Event detection is one of the fundamental tasks in information extraction and knowledge graph. However, a realistic event detection system often needs to deal with new event classes constantly. These new classes usually have only a few labeled instances as it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to annotate a large number of unlabeled instances. Therefore, this paper proposes a new task, called class-incremental few-shot event detection. Nevertheless, there are two problems (i.e., old knowledge forgetting and new class overfitting) in this task. To solve these problems, this paper further presents a novel knowledge distillation and prompt learning based method, called Prompt-KD. Specifically, to reduce the forgetting issue about old knowledge, Prompt-KD develops an attention based multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework, where the ancestor teacher model pre-trained on base classes is reused in all learning sessions, and the father teacher model derives the current student model via adaptation. On the other hand, in order to cope with the few-shot learning scenario and alleviate the corresponding new class overfitting problem, Prompt-KD is also equipped with a prompt learning mechanism. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., FewEvent and MAVEN, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Prompt-KD.

Hyper-relational facts, which consist of a primary triple (head entity, relation, tail entity) and auxiliary attribute-value pairs, are widely present in real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Link Prediction on Hyper-relational Facts (LPHFs) is to predict a missing element in a hyper-relational fact, which helps populate and enrich KGs. However, existing LPHFs studies usually require an amount of high-quality data. They overlook few-shot relations, which have limited instances, yet are common in real-world scenarios. Thus, we introduce a new task, Few-Shot Link Prediction on Hyper-relational Facts (FSLPHFs). It aims to predict a missing entity in a hyper-relational fact with limited support instances. To tackle FSLPHFs, we propose MetaRH, a model that learns Meta Relational information in Hyper-relational facts. MetaRH comprises three modules: relation learning, support-specific adjustment, and query inference. By capturing meta relational information from limited support instances, MetaRH can accurately predict the missing entity in a query. As there is no existing dataset available for this new task, we construct three datasets to validate the effectiveness of MetaRH. Experimental results on these datasets demonstrate that MetaRH significantly outperforms existing representative models.

Nested Event Extraction (NEE) aims to extract complex event structures where an event contains other events as its arguments recursively. Nested events involve a kind of Pivot Elements (PEs) that simultaneously act as arguments of outer-nest events and as triggers of inner-nest events, and thus connect them into nested structures. This special characteristic of PEs brings challenges to existing NEE methods, as they cannot well cope with the dual identities of PEs. Therefore, this paper proposes a new model, called PerNee, which extracts nested events mainly based on recognizing PEs. Specifically, PerNee first recognizes the triggers of both inner-nest and outer-nest events and further recognizes the PEs via classifying the relation type between trigger pairs. The model uses prompt learning to incorporate information from both event types and argument roles for better trigger and argument representations to improve NEE performance. Since existing NEE datasets (e.g., Genia11) are limited to specific domains and contain a narrow range of event types with nested structures, we systematically categorize nested events in the generic domain and construct a new NEE dataset, called ACE2005-Nest. Experimental results demonstrate that PerNee consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on ACE2005-Nest, Genia11, and Genia13. The ACE2005-Nest dataset and the code of the PerNee model are available at https://github.com/waysonren/PerNee.

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG), which characterizes temporally evolving facts in the form of (subject, relation, object, timestamp), has attracted much attention recently. TKG reasoning aims to predict future facts based on given historical ones. However, existing TKG reasoning models are unable to abstain from predictions they are uncertain, which will inevitably bring risks in real-world applications. Thus, in this paper, we propose an abstention mechanism for TKG reasoning, which helps the existing models make selective, instead of indiscriminate, predictions. Specifically, we develop a confidence estimator, called Confidence Estimator with History (CEHis), to enable the existing TKG reasoning models to first estimate their confidence in making predictions, and then abstain from those with low confidence. To do so, CEHis takes two kinds of information into consideration, namely, the certainty of the current prediction and the accuracy of historical predictions. Experiments with representative TKG reasoning models on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CEHis.

Recently, prompt tuning has achieved promising results in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The typical approach is to insert text pieces (i.e. templates) into the input and transform downstream tasks into the same form as pre-training. In essence, a high-quality template is the foundation of prompt tuning to support the performance of the converted cloze-style task. However, for sarcasm recognition, it is time-consuming and requires increasingly sophisticated domain knowledge to determine the appropriate templates and label words due to its highly figurative nature. In this work, we propose SarcPrompt, to incorporate the prior knowledge about contradictory intentions into prompt tuning for sarcasm recognition. SarcPrompt is inspired by that the speaker usually says the opposite of what they actually mean in the sarcastic text. Based on this idea, we explicitly mimic the actual intention by prompt construction and indicate whether the actual intention is contradictory to the literal content by verbalizer engineering. Experiments on three public datasets with standard and low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our SarcPrompt for sarcasm recognition.

