Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task to recognize specific types of entities from a given sentence. Depending on how the entities appear in the sentence, it can be divided into three subtasks, namely, Flat NER, Nested NER, and Discontinuous NER. Among the existing approaches, only the generative model can be uniformly adapted to these three subtasks. However, when the generative model is applied to NER, its optimization objective is not consistent with the task, which makes the model vulnerable to the incorrect biases. In this paper, we analyze the incorrect biases in the generation process from a causality perspective and attribute them to two confounders: pre-context confounder and entity-order confounder. Furthermore, we design Intra- and Inter-entity Deconfounding Data Augmentation methods to eliminate the above confounders according to the theory of backdoor adjustment. Experiments show that our method can improve the performance of the generative NER model in various datasets.
Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent works treat named entity recognition as a reading comprehension task, constructing type-specific queries manually to extract entities. This paradigm suffers from three issues. First, type-specific queries can only extract one type of entities per inference, which is inefficient. Second, the extraction for different types of entities is isolated, ignoring the dependencies between them. Third, query construction relies on external knowledge and is difficult to apply to realistic scenarios with hundreds of entity types. To deal with them, we propose Parallel Instance Query Network (PIQN), which sets up global and learnable instance queries to extract entities from a sentence in a parallel manner. Each instance query predicts one entity, and by feeding all instance queries simultaneously, we can query all entities in parallel. Instead of being constructed from external knowledge, instance queries can learn their different query semantics during training. For training the model, we treat label assignment as a one-to-many Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) and dynamically assign gold entities to instance queries with minimal assignment cost. Experiments on both nested and flat NER datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.
Relation Induction is a very practical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) area. In practical application scenarios, people want to induce more entity pairs having the same relation from only a few seed entity pairs. Thus, instead of the laborious supervised setting, in this paper, we focus on the minimally-supervised setting where only a couple of seed entity pairs per relation are provided. Although the conventional relation induction methods have made some success, their performance depends heavily on the quality of word embeddings. The great success of Pre-trained Language Models, such as BERT, changes the NLP area a lot, and they are proven to be able to better capture relation knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel method to induce relation with BERT under the minimally-supervised setting. Specifically, we firstly extract proper templates from the corpus by using the mask-prediction task in BERT to build pseudo-sentences as the context of entity pairs. Then we use BERT attention weights to better represent the pseudo-sentences. In addition, We also use the IntegratedGradient of entity pairs to iteratively select better templates further. Finally, with the high-quality pseudo-sentences, we can train a better classifier for relation induction. Experiments onGoogle Analogy Test Sets (GATS), Bigger Analogy TestSet (BATS) and DiffVec demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Math word problem solver requires both precise relation reasoning about quantities in the text and reliable generation for the diverse equation. Current sequence-to-tree or relation extraction methods regard this only from a fixed view, struggling to simultaneously handle complex semantics and diverse equations. However, human solving naturally involves two consistent reasoning views: top-down and bottom-up, just as math equations also can be expressed in multiple equivalent forms: pre-order and post-order. We propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning for a more complete semantics-to-equation mapping. The entire process is decoupled into two independent but consistent views: top-down decomposition and bottom-up construction, and the two reasoning views are aligned in multi-granularity for consistency, enhancing global generation and precise reasoning. Experiments on multiple datasets across two languages show our approach significantly outperforms the existing baselines, especially on complex problems. We also show after consistent alignment, multi-view can absorb the merits of both views and generate more diverse results consistent with the mathematical laws.
Joint entity and relation extraction has been a core task in the field of information extraction. Recent approaches usually consider the extraction of relational triples from a stereoscopic perspective, either learning a relation-specific tagger or separate classifiers for each relation type. However, they still suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections between triples. To address these issues, we propose a novel query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples. By metric-based comparison between query embeddings and token embeddings, we can extract all types of triples in one step, thus eliminating the error propagation problem. In addition, we learn the instance-level representation of relational triples via contrastive learning. In this way, relational triples can not only enclose rich class-level semantics but also access to high-order global connections. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state of the art on five widely used benchmarks.
The MultiCoNER shared task aims at detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities in short and low-context settings for multiple languages. The lack of contexts makes the recognition of ambiguous named entities challenging. To alleviate this issue, our team DAMO-NLP proposes a knowledge-based system, where we build a multilingual knowledge base based on Wikipedia to provide related context information to the named entity recognition (NER) model. Given an input sentence, our system effectively retrieves related contexts from the knowledge base. The original input sentences are then augmented with such context information, allowing significantly better contextualized token representations to be captured. Our system wins 10 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER shared task.
Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. Traditional NER research only deals with flat entities and ignores nested entities. The span-based methods treat entity recognition as a span classification task. Although these methods have the innate ability to handle nested NER, they suffer from high computational cost, ignorance of boundary information, under-utilization of the spans that partially match with entities, and difficulties in long entity recognition. To tackle these issues, we propose a two-stage entity identifier. First we generate span proposals by filtering and boundary regression on the seed spans to locate the entities, and then label the boundary-adjusted span proposals with the corresponding categories. Our method effectively utilizes the boundary information of entities and partially matched spans during training. Through boundary regression, entities of any length can be covered theoretically, which improves the ability to recognize long entities. In addition, many low-quality seed spans are filtered out in the first stage, which reduces the time complexity of inference. Experiments on nested NER datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.
Prerequisite relations among concepts are crucial for educational applications, such as curriculum planning and intelligent tutoring. In this paper, we propose a novel concept prerequisite relation learning approach, named CPRL, which combines both concept representation learned from a heterogeneous graph and concept pairwise features. Furthermore, we extend CPRL under weakly supervised settings to make our method more practical, including learning prerequisite relations from learning object dependencies and generating training data with data programming. Our experiments on four datasets show that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art results comparing with existing methods.
In this paper, we study a new task of synonym expansion using transitivity, and propose a novel approach named SynET, which considers both the contexts of two given synonym pairs. It introduces an auxiliary task to reduce the impact of noisy sentences, and proposes a Multi-Perspective Entity Matching Network to match entities from multiple perspectives. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show the effectiveness of our approach.
Large pre-trained transformer-based language models have achieved impressive results on a wide range of NLP tasks. In the past few years, Knowledge Distillation(KD) has become a popular paradigm to compress a computationally expensive model to a resource-efficient lightweight model. However, most KD algorithms, especially in NLP, rely on the accessibility of the original training dataset, which may be unavailable due to privacy issues. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel two-stage data-free distillation method, named Adversarial self-Supervised Data-Free Distillation (AS-DFD), which is designed for compressing large-scale transformer-based models (e.g., BERT). To avoid text generation in discrete space, we introduce a Plug & Play Embedding Guessing method to craft pseudo embeddings from the teacher’s hidden knowledge. Meanwhile, with a self-supervised module to quantify the student’s ability, we adapt the difficulty of pseudo embeddings in an adversarial training manner. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first data-free distillation framework designed for NLP tasks. We verify the effectiveness of our method on several text classification datasets.