In this paper, we firstly empirically find that existing models struggle to handle hard mentions due to their insufficient contexts, which consequently limits their overall typing performance. To this end, we propose to exploit sibling mentions for enhancing the mention representations. Specifically, we present two different metrics for sibling selection and employ an attentive graph neural network to aggregate information from sibling mentions. The proposed graph model is scalable in that unseen test mentions are allowed to be added as new nodes for inference. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our sibling learning strategy, where our model outperforms ten strong baselines. Moreover, our experiments indeed prove the superiority of sibling mentions in helping clarify the types for hard mentions.

Joint relational triple extraction from unstructured text is an important task in information extraction. However, most existing works either ignore the semantic information of relations or predict subjects and objects sequentially. To address the issues, we introduce a new blank filling paradigm for the task, and propose a relation-first blank filling network (RFBFN). Specifically, we first detect potential relations maintained in the text to aid the following entity pair extraction. Then, we transform relations into relation templates with blanks which contain the fine-grained semantic representation of the relations. Finally, corresponding subjects and objects are extracted simultaneously by filling the blanks. We evaluate the proposed model on public benchmark datasets. Experimental results show our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. The source code of our work is available at: https://github.com/lizhe2016/RFBFN.

Existing work on Fine-grained Entity Typing (FET) typically trains automatic models on the datasets obtained by using Knowledge Bases (KB) as distant supervision. However, the reliance on KB means this training setting can be hampered by the lack of or the incompleteness of the KB. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel setting for training FET models: FET without accessing any knowledge base. Under this setting, we propose a two-step framework to train FET models. In the first step, we automatically create pseudo data with fine-grained labels from a large unlabeled dataset. Then a neural network model is trained based on the pseudo data, either in an unsupervised way or using self-training under the weak guidance from a coarse-grained Named Entity Recognition (NER) model. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance with respect to the models trained on the original KB-supervised datasets.

Language models like BERT and SpanBERT pretrained on open-domain data have obtained impressive gains on various NLP tasks. In this paper, we probe the effectiveness of domain-adaptive pretraining objectives on downstream tasks. In particular, three objectives, including a novel objective focusing on modeling predicate-argument relations, are evaluated on two challenging dialogue understanding tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that domain-adaptive pretraining with proper objectives can significantly improve the performance of a strong baseline on these tasks, achieving the new state-of-the-art performances.

This paper introduces TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. Compared to most previous publicly available text understanding systems and tools, TexSmart holds some unique features. First, the NER function of TexSmart supports over 1,000 entity types, while most other public tools typically support several to (at most) dozens of entity types. Second, TexSmart introduces new semantic analysis functions like semantic expansion and deep semantic representation, that are absent in most previous systems. Third, a spectrum of algorithms (from very fast algorithms to those that are relatively slow but more accurate) are implemented for one function in TexSmart, to fulfill the requirements of different academic and industrial applications. The adoption of unsupervised or weakly-supervised algorithms is especially emphasized, with the goal of easily updating our models to include fresh data with less human annotation efforts.

Neural text generation has made tremendous progress in various tasks. One common characteristic of most of the tasks is that the texts are not restricted to some rigid formats when generating. However, we may confront some special text paradigms such as Lyrics (assume the music score is given), Sonnet, SongCi (classical Chinese poetry of the Song dynasty), etc. The typical characteristics of these texts are in three folds: (1) They must comply fully with the rigid predefined formats. (2) They must obey some rhyming schemes. (3) Although they are restricted to some formats, the sentence integrity must be guaranteed. To the best of our knowledge, text generation based on the predefined rigid formats has not been well investigated. Therefore, we propose a simple and elegant framework named SongNet to tackle this problem. The backbone of the framework is a Transformer-based auto-regressive language model. Sets of symbols are tailor-designed to improve the modeling performance especially on format, rhyme, and sentence integrity. We improve the attention mechanism to impel the model to capture some future information on the format. A pre-training and fine-tuning framework is designed to further improve the generation quality. Extensive experiments conducted on two collected corpora demonstrate that our proposed framework generates significantly better results in terms of both automatic metrics and the human evaluation.

Hypernymy detection, a.k.a, lexical entailment, is a fundamental sub-task of many natural language understanding tasks. Previous explorations mostly focus on monolingual hypernymy detection on high-resource languages, e.g., English, but few investigate the low-resource scenarios. This paper addresses the problem of low-resource hypernymy detection by combining high-resource languages. We extensively compare three joint training paradigms and for the first time propose applying meta learning to relieve the low-resource issue. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method among the three settings, which substantially improves the performance of extremely low-resource languages by preventing over-fitting on small datasets.