“信息检索(Information Retrieval, IR)旨在从大规模的语料集合中找到与用户查询相关的信息,已经成为人们解决日常工作和生活中问题的最重要工具之一。现有的IR系统主要依赖于“索引-召回-重排”的框架,将复杂的检索任务建模成多阶段耦合的搜索过程。这种解耦建模的方式,一方面提升了系统检索的效率,使得检索系统能够轻松应对数十亿的语料集合;另一方面也加重了系统架构的复杂性,无法实现端到端联合优化。为了应对这个问题,近年来研究人员开始探索利用一个统一的模型建模整个搜索过程,并提出了新的生成式信息检索范式,这种新的范式将整个语料集合编码到检索模型中,可以实现端到端优化,消除了检索系统对于外部索引的依赖。当前,生成式检索已经成为坉坒领域热门研究方向之一,研究人员提出了不同的方案来提升检索的效果,考虑到这个方向的快速进展,本文将对生成式信息检索进行系统的综述,包括基础概念,文档标识符和模型容量。此外,我们还讨论了一些未解决的挑战以及有前景的研究方向,希望能激发和促进更多关于这些主题的未来研究。”

Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) that predicts temporal facts (e.g., events) in the future is crucial for many applications. The temporal facts in existing TKGs only contain their core entities (i.e., the entities playing core roles therein) and formulate them as quadruples, i.e., (subject entity, predicate, object entity, timestamp). This formulation oversimplifies temporal facts and inevitably causes information loss. Therefore, we propose to describe a temporal fact more accurately as an n-tuple, containing not only its predicate and core entities, but also its auxiliary entities, as well as the roles of all entities. By so doing, TKGs are augmented to N-tuple Temporal Knowledge Graphs (N-TKGs). To conduct reasoning over N-TKGs, we further propose N-tuple Evolutional Network (NE-Net). It recurrently learns the evolutional representations of entities and predicates in temporal facts at different timestamps in the history via modeling the relations among those entities and predicates. Based on the learned representations, reasoning tasks at future timestamps can be realized via task-specific decoders. Experiment results on two newly built datasets demonstrate the superiority of N-TKG and the effectiveness of NE-Net.

Retrieval-enhanced methods have become a primary approach in fact verification (FV); it requires reasoning over multiple retrieved pieces of evidence to verify the integrity of a claim. To retrieve evidence, existing work often employs off-the-shelf retrieval models whose design is based on the probability ranking principle. We argue that, rather than relevance, for FV we need to focus on the utility that a claim verifier derives from the retrieved evidence. We introduce the feedback-based evidence retriever (FER) that optimizes the evidence retrieval process by incorporating feedback from the claim verifier. As a feedback signal we use the divergence in utility between how effectively the verifier utilizes the retrieved evidence and the ground-truth evidence to produce the final claim label. Empirical studies demonstrate the superiority of FER over prevailing baselines.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to identify causal relations between events in unstructured texts. This is a very challenging task, because causal relations are usually expressed by implicit associations between events. Existing methods usually capture such associations by directly modeling the texts with pre-trained language models, which underestimate two kinds of semantic structures vital to the ECI task, namely, event-centric structure and event-associated structure. The former includes important semantic elements related to the events to describe them more precisely, while the latter contains semantic paths between two events to provide possible supports for ECI. In this paper, we study the implicit associations between events by modeling the above explicit semantic structures, and propose a Semantic Structure Integration model (SemSIn).It utilizes a GNN-based event aggregator to integrate the event-centric structure information, and employs an LSTM-based path aggregator to capture the event-associated structure information between two events. Experimental results on three widely used datasets show that SemSIn achieves significant improvements over baseline methods.

A Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) is a sequence of KGs corresponding to different timestamps. TKG reasoning aims to predict potential facts in the future given the historical KG sequences. One key of this task is to mine and understand evolutional patterns of facts from these sequences. The evolutional patterns are complex in two aspects, length-diversity and time-variability. Existing models for TKG reasoning focus on modeling fact sequences of a fixed length, which cannot discover complex evolutional patterns that vary in length. Furthermore, these models are all trained offline, which cannot well adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns from then on. Thus, we propose a new model, called Complex Evolutional Network (CEN), which uses a length-aware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to handle evolutional patterns of different lengths via an easy-to-difficult curriculum learning strategy. Besides, we propose to learn the model under the online setting so that it can adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CEN obtains substantial performance improvement under both the traditional offline and the proposed online settings.

Sarcasm employs ambivalence, where one says something positive but actually means negative, and vice versa. The essence of sarcasm, which is also a sufficient and necessary condition, is the conflict between literal and implied sentiments expressed in one sentence. However, it is difficult to recognize such sentiment conflict because the sentiments are mixed or even implicit. As a result, the recognition of sophisticated and obscure sentiment brings in a great challenge to sarcasm detection. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Channel Framework by modeling both literal and implied sentiments separately. Based on this dual-channel framework, we design the Dual-Channel Network (DC-Net) to recognize sentiment conflict. Experiments on political debates (i.e. IAC-V1 and IAC-V2) and Twitter datasets show that our proposed DC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on sarcasm recognition. Our code is released to support research.

Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a task to link regions of images with their corresponding entities in Knowledge Bases (KBs), which is beneficial for many computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, image caption, and visual question answering. While existing tasks in VEL either rely on textual data to complement a multi-modal linking or only link objects with general entities, which fails to perform named entity linking on large amounts of image data. In this paper, we consider a purely Visual-based Named Entity Linking (VNEL) task, where the input only consists of an image. The task is to identify objects of interest (i.e., visual entity mentions) in images and link them to corresponding named entities in KBs. Since each entity often contains rich visual and textual information in KBs, we thus propose three different sub-tasks, i.e., visual to visual entity linking (V2VEL), visual to textual entity linking (V2TEL), and visual to visual-textual entity linking (V2VTEL). In addition, we present a high-quality human-annotated visual person linking dataset, named WIKIPerson. Based on WIKIPerson, we establish a series of baseline algorithms for the solution of each sub-task, and conduct experiments to verify the quality of the proposed datasets and the effectiveness of baseline methods. We envision this work to be helpful for soliciting more works regarding VNEL in the future. The codes and datasets are publicly available at https: //github.com/ict-bigdatalab/VNEL.

Prototypical network based joint methods have attracted much attention in few-shot event detection, which carry out event detection in a unified sequence tagging framework. However, these methods suffer from the inaccurate prototype representation problem, due to two main reasons: the number of instances for calculating prototypes is limited; And, they do not well capture the relationships among event prototypes. To deal with this problem, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced self-supervised Prototypical Network, called KE-PN, for few-shot event detection. KE-PN adopts hybrid rules, which can automatically align event types to an external knowledge base, i.e., FrameNet, to obtain more instances.It proposes a self-supervised learning method to filter out noisy data from enhanced instances. KE-PN is further equipped with an auxiliary event type relationship classification module, which injects the relationship information into representations of event prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., FewEvent, MAVEN, and ACE2005 demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of KE-PN.

A Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) is a sequence of KGs with respective timestamps, which adopts quadruples in the form of (subject, relation, object, timestamp) to describe dynamic facts. TKG reasoning has facilitated many real-world applications via answering such queries as (query entity, query relation, ?, future timestamp) about future. This is actually a matching task between a query and candidate entities based on their historical structures, which reflect behavioral trends of the entities at different timestamps. In addition, recent KGs provide background knowledge of all the entities, which is also helpful for the matching. Thus, in this paper, we propose the Historical Structure Matching (HiSMatch) model. It applies two structure encoders to capture the semantic information contained in the historical structures of the query and candidate entities. Besides, it adopts another encoder to integrate the background knowledge into the model. TKG reasoning experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant improvement of the proposed HiSMatch model, with up to 5.6% performance improvement in MRR, compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Due to the lack of labeled data in many realistic scenarios, a number of few-shot learning methods for text classification have been proposed, among which the meta learning based ones have recently attracted much attention. Such methods usually consist of a learner as the classifier and a meta learner for specializing the learner to different tasks. For the learner, learning rate is crucial to its performance. However, existing methods treat it as a hyper parameter and adjust it manually, which is time-consuming and laborious. Intuitively, for different tasks and neural network layers, the learning rates should be different and self-adaptive. For the meta learner, it requires a good generalization ability so as to quickly adapt to new tasks. Motivated by these issues, we propose a novel meta learning framework, called MetaSLRCL, for few-shot text classification. Specifically, we present a novel meta learning mechanism to obtain different learning rates for different tasks and neural network layers so as to enable the learner to quickly adapt to new training data. Moreover, we propose a task-oriented curriculum learning mechanism to help the meta learner achieve a better generalization ability by learning from different tasks with increasing difficulties. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaSLRCL.

