Predicate entailment detection is a crucial task for question-answering from text, where previous work has explored unsupervised learning of entailment graphs from typed open relation triples. In this paper, we present the first pipeline for building Chinese entailment graphs, which involves a novel high-recall open relation extraction (ORE) method and the first Chinese fine-grained entity typing dataset under the FIGER type ontology. Through experiments on the Levy-Holt dataset, we verify the strength of our Chinese entailment graph, and reveal the cross-lingual complementarity: on the parallel Levy-Holt dataset, an ensemble of Chinese and English entailment graphs outperforms both monolingual graphs, and raises unsupervised SOTA by 4.7 AUC points.
We examine LMs’ competence of directional predicate entailments by supervised fine-tuning with prompts. Our analysis shows that contrary to their apparent success on standard NLI, LMs show limited ability to learn such directional inference; moreover, existing datasets fail to test directionality, and/or are infested by artefacts that can be learnt as proxy for entailments, yielding over-optimistic results. In response, we present BoOQA (Boolean Open QA), a robust multi-lingual evaluation benchmark for directional predicate entailments, extrinsic to existing training sets. On BoOQA, we establish baselines and show evidence of existing LM-prompting models being incompetent directional entailment learners, in contrast to entailment graphs, however limited by sparsity.
Strong and affordable in-domain data is a desirable asset when transferring trained semantic parsers to novel domains. As previous methods for semi-automatically constructing such data cannot handle the complexity of realistic SQL queries, we propose to construct SQL queries via context-dependent sampling, and introduce the concept of topic. Along with our SQL query construction method, we propose a novel pipeline of semi-automatic Text-to-SQL dataset construction that covers the broad space of SQL queries. We show that the created dataset is comparable with expert annotation along multiple dimensions, and is capable of improving domain transfer performance for SOTA semantic parsers.
Recent work on data-to-text generation has made progress under the neural encoder-decoder architectures. However, the data input size is often enormous, while not all data records are important for text generation and inappropriate input may bring noise into the final output. To solve this problem, we propose a two-step approach which first selects and orders the important data records and then generates text from the noise-reduced data. Here we propose a learning to rank model to rank the importance of each record which is supervised by a relation extractor. With the noise-reduced data as input, we implement a text generator which sequentially models the input data records and emits a summary. Experiments on the ROTOWIRE dataset verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method in both performance and efficiency.
Previous work on visual storytelling mainly focused on exploring image sequence as evidence for storytelling and neglected textual evidence for guiding story generation. Motivated by human storytelling process which recalls stories for familiar images, we exploit textual evidence from similar images to help generate coherent and meaningful stories. To pick the images which may provide textual experience, we propose a two-step ranking method based on image object recognition techniques. To utilize textual information, we design an extended Seq2Seq model with two-channel encoder and attention. Experiments on the VIST dataset show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models without heavy engineering.