIGER show that our method achieves significant performance on FET by effectively modeling type differences.

2021

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LearnDA: Learnable Knowledge-Guided Data Augmentation for Event Causality Identification
Xinyu Zuo | Pengfei Cao | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Weihua Peng | Yuguang Chen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Modern models for event causality identification (ECI) are mainly based on supervised learning, which are prone to the data lacking problem. Unfortunately, the existing NLP-related augmentation methods cannot directly produce available data required for this task. To solve the data lacking problem, we introduce a new approach to augment training data for event causality identification, by iteratively generating new examples and classifying event causality in a dual learning framework. On the one hand, our approach is knowledge guided, which can leverage existing knowledge bases to generate well-formed new sentences. On the other hand, our approach employs a dual mechanism, which is a learnable augmentation framework, and can interactively adjust the generation process to generate task-related sentences. Experimental results on two benchmarks EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank show that 1) our method can augment suitable task-related training data for ECI; 2) our method outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.5 and +2.1 points on F1 value respectively).

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Knowledge-Enriched Event Causality Identification via Latent Structure Induction Networks
Pengfei Cao | Xinyu Zuo | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Yuguang Chen | Weihua Peng
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Identifying causal relations of events is an important task in natural language processing area. However, the task is very challenging, because event causality is usually expressed in diverse forms that often lack explicit causal clues. Existing methods cannot handle well the problem, especially in the condition of lacking training data. Nonetheless, humans can make a correct judgement based on their background knowledge, including descriptive knowledge and relational knowledge. Inspired by it, we propose a novel Latent Structure Induction Network (LSIN) to incorporate the external structural knowledge into this task. Specifically, to make use of the descriptive knowledge, we devise a Descriptive Graph Induction module to obtain and encode the graph-structured descriptive knowledge. To leverage the relational knowledge, we propose a Relational Graph Induction module which is able to automatically learn a reasoning structure for event causality reasoning. Experimental results on two widely used datasets indicate that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

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Improving Event Causality Identification via Self-Supervised Representation Learning on External Causal Statement
Xinyu Zuo | Pengfei Cao | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Weihua Peng | Yuguang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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KnowDis: Knowledge Enhanced Data Augmentation for Event Causality Detection via Distant Supervision
Xinyu Zuo | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Modern models of event causality detection (ECD) are mainly based on supervised learning from small hand-labeled corpora. However, hand-labeled training data is expensive to produce, low coverage of causal expressions, and limited in size, which makes supervised methods hard to detect causal relations between events. To solve this data lacking problem, we investigate a data augmentation framework for ECD, dubbed as Knowledge Enhanced Distant Data Augmentation (KnowDis). Experimental results on two benchmark datasets EventStoryLine corpus and Causal-TimeBank show that 1) KnowDis can augment available training data assisted with the lexical and causal commonsense knowledge for ECD via distant supervision, and 2) our method outperforms previous methods by a large margin assisted with automatically labeled training data.

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Towards Causal Explanation Detection with Pyramid Salient-Aware Network
Xinyu Zuo | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

Causal explanation analysis (CEA) can assist us to understand the reasons behind daily events, which has been found very helpful for understanding the coherence of messages. In this paper, we focus on Causal Explanation Detection, an important subtask of causal explanation analysis, which determines whether a causal explanation exists in one message. We design a Pyramid Salient-Aware Network (PSAN) to detect causal explanations on messages. PSAN can assist in causal explanation detection via capturing the salient semantics of discourses contained in their keywords with a bottom graph-based word-level salient network. Furthermore, PSAN can modify the dominance of discourses via a top attention-based discourse-level salient network to enhance explanatory semantics of messages. The experiments on the commonly used dataset of CEA shows that the PSAN outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 1.8% F1 value on the Causal Explanation Detection task.