Quotation extraction aims to extract quotations from written text. There are three components in a quotation: source refers to the holder of the quotation, cue is the trigger word(s), and content is the main body. Existing solutions for quotation extraction mainly utilize rule-based approaches and sequence labeling models. While rule-based approaches often lead to low recalls, sequence labeling models cannot well handle quotations with complicated structures. In this paper, we propose the Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net () for quotation extraction. is able to extract complicated quotations with components of variable lengths and complicated structures. On two public datasets (and ) and one proprietary dataset (), we show that our achieves state-of-the-art performance on complicated quotation extraction.

Euphemism is a type of figurative language broadly adopted in social media and daily conversations. People use euphemism for politeness or to conceal what they are discussing. Euphemism detection is a challenging task because of its obscure and figurative nature. Even humans may not agree on if a word expresses euphemism. In this paper, we propose to employ bidirectional encoder representations transformers (BERT), and relational graph attention network in order to model the semantic and syntactic relations between the target words and the input sentence. The best performing method of ours reaches a Macro-F1 score of 84.0 on the euphemism detection dataset of the third workshop on figurative language processing shared task 2022.

Scripts are structured sequences of events together with the participants, which are extracted from the texts. Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the historical events in the script. Two kinds of information facilitate this task, namely, the event-level information and the script-level information. At the event level, existing studies view an event as a verb with its participants, while neglecting other useful properties, such as the state of the participants. At the script level, most existing studies only consider a single event sequence corresponding to one common protagonist. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model, called MCPredictor, which integrates deep event-level and script-level information for script event prediction. At the event level, MCPredictor utilizes the rich information in the text to obtain more comprehensive event semantic representations. At the script-level, it considers multiple event sequences corresponding to different participants of the subsequent event. The experimental results on the widely-used New York Times corpus demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) have been developed and used in many different areas. Reasoning on TKGs that predicts potential facts (events) in the future brings great challenges to existing models. When facing a prediction task, human beings usually search useful historical information (i.e., clues) in their memories and then reason for future meticulously. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose CluSTeR to predict future facts in a two-stage manner, Clue Searching and Temporal Reasoning, accordingly. Specifically, at the clue searching stage, CluSTeR learns a beam search policy via reinforcement learning (RL) to induce multiple clues from historical facts. At the temporal reasoning stage, it adopts a graph convolution network based sequence method to deduce answers from clues. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the substantial advantages of CluSTeR compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the clues found by CluSTeR further provide interpretability for the results.

Knowledge inference on knowledge graph has attracted extensive attention, which aims to find out connotative valid facts in knowledge graph and is very helpful for improving the performance of many downstream applications. However, researchers have mainly poured attention to knowledge inference on binary facts. The studies on n-ary facts are relatively scarcer, although they are also ubiquitous in the real world. Therefore, this paper addresses knowledge inference on n-ary facts. We represent each n-ary fact as a primary triple coupled with a set of its auxiliary descriptive attribute-value pair(s). We further propose a neural network model, NeuInfer, for knowledge inference on n-ary facts. Besides handling the common task to infer an unknown element in a whole fact, NeuInfer can cope with a new type of task, flexible knowledge inference. It aims to infer an unknown element in a partial fact consisting of the primary triple coupled with any number of its auxiliary description(s). Experimental results demonstrate the remarkable superiority of NeuInfer.

This paper proposes a novel approach to learn commonsense from images, instead of limited raw texts or costly constructed knowledge bases, for the commonsense reasoning problem in NLP. Our motivation comes from the fact that an image is worth a thousand words, where richer scene information could be leveraged to help distill the commonsense knowledge, which is often hidden in languages. Our approach, namely Loire, consists of two stages. In the first stage, a bi-modal sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized to conduct the scene layout generation task, based on a text representation model ViBERT. In this way, the required visual scene knowledge, such as spatial relations, will be encoded in ViBERT by the supervised learning process with some bi-modal data like COCO. Then ViBERT is concatenated with a pre-trained language model to perform the downstream commonsense reasoning tasks. Experimental results on two commonsense reasoning problems, i.e.commonsense question answering and pronoun resolution, demonstrate that Loire outperforms traditional language-based methods. We also give some case studies to show what knowledge is learned from images and explain how the generated scene layout helps the commonsense reasoning process.

