Zixuan Zhang


2022

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RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios
Xinya Du | Zixuan Zhang | Sha Li | Pengfei Yu | Hongwei Wang | Tuan Lai | Xudong Lin | Ziqi Wang | Iris Liu | Ben Zhou | Haoyang Wen | Manling Li | Darryl Hannan | Jie Lei | Hyounghun Kim | Rotem Dror | Haoyu Wang | Michael Regan | Qi Zeng | Qing Lyu | Charles Yu | Carl Edwards | Xiaomeng Jin | Yizhu Jiao | Ghazaleh Kazeminejad | Zhenhailong Wang | Chris Callison-Burch | Mohit Bansal | Carl Vondrick | Jiawei Han | Dan Roth | Shih-Fu Chang | Martha Palmer | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: System Demonstrations

We introduce RESIN-11, a new schema-guided event extraction&prediction framework that can be applied to a large variety of newsworthy scenarios. The framework consists of two parts: (1) an open-domain end-to-end multimedia multilingual information extraction system with weak-supervision and zero-shot learningbased techniques. (2) schema matching and schema-guided event prediction based on our curated schema library. We build a demo website based on our dockerized system and schema library publicly available for installation (https://github.com/RESIN-KAIROS/RESIN-11). We also include a video demonstrating the system.

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COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System
Manling Li | Revanth Gangi Reddy | Ziqi Wang | Yi-shyuan Chiang | Tuan Lai | Pengfei Yu | Zixuan Zhang | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

To tackle the challenge of accurate and timely communication regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we present a COVID-19 Claim Radar to automatically extract supporting and refuting claims on a daily basis. We provide a comprehensive structured view of claims, including rich claim attributes (such as claimers and claimer affiliations) and associated knowledge elements as claim semantics (such as events, relations and entities), enabling users to explore equivalent, refuting, or supporting claims with structural evidence, such as shared claimers, similar centroid events and arguments. In order to consolidate claim structures at the corpus-level, we leverage Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements. The system automatically provides users a comprehensive exposure to COVID-19 related claims, their importance, and their interconnections. The system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation.

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Language Model Pre-Training with Sparse Latent Typing
Liliang Ren | Zixuan Zhang | Han Wang | Clare Voss | ChengXiang Zhai | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, most of the LM pre-training objectives only focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn latent-level interpretable representations of sentences. In this paper, we manage to push the language models to obtain a deeper understanding of sentences by proposing a new pre-training objective, Sparse Latent Typing, which enables the model to sparsely extract sentence-level keywords with diverse latent types. Experimental results show that our model is able to learn interpretable latent type categories in a self-supervised manner without using any external knowledge. Besides, the language model pre-trained with such an objective also significantly improves Information Extraction related downstream tasks in both supervised and few-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/renll/SparseLT.

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Building an Event Extractor with Only a Few Examples
Pengfei Yu | Zixuan Zhang | Clare Voss | Jonathan May | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing

Supervised event extraction models require a substantial amount of training data to perform well. However, event annotation requires a lot of human effort and costs much time, which limits the application of existing supervised approaches to new event types. In order to reduce manual labor and shorten the time to build an event extraction system for an arbitrary event ontology, we present a new framework to train such systems much more efficiently without large annotations. Our event trigger labeling model uses a weak supervision approach, which only requires a set of keywords, a small number of examples and an unlabeled corpus, on which our approach automatically collects weakly supervised annotations. Our argument role labeling component performs zero-shot learning, which only requires the names of the argument roles of new event types. The source codes of our event trigger detection1 and event argument extraction2 models are publicly available for research purposes. We also release a dockerized system connecting the two models into an unified event extraction pipeline.

2021

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EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding
Zixuan Zhang | Hongwei Wang | Han Zhao | Hanghang Tong | Heng Ji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Relations in most of the traditional knowledge graphs (KGs) only reflect static and factual connections, but fail to represent the dynamic activities and state changes about entities. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of incorporating events in KG representation learning, and propose an event-enhanced KG embedding model EventKE. Specifically, given the original KG, we first incorporate event nodes by building a heterogeneous network, where entity nodes and event nodes are distributed on the two sides of the network inter-connected by event argument links. We then use entity-entity relations from the original KG and event-event temporal links to inner-connect entity and event nodes respectively. We design a novel and effective attention-based message passing method, which is conducted on entity-entity, event-entity, and event-event relations to fuse the event information into KG embeddings. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that events can greatly improve the quality of the KG embeddings on multiple downstream tasks.

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Fine-grained Information Extraction from Biomedical Literature based on Knowledge-enriched Abstract Meaning Representation
Zixuan Zhang | Nikolaus Parulian | Heng Ji | Ahmed Elsayed | Skatje Myers | Martha Palmer
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)

Biomedical Information Extraction from scientific literature presents two unique and non-trivial challenges. First, compared with general natural language texts, sentences from scientific papers usually possess wider contexts between knowledge elements. Moreover, comprehending the fine-grained scientific entities and events urgently requires domain-specific background knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel biomedical Information Extraction (IE) model to tackle these two challenges and extract scientific entities and events from English research papers. We perform Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to compress the wide context to uncover a clear semantic structure for each complex sentence. Besides, we construct the sentence-level knowledge graph from an external knowledge base and use it to enrich the AMR graph to improve the model’s understanding of complex scientific concepts. We use an edge-conditioned graph attention network to encode the knowledge-enriched AMR graph for biomedical IE tasks. Experiments on the GENIA 2011 dataset show that the AMR and external knowledge have contributed 1.8% and 3.0% absolute F-score gains respectively. In order to evaluate the impact of our approach on real-world problems that involve topic-specific fine-grained knowledge elements, we have also created a new ontology and annotated corpus for entity and event extraction for the COVID-19 scientific literature, which can serve as a new benchmark for the biomedical IE community.

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Abstract Meaning Representation Guided Graph Encoding and Decoding for Joint Information Extraction
Zixuan Zhang | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The tasks of Rich Semantic Parsing, such as Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), share similar goals with Information Extraction (IE) to convert natural language texts into structured semantic representations. To take advantage of such similarity, we propose a novel AMR-guided framework for joint information extraction to discover entities, relations, and events with the help of a pre-trained AMR parser. Our framework consists of two novel components: 1) an AMR based semantic graph aggregator to let the candidate entity and event trigger nodes collect neighborhood information from AMR graph for passing message among related knowledge elements; 2) an AMR guided graph decoder to extract knowledge elements based on the order decided by the hierarchical structures in AMR. Experiments on multiple datasets have shown that the AMR graph encoder and decoder have provided significant gains and our approach has achieved new state-of-the-art performance on all IE subtasks.