Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing. However, the massive scale and computational demands of these models present formidable challenges when considering their practical deployment in resource-constrained environments. While techniques such as chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation have displayed promise in distilling LLMs into small language models (SLMs), there is a risk that distilled SLMs may still inherit flawed reasoning and hallucinations from LLMs. To address these issues, we propose a twofold methodology: First, we introduce a novel method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs, aiming to mitigate the adverse effects of flawed reasoning and hallucinations inherited from LLMs. Second, we advocate for distilling more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-evaluation outputs, to ensure a more thorough and robust knowledge transfer into SLMs. Experiments on three NLP benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs, offering a new perspective for developing more effective and efficient SLMs in resource-constrained environments.

In the context-dependent Text-to-SQL task, the generated SQL statements are refined iteratively based on the user input utterance from each interaction. The input text from each interaction can be viewed as component modifications to the previous SQL statements, which could be further extracted as the modification patterns. Since these modification patterns could also be combined with other SQL statements, the models are supposed to have the compositional generalization to these novel combinations. This work is the first exploration of compositional generalization in context-dependent Text-to-SQL scenarios. To facilitate related studies, we constructed two challenging benchmarks named CoSQL-CG and SParC-CG by recombining the modification patterns and existing SQL statements. The following experiments show that almost all current models struggle on our proposed benchmarks. Furthermore, we found that better aligning the previous SQL statements with the input utterance could give models better combinatorial generalization ability. Based on these observations, we propose a method name p-align to improve the combinatorial generalization of Text-to-SQL models. Further experiments validate the effectiveness of our model.

Cross-lingual natural language inference is a fundamental problem in cross-lingual language understanding. Many recent works have used prompt learning to address the lack of annotated parallel corpora in XNLI.However, these methods adopt discrete prompting by simply translating the templates to the target language and need external expert knowledge to design the templates. Besides, discrete prompts of human-designed template words are not trainable vectors and can not be migrated to target languages in the inference stage flexibly. In this paper, we propose a novel Soft prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer (SoftMV) for XNLI. SoftMV first constructs cloze-style question with soft prompts for the input sample. Then we leverage bilingual dictionaries to generate an augmented multilingual question for the original question. SoftMV adopts a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization. Experimental results on XNLI demonstrate that SoftMV can achieve state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperform the previous methods under the few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings.

Given a data lake of tabular data as well as a query table, how can we retrieve all the tables in the data lake that can be unioned with the query table? Table union search constitutes an essential task in data discovery and preparation as it enables data scientists to navigate massive open data repositories. Existing methods identify uniability based on column representations (word surface forms or token embeddings) and column relation represented by column representation similarity. However, the semantic similarity obtained between column representations is often insufficient to reveal latent relational features to describe the column relation between pair of columns and not robust to the table noise. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multi-stage self-supervised table union search framework called AutoTUS, which represents column relation as a vector– column relational representation and learn column relational representation in a multi-stage manner that can better describe column relation for unionability prediction. In particular, the large language model powered contextualized column relation encoder is updated by adaptive clustering and pseudo label classification iteratively so that the better column relational representation can be learned. Moreover, to improve the robustness of the model against table noises, we propose table noise generator to add table noise to the training table data. Experiments on real-world datasets as well as synthetic test set augmented with table noise show that AutoTUS achieves 5.2% performance gain over the SOTA baseline.

Data augmentation techniques have been used to alleviate the problem of scarce labeled data in various NER tasks (flat, nested, and discontinuous NER tasks). Existing augmentation techniques either manipulate the words in the original text that break the semantic coherence of the text, or exploit generative models that ignore preserving entities in the original text, which impedes the use of augmentation techniques on nested and discontinuous NER tasks. In this work, we propose a novel Entity-to-Text based data augmentation technique named EnTDA to add, delete, replace or swap entities in the entity list of the original texts, and adopt these augmented entity lists to generate semantically coherent and entity preserving texts for various NER tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a diversity beam search to increase the diversity during the text generation process. Experiments on thirteen NER datasets across three tasks (flat, nested, and discontinuous NER tasks) and two settings (full data and low resource settings) show that EnTDA could bring more performance improvements compared to the baseline augmentation techniques.

