Current state-of-the-art systems for joint entity relation extraction (Luan et al., 2019; Wad-den et al., 2019) usually adopt the multi-task learning framework. However, annotations for these additional tasks such as coreference resolution and event extraction are always equally hard (or even harder) to obtain. In this work, we propose a pre-training method ENPAR to improve the joint extraction performance. ENPAR requires only the additional entity annotations that are much easier to collect. Unlike most existing works that only consider incorporating entity information into the sentence encoder, we further utilize the entity pair information. Specifically, we devise four novel objectives,i.e., masked entity typing, masked entity prediction, adversarial context discrimination, and permutation prediction, to pre-train an entity encoder and an entity pair encoder. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed pre-training method achieves significant improvement over BERT on ACE05, SciERC, and NYT, and outperforms current state-of-the-art on ACE05.

Many joint entity relation extraction models setup two separated label spaces for the two sub-tasks (i.e., entity detection and relation classification). We argue that this setting may hinder the information interaction between entities and relations. In this work, we propose to eliminate the different treatment on the two sub-tasks’ label spaces. The input of our model is a table containing all word pairs from a sentence. Entities and relations are represented by squares and rectangles in the table. We apply a unified classifier to predict each cell’s label, which unifies the learning of two sub-tasks. For testing, an effective (yet fast) approximate decoder is proposed for finding squares and rectangles from tables. Experiments on three benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05, SciERC) show that, using only half the number of parameters, our model achieves competitive accuracy with the best extractor, and is faster.

In this paper, we integrate span-related information into pre-trained encoder for entity relation extraction task. Instead of using general-purpose sentence encoder (e.g., existing universal pre-trained models), we introduce a span encoder and a span pair encoder to the pre-training network, which makes it easier to import intra-span and inter-span information into the pre-trained model. To learn the encoders, we devise three customized pre-training objectives from different perspectives, which target on tokens, spans, and span pairs. In particular, a span encoder is trained to recover a random shuffling of tokens in a span, and a span pair encoder is trained to predict positive pairs that are from the same sentences and negative pairs that are from different sentences using contrastive loss. Experimental results show that the proposed pre-training method outperforms distantly supervised pre-training, and achieves promising performance on two entity relation extraction benchmark datasets (ACE05, SciERC).

To solve the shared tasks of COIN: COmmonsense INference in Natural Language Processing) Workshop in , we need explore the impact of knowledge representation in modeling commonsense knowledge to boost performance of machine reading comprehension beyond simple text matching. There are two approaches to represent knowledge in the low-dimensional space. The first is to leverage large-scale unsupervised text corpus to train fixed or contextual language representations. The second approach is to explicitly express knowledge into a knowledge graph (KG), and then fit a model to represent the facts in the KG. We have experimented both (a) improving the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on a task with a small dataset size, by leveraging datasets of similar tasks; and (b) incorporating the distributional representations of a KG onto the representations of pre-trained language models, via simply concatenation or multi-head attention. We find out that: (a) for task 1, first fine-tuning on larger datasets like RACE (Lai et al., 2017) and SWAG (Zellersetal.,2018), and then fine-tuning on the target task improve the performance significantly; (b) for task 2, we find out the incorporating a KG of commonsense knowledge, WordNet (Miller, 1995) into the Bert model (Devlin et al., 2018) is helpful, however, it will hurts the performace of XLNET (Yangetal.,2019), a more powerful pre-trained model. Our approaches achieve the state-of-the-art results on both shared task’s official test data, outperforming all the other submissions.

Finding the correct hypernyms for entities is essential for taxonomy learning, fine-grained entity categorization, query understanding, etc. Due to the flexibility of the Chinese language, it is challenging to identify hypernyms in Chinese accurately. Rather than extracting hypernyms from texts, in this paper, we present a transductive learning approach to establish mappings from entities to hypernyms in the embedding space directly. It combines linear and non-linear embedding projection models, with the capacity of encoding arbitrary language-specific rules. Experiments on real-world datasets illustrate that our approach outperforms previous methods for Chinese hypernym prediction.