Event coreference resolution aims to classify all event mentions that refer to the same real-world event into the same group, which is necessary to information aggregation and many downstream applications. To resolve event coreference, existing methods usually calculate the similarities between event mentions and between specific kinds of event arguments. However, they fail to accurately identify paraphrase relations between events and may suffer from error propagation while extracting event components (i.e., event mentions and their arguments). Therefore, we propose a new model based on Event-specific Paraphrases and Argument-aware Semantic Embeddings, thus called EPASE, for event coreference resolution. EPASE recognizes deep paraphrase relations in an event-specific context of sentences and can cover event paraphrases of more situations, bringing about a better generalization. Additionally, the embeddings of argument roles are encoded into event embedding without relying on a fixed number and type of arguments, which results in the better scalability of EPASE. Experiments on both within- and cross-document event coreference demonstrate its consistent and significant superiority compared to existing methods.

In multi-turn dialogue generation, response is usually related with only a few contexts. Therefore, an ideal model should be able to detect these relevant contexts and produce a suitable response accordingly. However, the widely used hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder models just treat all the contexts indiscriminately, which may hurt the following response generation process. Some researchers try to use the cosine similarity or the traditional attention mechanism to find the relevant contexts, but they suffer from either insufficient relevance assumption or position bias problem. In this paper, we propose a new model, named ReCoSa, to tackle this problem. Firstly, a word level LSTM encoder is conducted to obtain the initial representation of each context. Then, the self-attention mechanism is utilized to update both the context and masked response representation. Finally, the attention weights between each context and response representations are computed and used in the further decoding process. Experimental results on both Chinese customer services dataset and English Ubuntu dialogue dataset show that ReCoSa significantly outperforms baseline models, in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations. Further analysis on attention shows that the detected relevant contexts by ReCoSa are highly coherent with human’s understanding, validating the correctness and interpretability of ReCoSa.

Syntactic relations are broadly used in many NLP tasks. For event detection, syntactic relation representations based on dependency tree can better capture the interrelations between candidate trigger words and related entities than sentence representations. But, existing studies only use first-order syntactic relations (i.e., the arcs) in dependency trees to identify trigger words. For this reason, this paper proposes a new method for event detection, which uses a dependency tree based graph convolution network with aggregative attention to explicitly model and aggregate multi-order syntactic representations in sentences. Experimental comparison with state-of-the-art baselines shows the superiority of the proposed method.

In conversation, a general response (e.g., “I don’t know”) could correspond to a large variety of input utterances. Previous generative conversational models usually employ a single model to learn the relationship between different utterance-response pairs, thus tend to favor general and trivial responses which appear frequently. To address this problem, we propose a novel controlled response generation mechanism to handle different utterance-response relationships in terms of specificity. Specifically, we introduce an explicit specificity control variable into a sequence-to-sequence model, which interacts with the usage representation of words through a Gaussian Kernel layer, to guide the model to generate responses at different specificity levels. We describe two ways to acquire distant labels for the specificity control variable in learning. Empirical studies show that our model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art response generation models under both automatic and human evaluations.

Sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) models have been widely used for response generation in the area of conversation. However, the requirements for different conversation scenarios are distinct. For example, customer service requires the generated responses to be specific and accurate, while chatbot prefers diverse responses so as to attract different users. The current Seq2Seq model fails to meet these diverse requirements, by using a general average likelihood as the optimization criteria. As a result, it usually generates safe and commonplace responses, such as ‘I don’t know’. In this paper, we propose two tailored optimization criteria for Seq2Seq to different conversation scenarios, i.e., the maximum generated likelihood for specific-requirement scenario, and the conditional value-at-risk for diverse-requirement scenario. Experimental results on the Ubuntu dialogue corpus (Ubuntu service scenario) and Chinese Weibo dataset (social chatbot scenario) show that our proposed models not only satisfies diverse requirements for different scenarios, but also yields better performances against traditional Seq2Seq models in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations.