Query-focused meeting summarization(QFMS) aims to generate a specific summary for the given query according to the meeting transcripts. Due to the conflict between long meetings and limited input size, previous works mainly adopt extract-then-summarize methods, which use extractors to simulate binary labels or ROUGE scores to extract utterances related to the query and then generate a summary. However, the previous approach fails to fully use the comparison between utterances. To the extractor, comparison orders are more important than specific scores. In this paper, we propose a Ranker-Generator framework. It learns to rank the utterances by comparing them in pairs and learning from the global orders, then uses top utterances as the generator’s input. We show that learning to rank utterances helps to select utterances related to the query effectively, and the summarizer can benefit from it. Experimental results on QMSum show that the proposed model outperforms all existing multi-stage models with fewer parameters.

Open relation extraction is the task to extract relational facts without pre-defined relation types from open-domain corpora. However, since there are some hard or semi-hard instances sharing similar context and entity information but belonging to different underlying relation, current OpenRE methods always cluster them into the same relation type. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Instance Ranking and Label Calibration strategies (IRLC) to learn discriminative representations for open relation extraction. Due to lacking the original instance label, we provide three surrogate strategies to generate the positive, hard negative, and semi-hard negative instances for the original instance. Instance ranking aims to refine the relational feature space by pushing the hard and semi-hard negative instances apart from the original instance with different margins and pulling the original instance and its positive instance together. To refine the cluster probability distributions of these instances, we introduce a label calibration strategy to model the constraint relationship between instances. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Zero-shot relation extraction aims to identify novel relations which cannot be observed at the training stage. However, it still faces some challenges since the unseen relations of instances are similar or the input sentences have similar entities, the unseen relation representations from different categories tend to overlap and lead to errors. In this paper, we propose a novel Relation Contrastive Learning framework (RCL) to mitigate above two types of similar problems: Similar Relations and Similar Entities. By jointly optimizing a contrastive instance loss with a relation classification loss on seen relations, RCL can learn subtle difference between instances and achieve better separation between different relation categories in the representation space simultaneously. Especially in contrastive instance learning, the dropout noise as data augmentation is adopted to amplify the semantic difference between similar instances without breaking relation representation, so as to promote model to learn more effective representations. Experiments conducted on two well-known datasets show that RCL can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, if the seen relations are insufficient, RCL can also obtain comparable results with the model trained on the full training set, showing the robustness of our approach.

Supervised open relation extraction aims to discover novel relations by leveraging supervised data of pre-defined relations. However, most existing methods do not achieve effective knowledge transfer from pre-defined relations to novel relations, they have difficulties generating high-quality pseudo-labels for unsupervised data of novel relations and usually suffer from the error propagation issue. In this paper, we propose a Cluster-aware Pseudo-Labeling (CaPL) method to improve the pseudo-labels quality and transfer more knowledge for discovering novel relations. Specifically, the model is firstly pre-trained with the pre-defined relations to learn the relation representations. To improve the pseudo-labels quality, the distances between each instance and all cluster centers are used to generate the cluster-aware soft pseudo-labels for novel relations. To mitigate the catastrophic forgetting issue, we design the consistency regularization loss to make better use of the pseudo-labels and jointly train the model with both unsupervised and supervised data. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-arts performance.