Procedural Multimodal Documents (PMDs) organize textual instructions and corresponding images step by step. Comprehending PMDs and inducing their representations for the downstream reasoning tasks is designated as Procedural MultiModal Machine Comprehension (M3C). In this study, we approach Procedural M3C at a fine-grained level (compared with existing explorations at a document or sentence level), that is, entity. With delicate consideration, we model entity both in its temporal and cross-modal relation and propose a novel Temporal-Modal Entity Graph (TMEG). Specifically, graph structure is formulated to capture textual and visual entities and trace their temporal-modal evolution. In addition, a graph aggregation module is introduced to conduct graph encoding and reasoning. Comprehensive experiments across three Procedural M3C tasks are conducted on a traditional dataset RecipeQA and our new dataset CraftQA, which can better evaluate the generalization of TMEG.

Current Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) task mainly focuses on performing answer reasoning upon KGs with binary facts. However, it neglects the n-ary facts, which contain more than two entities. In this work, we highlight a more challenging but under-explored task: n-ary KGQA, i.e., answering n-ary facts questions upon n-ary KGs. Nevertheless, the multi-hop reasoning framework popular in binary KGQA task is not directly applicable on n-ary KGQA. We propose two feasible improvements: 1) upgrade the basic reasoning unit from entity or relation to fact, and 2) upgrade the reasoning structure from chain to tree. Therefore, we propose a novel fact-tree reasoning framework, FacTree, which integrates the above two upgrades. FacTree transforms the question into a fact tree and performs iterative fact reasoning on the fact tree to infer the correct answer. Experimental results on the n-ary KGQA dataset we constructed and two binary KGQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FacTree compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has drawn more and more attention because of its extensive applications. However, towards the sentence carried with more than one aspect, most existing works generate an aspect-specific sentence representation for each aspect term to predict sentiment polarity, which neglects the sentiment relationship among aspect terms. Besides, most current ABSA methods focus on sentences containing only one aspect term or multiple aspect terms with the same sentiment polarity, which makes ABSA degenerate into sentence-level sentiment analysis. In this paper, to deal with this problem, we construct a heterogeneous graph to model inter-aspect relationships and aspect-context relationships simultaneously and propose a novel Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network (CHGMAN) to encode the constructed heterogeneous graph. Meanwhile, we conduct extensive experiments on three datasets: MAMSATSA, Rest14, and Laptop14, experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

Knowledge graphs are essential for numerous downstream natural language processing applications, but are typically incomplete with many facts missing. This results in research efforts on multi-hop reasoning task, which can be formulated as a search process and current models typically perform short distance reasoning. However, the long-distance reasoning is also vital with the ability to connect the superficially unrelated entities. To the best of our knowledge, there lacks a general framework that approaches multi-hop reasoning in mixed long-short distance reasoning scenarios. We argue that there are two key issues for a general multi-hop reasoning model: i) where to go, and ii) when to stop. Therefore, we propose a general model which resolves the issues with three modules: 1) the local-global knowledge module to estimate the possible paths, 2) the differentiated action dropout module to explore a diverse set of paths, and 3) the adaptive stopping search module to avoid over searching. The comprehensive results on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model with significant improvements against baselines in both short and long distance reasoning scenarios.

User intent discovery is a key step in developing a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module at the core of any modern Conversational AI system. Typically, human experts review a representative sample of user input data to discover new intents, which is subjective, costly, and error-prone. In this work, we aim to assist the NLU developers by presenting a novel method for discovering new intents at scale given a corpus of utterances. Our method utilizes supervised contrastive learning to leverage information from a domain-relevant, already labeled dataset and identifies new intents in the corpus at hand using unsupervised K-means clustering. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin up to 2% and 13% on two benchmark datasets, measured by clustering accuracy. Furthermore, we apply our method on a large dataset from the travel domain to demonstrate its effectiveness on a real-world use case.