Viet Lai


2021

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Event Extraction from Historical Texts: A New Dataset for Black Rebellions
Viet Lai | Minh Van Nguyen | Heidi Kaufman | Thien Huu Nguyen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Cross-Task Instance Representation Interactions and Label Dependencies for Joint Information Extraction with Graph Convolutional Networks
Minh Van Nguyen | Viet Lai | Thien Huu Nguyen
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Existing works on information extraction (IE) have mainly solved the four main tasks separately (entity mention recognition, relation extraction, event trigger detection, and argument extraction), thus failing to benefit from inter-dependencies between tasks. This paper presents a novel deep learning model to simultaneously solve the four tasks of IE in a single model (called FourIE). Compared to few prior work on jointly performing four IE tasks, FourIE features two novel contributions to capture inter-dependencies between tasks. First, at the representation level, we introduce an interaction graph between instances of the four tasks that is used to enrich the prediction representation for one instance with those from related instances of other tasks. Second, at the label level, we propose a dependency graph for the information types in the four IE tasks that captures the connections between the types expressed in an input sentence. A new regularization mechanism is introduced to enforce the consistency between the golden and predicted type dependency graphs to improve representation learning. We show that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for joint IE on both monolingual and multilingual learning settings with three different languages.

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Unleash GPT-2 Power for Event Detection
Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh | Viet Lai | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Huu Nguyen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Event Detection (ED) aims to recognize mentions of events (i.e., event triggers) and their types in text. Recently, several ED datasets in various domains have been proposed. However, the major limitation of these resources is the lack of enough training data for individual event types which hinders the efficient training of data-hungry deep learning models. To overcome this issue, we propose to exploit the powerful pre-trained language model GPT-2 to generate training samples for ED. To prevent the noises inevitable in automatically generated data from hampering training process, we propose to exploit a teacher-student architecture in which the teacher is supposed to learn anchor knowledge from the original data. The student is then trained on combination of the original and GPT-generated data while being led by the anchor knowledge from the teacher. Optimal transport is introduced to facilitate the anchor knowledge-based guidance between the two networks. We evaluate the proposed model on multiple ED benchmark datasets, gaining consistent improvement and establishing state-of-the-art results for ED.

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Learning Prototype Representations Across Few-Shot Tasks for Event Detection
Viet Lai | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Huu Nguyen
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We address the sampling bias and outlier issues in few-shot learning for event detection, a subtask of information extraction. We propose to model the relations between training tasks in episodic few-shot learning by introducing cross-task prototypes. We further propose to enforce prediction consistency among classifiers across tasks to make the model more robust to outliers. Our extensive experiment shows a consistent improvement on three few-shot learning datasets. The findings suggest that our model is more robust when labeled data of novel event types is limited. The source code is available at http://github.com/laiviet/fsl-proact.