Question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (KGs) efficiently uses facts contained in a temporal KG, which records entity relations and when they occur in time, to answer natural language questions (e.g., “Who was the president of the US before Obama?”). These questions often involve three time-related challenges that previous work fail to adequately address: 1) questions often do not specify exact timestamps of interest (e.g., “Obama” instead of 2000); 2) subtle lexical differences in time relations (e.g., “before” vs “after”); 3) off-the-shelf temporal KG embeddings that previous work builds on ignore the temporal order of timestamps, which is crucial for answering temporal-order related questions. In this paper, we propose a time-sensitive question answering (TSQA) framework to tackle these problems. TSQA features a timestamp estimation module to infer the unwritten timestamp from the question. We also employ a time-sensitive KG encoder to inject ordering information into the temporal KG embeddings that TSQA is based on. With the help of techniques to reduce the search space for potential answers, TSQA significantly outperforms the previous state of the art on a new benchmark for question answering over temporal KGs, especially achieving a 32% (absolute) error reduction on complex questions that require multiple steps of reasoning over facts in the temporal KG.

Document-level relation extraction is a challenging task, requiring reasoning over multiple sentences to predict a set of relations in a document. In this paper, we propose a novel framework E2GRE (Entity and Evidence Guided Relation Extraction) that jointly extracts relations and the underlying evidence sentences by using large pretrained language model (LM) as input encoder. First, we propose to guide the pretrained LM’s attention mechanism to focus on relevant context by using attention probabilities as additional features for evidence prediction. Furthermore, instead of feeding the whole document into pretrained LMs to obtain entity representation, we concatenate document text with head entities to help LMs concentrate on parts of the document that are more related to the head entity. Our E2GRE jointly learns relation extraction and evidence prediction effectively, showing large gains on both these tasks, which we find are highly correlated.

Recent work on aspect-level sentiment classification has employed Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) over dependency trees to learn interactions between aspect terms and opinion words. In some cases, the corresponding opinion words for an aspect term cannot be reached within two hops on dependency trees, which requires more GCN layers to model. However, GCNs often achieve the best performance with two layers, and deeper GCNs do not bring any additional gain. Therefore, we design a novel selective attention based GCN model. On one hand, the proposed model enables the direct interaction between aspect terms and context words via the self-attention operation without the distance limitation on dependency trees. On the other hand, a top-k selection procedure is designed to locate opinion words by selecting k context words with the highest attention scores. We conduct experiments on several commonly used benchmark datasets and the results show that our proposed SA-GCN outperforms strong baseline models.

Recent work on aspect-level sentiment classification has demonstrated the efficacy of incorporating syntactic structures such as dependency trees with graph neural networks (GNN), but these approaches are usually vulnerable to parsing errors. To better leverage syntactic information in the face of unavoidable errors, we propose a simple yet effective graph ensemble technique, GraphMerge, to make use of the predictions from different parsers. Instead of assigning one set of model parameters to each dependency tree, we first combine the dependency relations from different parses before applying GNNs over the resulting graph. This allows GNN models to be robust to parse errors at no additional computational cost, and helps avoid overparameterization and overfitting from GNN layer stacking by introducing more connectivity into the ensemble graph. Our experiments on the SemEval 2014 Task 4 and ACL 14 Twitter datasets show that our GraphMerge model not only outperforms models with single dependency tree, but also beats other ensemble models without adding model parameters.

Distance-based knowledge graph embeddings have shown substantial improvement on the knowledge graph link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, complex relations such as N-to-1, 1-to-N and N-to-N still remain challenging to predict. In this work, we propose a novel distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. First, we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimensional space with orthogonal transforms to model relations. The orthogonal transform embedding for relations keeps the capability for modeling symmetric/anti-symmetric, inverse and compositional relations while achieves better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is integrated into distance scoring functions directly. Specifically, graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. Each node embedding in knowledge graph is augmented with two context representations, which are computed from the neighboring outgoing and incoming nodes/edges respectively. The proposed approach improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-to-1, 1-to-N and N-to-N cases. Our experimental results show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on two common benchmarks FB15k-237 and WNRR-18, especially on FB15k-237 which has many high in-degree nodes.

Multi-hop reading comprehension (RC) across documents poses new challenge over single-document RC because it requires reasoning over multiple documents to reach the final answer. In this paper, we propose a new model to tackle the multi-hop RC problem. We introduce a heterogeneous graph with different types of nodes and edges, which is named as Heterogeneous Document-Entity (HDE) graph. The advantage of HDE graph is that it contains different granularity levels of information including candidates, documents and entities in specific document contexts. Our proposed model can do reasoning over the HDE graph with nodes representation initialized with co-attention and self-attention based context encoders. We employ Graph Neural Networks (GNN) based message passing algorithms to accumulate evidences on the proposed HDE graph. Evaluated on the blind test set of the Qangaroo WikiHop data set, our HDE graph based single model delivers competitive result, and the ensemble model achieves the state-of-the-art performance.