Relation extraction (RE) tasks show promising performance in extracting relations from two entities mentioned in sentences, given sufficient annotations available during training. Such annotations would be labor-intensive to obtain in practice. Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences beyond limited annotations. These techniques neither preserve the semantic consistency of the original sentences when rule-based augmentations are adopted, nor preserve the syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. In this work, we propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. We adopt a generative formulation and design a multi-tasking solution to achieve synergies. Furthermore, GDA adopts entity hints as the prior knowledge of the generative model to augment diverse sentences. Experimental results in three datasets under a low-resource setting showed that GDA could bring 2.0% F1 improvements compared with no augmentation technique.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment classification task. Many recent works have used dependency trees to extract the relation between aspects and contexts and have achieved significant improvements. However, further improvement is limited due to the potential mismatch between the dependency tree as a syntactic structure and the sentiment classification as a semantic task. To alleviate this gap, we replace the syntactic dependency tree with the semantic structure named Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and propose a model called AMR-based Path Aggregation Relational Network (APARN) to take full advantage of semantic structures. In particular, we design the path aggregator and the relation-enhanced self-attention mechanism that complement each other. The path aggregator extracts semantic features from AMRs under the guidance of sentence information, while the relation-enhanced self-attention mechanism in turn improves sentence features with refined semantic information. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate 1.13% average F1 improvement of APARN in ABSA when compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

Multimodal relation extraction (MRE) is the task of identifying the semantic relationships between two entities based on the context of the sentence image pair. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches mainly focused on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge, but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations. To improve the prediction, this research proposes to retrieve textual and visual evidence based on the object, sentence, and whole image. We further develop a novel approach to synthesize the object-level, image-level, and sentence-level information for better reasoning between the same and different modalities. Extensive experiments and analyses show that the proposed method is able to effectively select and compare evidence across modalities and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

How to identify semantic relations among entities in a document when only a few labeled documents are available? Few-shot document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) is crucial for addressing the pervasive data scarcity problem in real-world scenarios. Metric-based meta-learning is an effective framework widely adopted for FSDLRE, which constructs class prototypes for classification. However, existing works often struggle to obtain class prototypes with accurate relational semantics: 1) To build prototype for a target relation type, they aggregate the representations of all entity pairs holding that relation, while these entity pairs may also hold other relations, thus disturbing the prototype. 2) They use a set of generic NOTA (none-of-the-above) prototypes across all tasks, neglecting that the NOTA semantics differs in tasks with different target relation types. In this paper, we propose a relation-aware prototype learning method for FSDLRE to strengthen the relational semantics of prototype representations. By judiciously leveraging the relation descriptions and realistic NOTA instances as guidance, our method effectively refines the relation prototypes and generates task-specific NOTA prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by average 2.61% F₁ across various settings of two FSDLRE benchmarks.

The explosion of misinformation spreading in the media ecosystem urges for automated fact-checking. While misinformation spans both geographic and linguistic boundaries, most work in the field has focused on English. Datasets and tools available in other languages, such as Chinese, are limited. In order to bridge this gap, we construct CHEF, the first CHinese Evidence-based Fact-checking dataset of 10K real-world claims. The dataset covers multiple domains, ranging from politics to public health, and provides annotated evidence retrieved from the Internet. Further, we develop established baselines and a novel approach that is able to model the evidence retrieval as a latent variable, allowing jointly training with the veracity prediction model in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments show that CHEF will provide a challenging testbed for the development of fact-checking systems designed to retrieve and reason over non-English claims.

Unsupervised relation extraction aims to extract the relationship between entities from natural language sentences without prior information on relational scope or distribution. Existing works either utilize self-supervised schemes to refine relational feature signals by iteratively leveraging adaptive clustering and classification that provoke gradual drift problems, or adopt instance-wise contrastive learning which unreasonably pushes apart those sentence pairs that are semantically similar. To overcome these defects, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework named HiURE, which has the capability to derive hierarchical signals from relational feature space using cross hierarchy attention and effectively optimize relation representation of sentences under exemplar-wise contrastive learning. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the advanced effectiveness and robustness of HiURE on unsupervised relation extraction when compared with state-of-the-art models.

