Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) aims to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. Despite the progressive performance of existing approaches in e-commerce platforms, they still suffer from two challenges: 1) difficulty in identifying values at different scales simultaneously; 2) easy confusion by some highly similar fine-grained attributes. This paper proposes a pre-training technique for AVE to address these issues. In particular, we first improve the conventional token-level masking strategy, guiding the language model to understand multi-scale values by recovering spans at the phrase and sentence level. Second, we apply clustering to build a challenging negative set for each example and design a pre-training objective based on contrastive learning to force the model to discriminate similar attributes. Comprehensive experiments show that our solution provides a significant improvement over traditional pre-trained models in the AVE task, and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks.

Table Understanding (TU) is a crucial aspect of information extraction that enables machines to comprehend the semantics behind tabular data. However, existing methods of TU cannot deal with the scarcity of labeled tabular data. In addition, these methods primarily focus on the textual content within the table, disregarding the inherent topological information of the table. This can lead to a misunderstanding of the tabular semantics. In this paper, we propose TabPrompt, a new framework to tackle the above challenges. Prompt-based learning has gained popularity due to its exceptional performance in few-shot learning. Thus, we introduce prompt-based learning to handle few-shot TU. Furthermore, Graph Contrastive Learning (Graph CL) demonstrates remarkable capabilities in capturing topological information, making Graph Neural Networks an ideal method for encoding tables. Hence, we develop a novel Graph CL method tailored to tabular data. This method serves as the pretext task during the pre-training phase, allowing the generation of vector representations that incorporate the table’s topological information. The experimental results of outperforming all strong baselines demonstrate the strength of our method in few-shot table understanding tasks.

Text-video based multimodal event extraction refers to identifying event information from the given text-video pairs. Existing methods predominantly utilize video appearance features (VAF) and text sequence features (TSF) as input information. Some of them employ contrastive learning to align VAF with the event types extracted from TSF. However, they disregard the motion representations in videos and the optimization of contrastive objective could be misguided by the background noise from RGB frames. We observe that the same event triggers correspond to similar motion trajectories, which are hardly affected by the background noise. Moviated by this, we propose a Three Stream Multimodal Event Extraction framework (TSEE) that simultaneously utilizes the features of text sequence and video appearance, as well as the motion representations to enhance the event extraction capacity. Firstly, we extract the optical flow features (OFF) as motion representations from videos to incorporate with VAF and TSF. Then we introduce a Multi-level Event Contrastive Learning module to align the embedding space between OFF and event triggers, as well as between event triggers and types. Finally, a Dual Querying Text module is proposed to enhance the interaction between modalities. Experimental results show that TSEE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates its superiority.

This paper studies event causality identification, which aims at predicting the causality relation for a pair of events in a sentence. Regarding event causality identification as a supervised classification task, most existing methods suffer from the problem of insufficient annotated data. In this paper, we propose a new derivative prompt joint learning model for event causality identification, which leverages potential causal knowledge in the pre-trained language model to tackle the data scarcity problem. Specifically, rather than external data or knowledge augmentation, we derive two relevant prompt tasks from event causality identification to enhance the model’s ability to identify explicit and implicit causality. We evaluate our model on two benchmark datasets and the results show that our model has great advantages over previous methods.

Relation extraction typically aims to extract semantic relationships between entities from the unstructured text. One of the most essential data sources for relation extraction is the spoken language, such as interviews and dialogues. However, the error propagation introduced in automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been ignored in relation extraction, and the end-to-end speech-based relation extraction method has been rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a new listening information extraction task, i.e., speech relation extraction. We construct the training dataset for speech relation extraction via text-to-speech systems, and we construct the testing dataset via crowd-sourcing with native English speakers. We explore speech relation extraction via two approaches: the pipeline approach conducting text-based extraction with a pretrained ASR module, and the end2end approach via a new proposed encoder-decoder model, or what we called SpeechRE.We conduct comprehensive experiments to distinguish the challenges in speech relation extraction, which may shed light on future explorations. We share the code and data on https://github.com/wutong8023/SpeechRE.

The ability to generate natural-language questions with controlled complexity levels is highly desirable as it further expands the applicability of question generation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural complexity-controllable question generation model, which incorporates a mixture of experts (MoE) as the selector of soft templates to improve the accuracy of complexity control and the quality of generated questions. The soft templates capture question similarity while avoiding the expensive construction of actual templates. Our method introduces a novel, cross-domain complexity estimator to assess the complexity of a question, taking into account the passage, the question, the answer and their interactions. The experimental results on two benchmark QA datasets demonstrate that our QG model is superior to state-of-the-art methods in both automatic and manual evaluation. Moreover, our complexity estimator is significantly more accurate than the baselines in both in-domain and out-domain settings.

Complex question-answering (CQA) involves answering complex natural-language questions on a knowledge base (KB). However, the conventional neural program induction (NPI) approach exhibits uneven performance when the questions have different types, harboring inherently different characteristics, e.g., difficulty level. This paper proposes a meta-reinforcement learning approach to program induction in CQA to tackle the potential distributional bias in questions. Our method quickly and effectively adapts the meta-learned programmer to new questions based on the most similar questions retrieved from the training data. The meta-learned policy is then used to learn a good programming policy, utilizing the trial trajectories and their rewards for similar questions in the support set. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CQA dataset (Saha et al., 2018) while using only five trial trajectories for the top-5 retrieved questions in each support set, and meta-training on tasks constructed from only 1% of the training set. We have released our code at https://github.com/DevinJake/MRL-CQA.

Event extraction plays an important role in legal applications, including case push and auxiliary judgment. However, traditional event structure cannot express the connections between arguments, which are extremely important in legal events. Therefore, this paper defines a dynamic event structure for Chinese legal events. To distinguish between similar events, we design hierarchical event features for event detection. Moreover, to address the problem of long-distance semantic dependence and anaphora resolution in argument classification, we propose a novel pedal attention mechanism to extract the semantic relation between two words through their dependent adjacent words. We label a Chinese legal event dataset and evaluate our model on it. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can surpass other state-of-the-art models.

Question generation over knowledge bases (KBQG) aims at generating natural-language questions about a subgraph, i.e. a set of triples. Two main challenges still face the current crop of encoder-decoder-based methods, especially on small subgraphs: (1) low diversity and poor fluency due to the limited information contained in the subgraphs, and (2) semantic drift due to the decoder’s oblivion of the semantics of the answer entity. We propose an innovative knowledge-enriched, type-constrained and grammar-guided KBQG model, named KTG, to addresses the above challenges. In our model, the encoder is equipped with auxiliary information from the KB, and the decoder is constrained with word types during QG. Specifically, entity domain and description, as well as relation hierarchy information are considered to construct question contexts, while a conditional copy mechanism is incorporated to modulate question semantics according to current word types. Besides, a novel reward function featuring grammatical similarity is designed to improve both generative richness and syntactic correctness via reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model outperforms existing methods by a significant margin on two widely-used benchmark datasets SimpleQuestion and PathQuestion.