For multi-turn dialogue rewriting, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge in dialog context and getting ride of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Existing attentive models attend to all words without prior focus, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. In this paper, we propose to use semantic role labeling (SRL), which highlights the core semantic information of who did what to whom, to provide additional guidance for the rewriter model. Experiments show that this information significantly improves a RoBERTa-based model that already outperforms previous state-of-the-art systems.

Quotations are crucial for successful explanations and persuasions in interpersonal communications. However, finding what to quote in a conversation is challenging for both humans and machines. This work studies automatic quotation generation in an online conversation and explores how language consistency affects whether a quotation fits the given context. Here, we capture the contextual consistency of a quotation in terms of latent topics, interactions with the dialogue history, and coherence to the query turn’s existing contents. Further, an encoder-decoder neural framework is employed to continue the context with a quotation via language generation. Experiment results on two large-scale datasets in English and Chinese demonstrate that our quotation generation model outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Further analysis shows that topic, interaction, and query consistency are all helpful to learn how to quote in online conversations.

Aspect words, indicating opinion targets, are essential in expressing and understanding human opinions. To identify aspects, most previous efforts focus on using sequence tagging models trained on human-annotated data. This work studies unsupervised aspect extraction and explores how words appear in global context (on sentence level) and local context (conveyed by neighboring words). We propose a novel neural model, capable of coupling global and local representation to discover aspect words. Experimental results on two benchmarks, laptop and restaurant reviews, show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models from previous studies evaluated with varying metrics. Analysis on model output show our ability to learn meaningful and coherent aspect representations. We further investigate how words distribute in global and local context, and find that aspect and non-aspect words do exhibit different context, interpreting our superiority in unsupervised aspect extraction.

In this paper, we present directional skip-gram (DSG), a simple but effective enhancement of the skip-gram model by explicitly distinguishing left and right context in word prediction. In doing so, a direction vector is introduced for each word, whose embedding is thus learned by not only word co-occurrence patterns in its context, but also the directions of its contextual words. Theoretical and empirical studies on complexity illustrate that our model can be trained as efficient as the original skip-gram model, when compared to other extensions of the skip-gram model. Experimental results show that our model outperforms others on different datasets in semantic (word similarity measurement) and syntactic (part-of-speech tagging) evaluations, respectively.

Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a challenging yet meaningful task, which not only serves as a preprocessing in many natural language processing(NLP) applications, but also facilitates reading and understanding of running texts in peoples’ daily lives. However, to utilize data-driven approaches for CSC, there is one major limitation that annotated corpora are not enough in applying algorithms and building models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of constructing CSC corpus with automatically generated spelling errors, which are either visually or phonologically resembled characters, corresponding to the OCR- and ASR-based methods, respectively. Upon the constructed corpus, different models are trained and evaluated for CSC with respect to three standard test sets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the corpus, therefore confirm the validity of our approach.

It is a challenging task to automatically compose poems with not only fluent expressions but also aesthetic wording. Although much attention has been paid to this task and promising progress is made, there exist notable gaps between automatically generated ones with those created by humans, especially on the aspects of term novelty and thematic consistency. Towards filling the gap, in this paper, we propose a conditional variational autoencoder with adversarial training for classical Chinese poem generation, where the autoencoder part generates poems with novel terms and a discriminator is applied to adversarially learn their thematic consistency with their titles. Experimental results on a large poetry corpus confirm the validity and effectiveness of our model, where its automatic and human evaluation scores outperform existing models.

Hypertext documents, such as web pages and academic papers, are of great importance in delivering information in our daily life. Although being effective on plain documents, conventional text embedding methods suffer from information loss if directly adapted to hyper-documents. In this paper, we propose a general embedding approach for hyper-documents, namely, hyperdoc2vec, along with four criteria characterizing necessary information that hyper-document embedding models should preserve. Systematic comparisons are conducted between hyperdoc2vec and several competitors on two tasks, i.e., paper classification and citation recommendation, in the academic paper domain. Analyses and experiments both validate the superiority of hyperdoc2vec to other models w.r.t. the four criteria.

With the development of medical information management, numerous medical data are being classified, indexed, and searched in various systems. Disease phrase matching, i.e., deciding whether two given disease phrases interpret each other, is a basic but crucial preprocessing step for the above tasks. Being capable of relieving the scarceness of annotations, domain adaptation is generally considered useful in medical systems. However, efforts on applying it to phrase matching remain limited. This paper presents a domain-adaptive matching network for disease phrases. Our network achieves domain adaptation by adversarial training, i.e., preferring features indicating whether the two phrases match, rather than which domain they come from. Experiments suggest that our model has the best performance among the very few non-adaptive or adaptive methods that can benefit from out-of-domain annotations.