Fine-grained entity typing (FGET) aims to classify named entity mentions into fine-grained entity types, which is meaningful for entity-related NLP tasks. For FGET, a key challenge is the low-resource problem — the complex entity type hierarchy makes it difficult to manually label data. Especially for those languages other than English, human-labeled data is extremely scarce. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual contrastive learning framework to learn FGET models for low-resource languages. Specifically, we use multi-lingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) as the backbone to transfer the typing knowledge from high-resource languages (such as English) to low-resource languages (such as Chinese). Furthermore, we introduce entity-pair-oriented heuristic rules as well as machine translation to obtain cross-lingual distantly-supervised data, and apply cross-lingual contrastive learning on the distantly-supervised data to enhance the backbone PLMs. Experimental results show that by applying our framework, we can easily learn effective FGET models for low-resource languages, even without any language-specific human-labeled data. Our code is also available at https://github.com/thunlp/CrossET.

Hyperbolic neural networks have shown great potential for modeling complex data. However, existing hyperbolic networks are not completely hyperbolic, as they encode features in the hyperbolic space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space (a Euclidean subspace) at the origin of the hyperbolic model. This hybrid method greatly limits the modeling ability of networks. In this paper, we propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolic networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting the Lorentz transformations (including boost and rotation) to formalize essential operations of neural networks. Moreover, we also prove that linear transformation in tangent spaces used by existing hyperbolic networks is a relaxation of the Lorentz rotation and does not include the boost, implicitly limiting the capabilities of existing hyperbolic networks. The experimental results on four NLP tasks show that our method has better performance for building both shallow and deep networks. Our code will be released to facilitate follow-up research.

Delta tuning (DET, also known as parameter-efficient tuning) is deemed as the new paradigm for using pre-trained language models (PLMs). Up to now, various DETs with distinct design elements have been proposed, achieving performance on par with fine-tuning. However, the mechanisms behind the above success are still under-explored, especially the connections among various DETs. To fathom the mystery, we hypothesize that the adaptations of different DETs could all be reparameterized as low-dimensional optimizations in a unified optimization subspace, which could be found by jointly decomposing independent solutions of different DETs. Then we explore the connections among different DETs by conducting optimization within the subspace. In experiments, we find that, for a certain DET, conducting optimization simply in the subspace could achieve comparable performance to its original space, and the found solution in the subspace could be transferred to another DET and achieve non-trivial performance. We also visualize the performance landscape of the subspace, and find that, there exists a substantial region where different DETs all perform well. Finally, we extend our analysis and show the strong connections between fine-tuning and DETs. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/Unified-DeltaTuning.

Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. Although plenty of works have studied how to effectively and efficiently adapt PLMs to high-performance minima, little is known about the connection of various minima reached under different adaptation configurations. In this paper, we investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. We conduct empirical analyses to investigate three questions: (1) how could hyperparameters, specific tuning methods, and training data affect PLM’s mode connectivity? (2) How does mode connectivity change during pre-training? (3) How does the PLM’s task knowledge change along the path connecting two minima? In general, exploring the mode connectivity of PLMs conduces to understanding the geometric connection of different minima, which may help us fathom the inner workings of PLM downstream adaptation. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/Mode-Connectivity-PLM.

We introduce a conceptually simple and effective method to quantify the similarity between relations in knowledge bases. Specifically, our approach is based on the divergence between the conditional probability distributions over entity pairs. In this paper, these distributions are parameterized by a very simple neural network. Although computing the exact similarity is in-tractable, we provide a sampling-based method to get a good approximation. We empirically show the outputs of our approach significantly correlate with human judgments. By applying our method to various tasks, we also find that (1) our approach could effectively detect redundant relations extracted by open information extraction (Open IE) models, that (2) even the most competitive models for relational classification still make mistakes among very similar relations, and that (3) our approach could be incorporated into negative sampling and softmax classification to alleviate these mistakes.