Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) aims to locate entity mentions and classify their types with only knowledge bases or gazetteers and unlabeled corpus. However, distant annotations are noisy and degrade the performance of NER models. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust prototype network named MProto for the DS-NER task. Different from previous prototype-based NER methods, MProto represents each entity type with multiple prototypes to characterize the intra-class variance among entity representations. To optimize the classifier, each token should be assigned an appropriate ground-truth prototype and we consider such token-prototype assignment as an optimal transport (OT) problem. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise from incomplete labeling, we propose a novel denoised optimal transport (DOT) algorithm. Specifically, we utilize the assignment result between *Other* class tokens and all prototypes to distinguish unlabeled entity tokens from true negatives. Experiments on several DS-NER benchmarks demonstrate that our MProto achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is now available on Github.

Abductive Reasoning, has long been considered to be at the core ability of humans, which enables us to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena in daily life. However, such critical reasoning capability is rarely investigated for contemporary AI systems under such limited observations. To facilitate this research community, this paper sheds new light on Abductive Reasoning by studying a new vision-language task, Multi-modal Action chain abductive Reasoning (MAR), together with a large-scale Abductive Reasoning dataset: Given an incomplete set of language described events, MAR aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and then infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain that can best explain the language premise. To solve this task, we propose a strong baseline model that realizes MAR from two perspectives: (i) we first introduce the transformer, which learns to encode the observation to imagine the plausible event with explicitly interpretable event grounding in the video based on the commonsense knowledge recognition ability. (ii) To complete the assumption of a follow-up action chain, we design a novel symbolic module that can complete strict derivation of the progressive action chain layer by layer. We conducted extensive experiments on the proposed dataset, and the experimental study shows that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on our newly created MAR dataset.

Knowledge graphs store a large number of factual triples while they are still incomplete, inevitably. The previous knowledge graph completion (KGC) models predict missing links between entities merely relying on fact-view data, ignoring the valuable commonsense knowledge. The previous knowledge graph embedding (KGE) techniques suffer from invalid negative sampling and the uncertainty of fact-view link prediction, limiting KGC’s performance. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel and scalable Commonsense-Aware Knowledge Embedding (CAKE) framework to automatically extract commonsense from factual triples with entity concepts. The generated commonsense augments effective self-supervision to facilitate both high-quality negative sampling (NS) and joint commonsense and fact-view link prediction. Experimental results on the KGC task demonstrate that assembling our framework could enhance the performance of the original KGE models, and the proposed commonsense-aware NS module is superior to other NS techniques. Besides, our proposed framework could be easily adaptive to various KGE models and explain the predicted results.

Natural language spatial video grounding aims to detect the relevant objects in video frames with descriptive sentences as the query. In spite of the great advances, most existing methods rely on dense video frame annotations, which require a tremendous amount of human effort. To achieve effective grounding under a limited annotation budget, we investigate one-shot video grounding and learn to ground natural language in all video frames with solely one frame labeled, in an end-to-end manner. One major challenge of end-to-end one-shot video grounding is the existence of videos frames that are either irrelevant to the language query or the labeled frame. Another challenge relates to the limited supervision, which might result in ineffective representation learning. To address these challenges, we designed an end-to-end model via Information Tree for One-Shot video grounding (IT-OS). Its key module, the information tree, can eliminate the interference of irrelevant frames based on branch search and branch cropping techniques. In addition, several self-supervised tasks are proposed based on the information tree to improve the representation learning under insufficient labeling. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Knowledge graph (KG) inference aims to address the natural incompleteness of KGs, including rule learning-based and KG embedding (KGE) models. However, the rule learning-based models suffer from low efficiency and generalization while KGE models lack interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel and effective closed-loop neural-symbolic learning framework EngineKG via incorporating our developed KGE and rule learning modules. KGE module exploits symbolic rules and paths to enhance the semantic association between entities and relations for improving KG embeddings and interpretability. A novel rule pruning mechanism is proposed in the rule learning module by leveraging paths as initial candidate rules and employing KG embeddings together with concepts for extracting more high-quality rules. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that our model outperforms the relevant baselines on link prediction tasks, demonstrating the superiority of our KG inference model in a neural-symbolic learning fashion. The source code and datasets of this paper are available at https://github.com/ngl567/EngineKG.

The introduction of multimodal information and pretraining technique significantly improves entity recognition from visually-rich documents. However, most of the existing methods pay unnecessary attention to irrelevant regions of the current document while ignoring the potentially valuable information in related documents. To deal with this problem, this work proposes a cross-document semantic enhancement method, which consists of two modules: 1) To prevent distractions from irrelevant regions in the current document, we design a learnable attention mask mechanism, which is used to adaptively filter redundant information in the current document. 2) To further enrich the entity-related context, we propose a cross-document information awareness technique, which enables the model to collect more evidence across documents to assist in prediction. The experimental results on two documents understanding benchmarks covering eight languages demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA methods.

Few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) is of great importance in long-tail distribution problem, especially in special domain with low-resource data. Most existing FSRE algorithms fail to accurately classify the relations merely based on the information of the sentences together with the recognized entity pairs, due to limited samples and lack of knowledge. To address this problem, in this paper, we proposed a novel entity CONCEPT-enhanced FEw-shot Relation Extraction scheme (ConceptFERE), which introduces the inherent concepts of entities to provide clues for relation prediction and boost the relations classification performance. Firstly, a concept-sentence attention module is developed to select the most appropriate concept from multiple concepts of each entity by calculating the semantic similarity between sentences and concepts. Secondly, a self-attention based fusion module is presented to bridge the gap of concept embedding and sentence embedding from different semantic spaces. Extensive experiments on the FSRE benchmark dataset FewRel have demonstrated the effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed ConceptFERE scheme as compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/LittleGuoKe/ConceptFERE.

Recent advances in Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) allow for representing entities and relations in continuous vector spaces. Some traditional KGE models leveraging additional type information can improve the representation of entities which however totally rely on the explicit types or neglect the diverse type representations specific to various relations. Besides, none of the existing methods is capable of inferring all the relation patterns of symmetry, inversion and composition as well as the complex properties of 1-N, N-1 and N-N relations, simultaneously. To explore the type information for any KG, we develop a novel KGE framework with Automated Entity TypE Representation (AutoETER), which learns the latent type embedding of each entity by regarding each relation as a translation operation between the types of two entities with a relation-aware projection mechanism. Particularly, our designed automated type representation learning mechanism is a pluggable module which can be easily incorporated with any KGE model. Besides, our approach could model and infer all the relation patterns and complex relations. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model compared to state-of-the-art baselines on link prediction tasks, and the visualization of type clustering provides clearly the explanation of type embeddings and verifies the effectiveness of our model.

This paper provides a new way to improve the efficiency of the REINFORCE training process. We apply it to the task of instance selection in distant supervision. Modeling the instance selection in one bag as a sequential decision process, a reinforcement learning agent is trained to determine whether an instance is valuable or not and construct a new bag with less noisy instances. However unbiased methods, such as REINFORCE, could usually take much time to train. This paper adopts posterior regularization (PR) to integrate some domain-specific rules in instance selection using REINFORCE. As the experiment results show, this method remarkably improves the performance of the relation classifier trained on cleaned distant supervision dataset as well as the efficiency of the REINFORCE training.