Entity Linking (EL) is an essential and challenging task in natural language processing that seeks to link some text representing an entity within a document or sentence with its corresponding entry in a dictionary or knowledge base. Most existing approaches focus on creating elaborate contextual models that look for clues the words surrounding the entity-text to help solve the linking problem. Although these fine-tuned language models tend to work, they can be unwieldy, difficult to train, and do not transfer well to other domains. Fortunately, Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT provide a highly-advanced solution to the problems inherent in EL models, but simply naive prompts to LLMs do not work well. In the present work, we define ChatEL, which is a three-step framework to prompt LLMs to return accurate results. Overall the ChatEL framework improves the average F1 performance across 10 datasets by more than 2%. Finally, a thorough error analysis shows many instances with the ground truth labels were actually incorrect, and the labels predicted by ChatEL were actually correct. This indicates that the quantitative results presented in this paper may be a conservative estimate of the actual performance. All data and code are available as an open-source package on GitHub at https://github.com/yifding/In_Context_EL.

The ability to detect intent in dialogue systems has become increasingly important in modern technology. These systems often generate a large amount of unlabeled data, and manually labeling this data requires substantial human effort. Semi-supervised methods attempt to remedy this cost by using a model trained on a few labeled examples and then by assigning pseudo-labels to further a subset of unlabeled examples that has a model prediction confidence higher than a certain threshold. However, one particularly perilous consequence of these methods is the risk of picking an imbalanced set of examples across classes, which could lead to poor labels. In the present work, we describe Top-K K-Nearest Neighbor (TK-KNN), which uses a more robust pseudo-labeling approach based on distance in the embedding space while maintaining a balanced set of pseudo-labeled examples across classes through a ranking-based approach. Experiments on several datasets show that TK-KNN outperforms existing models, particularly when labeled data is scarce on popular datasets such as CLINC150 and Banking77.

Classifiers commonly make use of pre-annotated datasets, wherein a model is evaluated by pre-defined metrics on a held-out test set typically made of human-annotated labels. Metrics used in these evaluations are tied to the availability of well-defined ground truth labels, and these metrics typically do not allow for inexact matches. These noisy ground truth labels and strict evaluation metrics may compromise the validity and realism of evaluation results. In the present work, we conduct a systematic label verification experiment on the entity linking (EL) task. Specifically, we ask annotators to verify the correctness of annotations after the fact (, posthoc). Compared to pre-annotation evaluation, state-of-the-art EL models performed extremely well according to the posthoc evaluation methodology. Surprisingly, we find predictions from EL models had a similar or higher verification rate than the ground truth. We conclude with a discussion on these findings and recommendations for future evaluations. The source code, raw results, and evaluation scripts are publicly available via the MIT license at https://github.com/yifding/e2e_EL_evaluate

The product attribute value extraction (AVE) task aims to capture key factual information from product profiles, and is useful for several downstream applications in e-Commerce platforms. Previous contributions usually formulate this task using sequence labeling or reading comprehension architectures. However, sequence labeling models tend to be conservative in their predictions resulting in a high false negative rate. Existing reading comprehension formulations, on the other hand, can over-generate attribute values which hinders precision. In the present work we address these limitations with a new end-to-end pipeline framework called Ask-and-Verify. Given a product and an attribute query, the Ask step detects the top-K span candidates (i.e. possible attribute values) from the product profiles, then the Verify step filters out false positive candidates. We evaluate Ask-and-Verify model on Amazon’s product pages and AliExpress public dataset, and present a comparative analysis as well as a detailed ablation study. Despite its simplicity, we show that Ask-and-Verify outperforms recent state-of-the-art models by up to 3.1% F1 absolute improvement points, while also scaling to thousands of attributes.

The training process of scientific NER models is commonly performed in two steps: i) Pre-training a language model by self-supervised tasks on huge data and ii) fine-tune training with small labelled data. The success of the strategy depends on the relevance between the data domains and between the tasks. However, gaps are found in practice when the target domains are specific and small. We propose a novel framework to introduce a “pre-fine tuning” step between pre-training and fine-tuning. It constructs a corpus by selecting sentences from unlabeled documents that are the most relevant with the labelled training data. Instead of predicting tokens in random spans, the pre-fine tuning task is to predict tokens in entity candidates identified by text mining methods. Pre-fine tuning is automatic and light-weight because the corpus size can be much smaller than pre-training data to achieve a better performance. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness.

In the age of social news, it is important to understand the types of reactions that are evoked from news sources with various levels of credibility. In the present work we seek to better understand how users react to trusted and deceptive news sources across two popular, and very different, social media platforms. To that end, (1) we develop a model to classify user reactions into one of nine types, such as answer, elaboration, and question, etc, and (2) we measure the speed and the type of reaction for trusted and deceptive news sources for 10.8M Twitter posts and 6.2M Reddit comments. We show that there are significant differences in the speed and the type of reactions between trusted and deceptive news sources on Twitter, but far smaller differences on Reddit.