Compared to traditional single-turn ad-hoc retrieval, conversational retrieval needs to handle the multi-turn conversation and understand the user’s real query intent. However, most existing methods simply fine-tune the pre-trained ad-hoc retriever on limited supervised data, making it challenging for the retriever to fully grasp the entirety of the conversation. In this paper, we find that large language models (LLMs) can accurately discover the user’s query intent from the complex conversation context and provide the supervised signal to instruct the retriever in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method termed InstructoR to Instruct unsupervised conversational dense Retrieval with LLMs. We design an unsupervised training framework that employs LLMs to estimate the session-passage relevance score as the soft label to guide the retriever’s training. Specially, we devise three instructing strategies from context, query and response perspectives to calculate the relevance score more precisely, including conversational retrieval as conversation generation, question rewrite as latent variable and question response as posterior guide. Experimental results show InstructoR can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, even surpassing the current supervised state-of-the-art method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under low-resource and zero-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/InstructoR/.

Despite the significant progress in developing named entity recognition models, scaling to novel-emerging types still remains challenging in real-world scenarios. Continual learning and zero-shot learning approaches have been explored to handle novel-emerging types with less human supervision, but they have not been as successfully adopted as supervised approaches. Meanwhile, humans possess a much larger vocabulary size than these approaches and have the ability to learn the alignment between entities and concepts effortlessly through natural supervision. In this paper, we consider a more realistic and challenging setting called open-vocabulary named entity recognition (OVNER) to imitate human-level ability. OVNER aims to recognize entities in novel types by their textual names or descriptions. Specifically, we formulate OVNER as a semantic matching task and propose a novel and scalable two-stage method called Context-Type SemAntiC Alignment and FusiOn (CACAO). In the pre-training stage, we adopt Dual-Encoder for context-type semantic alignment and pre-train Dual-Encoder on 80M context-type pairs which are easily accessible through natural supervision. In the fine-tuning stage, we use Cross-Encoder for context-type semantic fusion and fine-tune Cross-Encoder on base types with human supervision. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on three challenging OVNER benchmarks by 9.7%, 9.5%, and 1.8% F1-score of novel types. Moreover, CACAO also demonstrates its flexible transfer ability in cross-domain NER.

In this paper, we propose CogKGE, a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) toolkit, which aims to represent multi-source and heterogeneous knowledge. For multi-source knowledge, unlike existing methods that mainly focus on entity-centric knowledge, CogKGE also supports the representations of event-centric, commonsense and linguistic knowledge. For heterogeneous knowledge, besides structured triple facts, CogKGE leverages additional unstructured information, such as text descriptions, node types and temporal information, to enhance the meaning of embeddings. Designing CogKGE aims to provide a unified programming framework for KGE tasks and a series of knowledge representations for downstream tasks. As a research framework, CogKGE consists of five parts, including core, data, model, knowledge and adapter module. As a knowledge discovery toolkit, CogKGE provides pre-trained embedders to discover new facts, cluster entities and check facts. Furthermore, we construct two benchmark datasets for further research on multi-source heterogeneous KGE tasks: EventKG240K and CogNet360K. We also release an online system to discover knowledge visually. Source code, datasets and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at GitHub, with a short instruction video.

The task of knowledge graph entity typing (KGET) aims to infer the missing types for entities in knowledge graphs. Some pioneering work has proved that neighbor information is very important for the task. However, existing methods only leverage the one-hop neighbor information of the central entity, ignoring the multi-hop neighbor information that can provide valuable clues for inference. Besides, we also observe that there are co-occurrence relations between types, which is very helpful to alleviate false-negative problem. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Mining Treasured Neighbors (MiNer) to make use of these two characteristics. Firstly, we devise a Neighbor Information Aggregation module to aggregate the neighbor information. Then, we propose an Entity Type Inference module to mitigate the adverse impact of the irrelevant neighbor information. Finally, a Type Co-occurrence Regularization module is designed to prevent the model from overfitting the false negative examples caused by missing types. Experimental results on two widely used datasets indicate that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

As the first step of modern natural language processing, text representation encodes discrete texts as continuous embeddings. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated strong ability in text representation and significantly promoted the development of natural language understanding (NLU). However, existing PLMs represent a text solely by its context, which is not enough to support knowledge-intensive NLU tasks. Knowledge is power, and fusing external knowledge explicitly into PLMs can provide knowledgeable text representations. Since previous knowledge-enhanced methods differ in many aspects, making it difficult for us to reproduce previous methods, implement new methods, and transfer between different methods. It is highly desirable to have a unified paradigm to encompass all kinds of methods in one framework. In this paper, we propose CogKTR, a knowledge-enhanced text representation toolkit for natural language understanding. According to our proposed Unified Knowledge-Enhanced Paradigm (UniKEP), CogKTR consists of four key stages, including knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection, and knowledge application. CogKTR currently supports easy-to-use knowledge acquisition interfaces, multi-source knowledge embeddings, diverse knowledge-enhanced models, and various knowledge-intensive NLU tasks. Our unified, knowledgeable and modular toolkit is publicly available at GitHub, with an online system and a short instruction video.

CogNet is a knowledge base that integrates three types of knowledge: linguistic knowledge, world knowledge and commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose an information extraction toolkit, called CogIE, which is a bridge connecting raw texts and CogNet. CogIE has three features: versatile, knowledge-grounded and extensible. First, CogIE is a versatile toolkit with a rich set of functional modules, including named entity recognition, entity typing, entity linking, relation extraction, event extraction and frame-semantic parsing. Second, as a knowledge-grounded toolkit, CogIE can ground the extracted facts to CogNet and leverage different types of knowledge to enrich extracted results. Third, for extensibility, owing to the design of three-tier architecture, CogIE is not only a plug-and-play toolkit for developers but also an extensible programming framework for researchers. We release an open-access online system to visually extract information from texts. Source code, datasets and pre-trained models are publicly available at GitHub, with a short instruction video.