Recent years have witnessed growing interests in incorporating external knowledge such as pre-trained word embeddings (PWEs) or pre-trained language models (PLMs) into neural topic modeling. However, we found that employing PWEs and PLMs for topic modeling only achieved limited performance improvements but with huge computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to incorporate external knowledge into neural topic modeling where the neural topic model is pre-trained on a large corpus and then fine-tuned on the target dataset. Experiments have been conducted on three datasets and results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms both current state-of-the-art neural topic models and some topic modeling approaches enhanced with PWEs or PLMs. Moreover, further study shows that the proposed approach greatly reduces the need for the huge size of training data.

Medical code prediction from clinical notes aims at automatically associating medical codes with the clinical notes. Rare code problem, the medical codes with low occurrences, is prominent in medical code prediction. Recent studies employ deep neural networks and the external knowledge to tackle it. However, such approaches lack interpretability which is a vital issue in medical application. Moreover, due to the lengthy and noisy clinical notes, such approaches fail to achieve satisfactory results. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework based on medical concept driven attention to incorporate external knowledge for explainable medical code prediction. In specific, both the clinical notes and Wikipedia documents are aligned into topic space to extract medical concepts using topic modeling. Then, the medical concept-driven attention mechanism is applied to uncover the medical code related concepts which provide explanations for medical code prediction. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset show the superiority of the proposed framework over several state-of-the-art baselines.

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims at identifying named entities based on only few labeled instances. Current few-shot NER methods focus on leveraging existing datasets in the rich-resource domains which might fail in a training-from-scratch setting where no source-domain data is used. To tackle training-from-scratch setting, it is crucial to make full use of the annotation information (the boundaries and entity types). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-task (Seed, Expand and Entail) learning framework, SEE-Few, for Few-shot NER without using source domain data. The seeding and expanding modules are responsible for providing as accurate candidate spans as possible for the entailing module. The entailing module reformulates span classification as a textual entailment task, leveraging both the contextual clues and entity type information. All the three modules share the same text encoder and are jointly learned. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets under the training-from-scratch setting show that the proposed method outperformed several state-of-the-art few-shot NER methods with a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/unveiled-the-red-hat/SEE-Few.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) stores world knowledge that benefits various reasoning-based applications. Due to their incompleteness, a fundamental task for KGs, which is known as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), is to perform link prediction and infer new facts based on the known facts. Recently, link prediction on the temporal KGs becomes an active research topic. Numerous Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) methods have been proposed by mapping the entities and relations in TKG to the high-dimensional representations. However, most existing TKGC methods are mainly based on deterministic vector embeddings, which are not flexible and expressive enough. In this paper, we propose a novel TKGC method, TKGC-AGP, by mapping the entities and relations in TKG to the approximations of multivariate Gaussian processes (MGPs). Equipped with the flexibility and capacity of MGP, the global trends as well as the local fluctuations in the TKGs can be simultaneously modeled. Moreover, the temporal uncertainties can be also captured with the kernel function and the covariance matrix of MGP. Moreover, a first-order Markov assumption-based training algorithm is proposed to effective optimize the proposed method. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two real-world benchmark datasets compared with some state-of-the-art TKGC methods.

Multi-label document classification, associating one document instance with a set of relevant labels, is attracting more and more research attention. Existing methods explore the incorporation of information beyond text, such as document metadata or label structure. These approaches however either simply utilize the semantic information of metadata or employ the predefined parent-child label hierarchy, ignoring the heterogeneous graphical structures of metadata and labels, which we believe are crucial for accurate multi-label document classification. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel neural network based approach for multi-label document classification, in which two heterogeneous graphs are constructed and learned using heterogeneous graph transformers. One is metadata heterogeneous graph, which models various types of metadata and their topological relations. The other is label heterogeneous graph, which is constructed based on both the labels’ hierarchy and their statistical dependencies. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.

Implicit sentiment analysis, aiming at detecting the sentiment of a sentence without sentiment words, has become an attractive research topic in recent years. In this paper, we focus on event-centric implicit sentiment analysis that utilizes the sentiment-aware event contained in a sentence to infer its sentiment polarity. Most existing methods in implicit sentiment analysis simply view noun phrases or entities in text as events or indirectly model events with sophisticated models. Since events often trigger sentiments in sentences, we argue that this task would benefit from explicit modeling of events and event representation learning. To this end, we represent an event as the combination of its event type and the event triplet <subject, predicate, object>. Based on such event representation, we further propose a novel model with hierarchical tensor-based composition mechanism to detect sentiment in text. In addition, we present a dataset for event-centric implicit sentiment analysis where each sentence is labeled with the event representation described above. Experimental results on our constructed dataset and an existing benchmark dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Multi-hop relation detection in Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims at retrieving the relation path starting from the topic entity to the answer node based on a given question, where the relation path may comprise multiple relations. Most of the existing methods treat it as a single-label learning problem while ignoring the fact that for some complex questions, there exist multiple correct relation paths in knowledge bases. Therefore, in this paper, multi-hop relation detection is considered as a multi-label learning problem. However, performing multi-label multi-hop relation detection is challenging since the numbers of both the labels and the hops are unknown. To tackle this challenge, multi-label multi-hop relation detection is formulated as a sequence generation task. A relation-aware sequence relation generation model is proposed to solve the problem in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for relation detection and KBQA.

Relation detection in knowledge base question answering, aims to identify the path(s) of relations starting from the topic entity node that is linked to the answer node in knowledge graph. Such path might consist of multiple relations, which we call multi-hop. Moreover, for a single question, there may exist multiple relation paths to the correct answer, which we call multi-label. However, most of existing approaches only detect one single path to obtain the answer without considering other correct paths, which might affect the final performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer approach for multi-label multi-hop relation detection (DC-MLMH) by decomposing it into head relation detection and conditional relation path generation. In specific, a novel path sampling mechanism is proposed to generate diverse relation paths for the inference stage. A majority-vote policy is employed to detect final KB answer. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on the FreebaseQA benchmark dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed approach not only outperforms other competitive multi-label baselines, but also has superiority over some state-of-art KBQA methods.