We propose the first character-level white-box adversarial attack method against transformer models. The intuition of our method comes from the observation that words are split into subtokens before being fed into the transformer models and the substitution between two close subtokens has a similar effect with the character modification. Our method mainly contains three steps. First, a gradient-based method is adopted to find the most vulnerable words in the sentence. Then we split the selected words into subtokens to replace the origin tokenization result from the transformer tokenizer. Finally, we utilize an adversarial loss to guide the substitution of attachable subtokens in which the Gumbel-softmax trick is introduced to ensure gradient propagation.Meanwhile, we introduce the visual and length constraint in the optimization process to achieve minimum character modifications.Extensive experiments on both sentence-level and token-level tasks demonstrate that our method could outperform the previous attack methods in terms of success rate and edit distance. Furthermore, human evaluation verifies our adversarial examples could preserve their origin labels.

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.

Successful Machine Learning based Named Entity Recognition models could fail on texts from some special domains, for instance, Chinese addresses and e-commerce titles, where requires adequate background knowledge. Such texts are also difficult for human annotators. In fact, we can obtain some potentially helpful information from correlated texts, which have some common entities, to help the text understanding. Then, one can easily reason out the correct answer by referencing correlated samples. In this paper, we suggest enhancing NER models with correlated samples. We draw correlated samples by the sparse BM25 retriever from large-scale in-domain unlabeled data. To explicitly simulate the human reasoning process, we perform a training-free entity type calibrating by majority voting. To capture correlation features in the training stage, we suggest to model correlated samples by the transformer-based multi-instance cross-encoder. Empirical results on datasets of the above two domains show the efficacy of our methods.

A scene graph is a semantic representation that expresses the objects, attributes, and relationships between objects in a scene. Scene graphs play an important role in many cross modality tasks, as they are able to capture the interactions between images and texts. In this paper, we focus on scene graph modification (SGM), where the system is required to learn how to update an existing scene graph based on a natural language query. Unlike previous approaches that rebuilt the entire scene graph, we frame SGM as a graph expansion task by introducing the incremental structure expanding (ISE). ISE constructs the target graph by incrementally expanding the source graph without changing the unmodified structure. Based on ISE, we further propose a model that iterates between nodes prediction and edges prediction, inferring more accurate and harmonious expansion decisions progressively. In addition, we construct a challenging dataset that contains more complicated queries and larger scene graphs than existing datasets. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which surpasses the previous state-of-the-art model by large margins.

To alleviate human efforts from obtaining large-scale annotations, Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction methods aim to leverage unlabeled data in addition to learning from limited samples. Existing self-training methods suffer from the gradual drift problem, where noisy pseudo labels on unlabeled data are incorporated during training. To alleviate the noise in pseudo labels, we propose a method called MetaSRE, where a Relation Label Generation Network generates accurate quality assessment on pseudo labels by (meta) learning from the successful and failed attempts on Relation Classification Network as an additional meta-objective. To reduce the influence of noisy pseudo labels, MetaSRE adopts a pseudo label selection and exploitation scheme which assesses pseudo label quality on unlabeled samples and only exploits high-quality pseudo labels in a self-training fashion to incrementally augment labeled samples for both robustness and accuracy. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Low-resource Relation Extraction (LRE) aims to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora when human annotation is scarce. Existing works either utilize self-training scheme to generate pseudo labels that will cause the gradual drift problem, or leverage meta-learning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly. To alleviate selection bias due to the lack of feedback loops in existing LRE learning paradigms, we developed a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate the gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error. We also propose a framework called GradLRE, which handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction. Besides the scenario where unlabeled data is sufficient, GradLRE handles the situation where no unlabeled data is available, by exploiting a contextualized augmentation method to generate data. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GradLRE on low resource relation extraction when comparing with baselines.

Open relation extraction is the task of extracting open-domain relation facts from natural language sentences. Existing works either utilize heuristics or distant-supervised annotations to train a supervised classifier over pre-defined relations, or adopt unsupervised methods with additional assumptions that have less discriminative power. In this work, we propose a self-supervised framework named SelfORE, which exploits weak, self-supervised signals by leveraging large pretrained language model for adaptive clustering on contextualized relational features, and bootstraps the self-supervised signals by improving contextualized features in relation classification. Experimental results on three datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of SelfORE on open-domain Relation Extraction when comparing with competitive baselines.