Bhushan Kotnis


2022

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BenchIE: A Framework for Multi-Faceted Fact-Based Open Information Extraction Evaluation
Kiril Gashteovski | Mingying Yu | Bhushan Kotnis | Carolin Lawrence | Mathias Niepert | Goran Glavaš
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Intrinsic evaluations of OIE systems are carried out either manually—with human evaluators judging the correctness of extractions—or automatically, on standardized benchmarks. The latter, while much more cost-effective, is less reliable, primarily because of the incompleteness of the existing OIE benchmarks: the ground truth extractions do not include all acceptable variants of the same fact, leading to unreliable assessment of the models’ performance. Moreover, the existing OIE benchmarks are available for English only. In this work, we introduce BenchIE: a benchmark and evaluation framework for comprehensive evaluation of OIE systems for English, Chinese, and German. In contrast to existing OIE benchmarks, BenchIE is fact-based, i.e., it takes into account informational equivalence of extractions: our gold standard consists of fact synsets, clusters in which we exhaustively list all acceptable surface forms of the same fact. Moreover, having in mind common downstream applications for OIE, we make BenchIE multi-faceted; i.e., we create benchmark variants that focus on different facets of OIE evaluation, e.g., compactness or minimality of extractions. We benchmark several state-of-the-art OIE systems using BenchIE and demonstrate that these systems are significantly less effective than indicated by existing OIE benchmarks. We make BenchIE (data and evaluation code) publicly available.

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MILIE: Modular & Iterative Multilingual Open Information Extraction
Bhushan Kotnis | Kiril Gashteovski | Daniel Rubio | Ammar Shaker | Vanesa Rodriguez-Tembras | Makoto Takamoto | Mathias Niepert | Carolin Lawrence
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is the task of extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples from natural language sentences. Current OpenIE systems extract all triple slots independently. In contrast, we explore the hypothesis that it may be beneficial to extract triple slots iteratively: first extract easy slots, followed by the difficult ones by conditioning on the easy slots, and therefore achieve a better overall extraction.Based on this hypothesis, we propose a neural OpenIE system, MILIE, that operates in an iterative fashion. Due to the iterative nature, the system is also modularit is possible to seamlessly integrate rule based extraction systems with a neural end-to-end system, thereby allowing rule based systems to supply extraction slots which MILIE can leverage for extracting the remaining slots. We confirm our hypothesis empirically: MILIE outperforms SOTA systems on multiple languages ranging from Chinese to Arabic. Additionally, we are the first to provide an OpenIE test dataset for Arabic and Galician.

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AnnIE: An Annotation Platform for Constructing Complete Open Information Extraction Benchmark
Niklas Friedrich | Kiril Gashteovski | Mingying Yu | Bhushan Kotnis | Carolin Lawrence | Mathias Niepert | Goran Glavaš
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting facts from sentences in the form of relations and their corresponding arguments in schema-free manner. Intrinsic performance of OIE systems is difficult to measure due to the incompleteness of existing OIE benchmarks: ground truth extractions do not group all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact that can be extracted from a sentence. To measure performance of OIE systems more realistically, it is necessary to manually annotate complete facts (i.e., clusters of all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact) from input sentences. We propose AnnIE: an interactive annotation platform that facilitates such challenging annotation tasks and supports creation of complete fact-oriented OIE evaluation benchmarks. AnnIE is modular and flexible in order to support different use case scenarios (i.e., benchmarks covering different types of facts) and different languages. We use AnnIE to build two complete OIE benchmarks: one with verb-mediated facts and another with facts encompassing named entities. We evaluate several OIE systems on our complete benchmarks created with AnnIE. We publicly release AnnIE (and all gold datasets generated with it) under non-restrictive license.

2020

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On Aligning OpenIE Extractions with Knowledge Bases: A Case Study
Kiril Gashteovski | Rainer Gemulla | Bhushan Kotnis | Sven Hertling | Christian Meilicke
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems

Open information extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting relations and their corresponding arguments from a natural language text in un- supervised manner. Outputs of such systems are used for downstream tasks such as ques- tion answering and automatic knowledge base (KB) construction. Many of these downstream tasks rely on aligning OIE triples with refer- ence KBs. Such alignments are usually eval- uated w.r.t. a specific downstream task and, to date, no direct manual evaluation of such alignments has been performed. In this paper, we directly evaluate how OIE triples from the OPIEC corpus are related to the DBpedia KB w.r.t. information content. First, we investigate OPIEC triples and DBpedia facts having the same arguments by comparing the information on the OIE surface relation with the KB rela- tion. Second, we evaluate the expressibility of general OPIEC triples in DBpedia. We in- vestigate whether—and, if so, how—a given OIE triple can be mapped to a single KB fact. We found that such mappings are not always possible because the information in the OIE triples tends to be more specific. Our evalua- tion suggests, however, that significant part of OIE triples can be expressed by means of KB formulas instead of individual facts.

2019

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Abstract Graphs and Abstract Paths for Knowledge Graph Completion
Vivi Nastase | Bhushan Kotnis
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)

Knowledge graphs, which provide numerous facts in a machine-friendly format, are incomplete. Information that we induce from such graphs – e.g. entity embeddings, relation representations or patterns – will be affected by the imbalance in the information captured in the graph – by biasing representations, or causing us to miss potential patterns. To partially compensate for this situation we describe a method for representing knowledge graphs that capture an intensional representation of the original extensional information. This representation is very compact, and it abstracts away from individual links, allowing us to find better path candidates, as shown by the results of link prediction using this information.

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Attending to Future Tokens for Bidirectional Sequence Generation
Carolin Lawrence | Bhushan Kotnis | Mathias Niepert
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Neural sequence generation is typically performed token-by-token and left-to-right. Whenever a token is generated only previously produced tokens are taken into consideration. In contrast, for problems such as sequence classification, bidirectional attention, which takes both past and future tokens into consideration, has been shown to perform much better. We propose to make the sequence generation process bidirectional by employing special placeholder tokens. Treated as a node in a fully connected graph, a placeholder token can take past and future tokens into consideration when generating the actual output token. We verify the effectiveness of our approach experimentally on two conversational tasks where the proposed bidirectional model outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin.

2015

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Knowledge Base Inference using Bridging Entities
Bhushan Kotnis | Pradeep Bansal | Partha P. Talukdar
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing