Sairam Gurajada


2022

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Cross-lingual Short-text Entity Linking: Generating Features for Neuro-Symbolic Methods
Qiuhao Lu | Sairam Gurajada | Prithviraj Sen | Lucian Popa | Dejing Dou | Thien Nguyen
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Data Science with Human-in-the-Loop (Language Advances)

Entity linking (EL) on short text is crucial for a variety of industrial applications. Compared with general long-text EL, short-text EL poses particular challenges as the limited context restricts the clues one can leverage to disambiguate textual mentions. On the other hand, existing studies mostly focus on black-box neural methods and thus lack interpretability, which is critical to industrial applications in certain areas. In this study, we extend upon LNN-EL, a monolingual short-text EL method based on interpretable first-order logic, by incorporating three sets of multilingual features to enable disambiguating mentions written in languages other than English. More specifically, we use multilingual autoencoding language models (i.e., mBERT) to capture the similarities between the mention with its context and the candidate entity; we use multilingual sequence-to-sequence language models (i.e., mBART and mT5) to represent the likelihood of the text given the candidate entity. We also propose a word-level context feature to capture the semantic evidence of the co-occurring mentions. We evaluate the proposed xLNN-EL approach on the QALD-9-multilingual dataset and demonstrate the cross-linguality of the model and the effectiveness of the features.

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SYGMA: A System for Generalizable and Modular Question Answering Over Knowledge Bases
Sumit Neelam | Udit Sharma | Hima Karanam | Shajith Ikbal | Pavan Kapanipathi | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya | Young-Suk Lee | Santosh Srivastava | Cezar Pendus | Saswati Dana | Dinesh Garg | Achille Fokoue | G P Shrivatsa Bhargav | Dinesh Khandelwal | Srinivas Ravishankar | Sairam Gurajada | Maria Chang | Rosario Uceda-Sosa | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray | Guilherme Lima | Ryan Riegel | Francois Luus | L V Subramaniam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) involving complex reasoning is emerging as an important research direction. However, most KBQA systems struggle with generalizability, particularly on two dimensions: (a) across multiple knowledge bases, where existing KBQA approaches are typically tuned to a single knowledge base, and (b) across multiple reasoning types, where majority of datasets and systems have primarily focused on multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we present SYGMA, a modular KBQA approach developed with goal of generalization across multiple knowledge bases and multiple reasoning types. To facilitate this, SYGMA is designed as two high level modules: 1) KB-agnostic question understanding module that remain common across KBs, and generates logic representation of the question with high level reasoning constructs that are extensible, and 2) KB-specific question mapping and answering module to address the KB-specific aspects of the answer extraction. We evaluated SYGMA on multiple datasets belonging to distinct knowledge bases (DBpedia and Wikidata) and distinct reasoning types (multi-hop and temporal). State-of-the-art or competitive performances achieved on those datasets demonstrate its generalization capability.

2021

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A Research Framework for Understanding Education-Occupation Alignment with NLP Techniques
Renzhe Yu | Subhro Das | Sairam Gurajada | Kush Varshney | Hari Raghavan | Carlos Lastra-Anadon
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact

Understanding the gaps between job requirements and university curricula is crucial for improving student success and institutional effectiveness in higher education. In this context, natural language processing (NLP) can be leveraged to generate granular insights into where the gaps are and how they change. This paper proposes a three-dimensional research framework that combines NLP techniques with economic and educational research to quantify the alignment between course syllabi and job postings. We elaborate on key technical details of the framework and further discuss its potential positive impacts on practice, including unveiling the inequalities in and long-term consequences of education-occupation alignment to inform policymakers, and fostering information systems to support students, institutions and employers in the school-to-work pipeline.

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Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation for Knowledge Base Question Answering
Pavan Kapanipathi | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Srinivas Ravishankar | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray | Ramón Fernandez Astudillo | Maria Chang | Cristina Cornelio | Saswati Dana | Achille Fokoue | Dinesh Garg | Alfio Gliozzo | Sairam Gurajada | Hima Karanam | Naweed Khan | Dinesh Khandelwal | Young-Suk Lee | Yunyao Li | Francois Luus | Ndivhuwo Makondo | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya | Tahira Naseem | Sumit Neelam | Lucian Popa | Revanth Gangi Reddy | Ryan Riegel | Gaetano Rossiello | Udit Sharma | G P Shrivatsa Bhargav | Mo Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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LNN-EL: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Short-text Entity Linking
Hang Jiang | Sairam Gurajada | Qiuhao Lu | Sumit Neelam | Lucian Popa | Prithviraj Sen | Yunyao Li | Alexander Gray
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)

Entity linking (EL) is the task of disambiguating mentions appearing in text by linking them to entities in a knowledge graph, a crucial task for text understanding, question answering or conversational systems. In the special case of short-text EL, which poses additional challenges due to limited context, prior approaches have reached good performance by employing heuristics-based methods or purely neural approaches. Here, we take a different, neuro-symbolic approach that combines the advantages of using interpretable rules based on first-order logic with the performance of neural learning. Even though constrained to use rules, we show that we reach competitive or better performance with SoTA black-box neural approaches. Furthermore, our framework has the benefits of extensibility and transferability. We show that we can easily blend existing rule templates given by a human expert, with multiple types of features (priors, BERT encodings, box embeddings, etc), and even with scores resulting from previous EL methods, thus improving on such methods. As an example of improvement, on the LC-QuAD-1.0 dataset, we show more than 3% increase in F1 score relative to previous SoTA. Finally, we show that the inductive bias offered by using logic results in a set of learned rules that transfers from one dataset to another, sometimes without finetuning, while still having high accuracy.

2019

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Low-resource Deep Entity Resolution with Transfer and Active Learning
Jungo Kasai | Kun Qian | Sairam Gurajada | Yunyao Li | Lucian Popa
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Entity resolution (ER) is the task of identifying different representations of the same real-world entities across databases. It is a key step for knowledge base creation and text mining. Recent adaptation of deep learning methods for ER mitigates the need for dataset-specific feature engineering by constructing distributed representations of entity records. While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance over benchmark data, they require large amounts of labeled data, which are typically unavailable in realistic ER applications. In this paper, we develop a deep learning-based method that targets low-resource settings for ER through a novel combination of transfer learning and active learning. We design an architecture that allows us to learn a transferable model from a high-resource setting to a low-resource one. To further adapt to the target dataset, we incorporate active learning that carefully selects a few informative examples to fine-tune the transferred model. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves comparable, if not better, performance compared to state-of-the-art learning-based methods while using an order of magnitude fewer labels.