EMNLP 2018 论文列表

Distant supervision is an effective method to generate large scale labeled data for relation extraction, which assumes that if a pair of entities appears in some relation of a Knowledge Graph (KG), all sentences containing those entities in a large unlabeled corpus are then labeled with that relation to train a relation classifier. However, when the pair of entities has multiple relationships in the KG, this assumption may produce noisy relation labels. This paper proposes a label-free distant supervision method, which makes no use of the relation labels under this inadequate assumption, but only uses the prior knowledge derived from the KG to supervise the learning of the classifier directly and softly. Specifically, we make use of the type information and the translation law derived from typical KG embedding model to learn embeddings for certain sentence patterns. As the supervision signal is only determined by the two aligned entities, neither hard relation labels nor extra noise-reduction model for the bag of sentences is needed in this way. The experiments show that the approach performs well in current distant supervision dataset.

Distantly supervised relation extraction employs existing knowledge graphs to automatically collect training data. While distant supervision is effective to scale relation extraction up to large-scale corpora, it inevitably suffers from the wrong labeling problem. Many efforts have been devoted to identifying valid instances from noisy data. However, most existing methods handle each relation in isolation, regardless of rich semantic correlations located in relation hierarchies. In this paper, we aim to incorporate the hierarchical information of relations for distantly supervised relation extraction and propose a novel hierarchical attention scheme. The multiple layers of our hierarchical attention scheme provide coarse-to-fine granularity to better identify valid instances, which is especially effective for extracting those long-tail relations. The experimental results on a large-scale benchmark dataset demonstrate that our models are capable of modeling the hierarchical information of relations and significantly outperform other baselines. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/HNRE.

Cross-sentence n-ary relation extraction detects relations among n entities across multiple sentences. Typical methods formulate an input as a document graph, integrating various intra-sentential and inter-sentential dependencies. The current state-of-the-art method splits the input graph into two DAGs, adopting a DAG-structured LSTM for each. Though being able to model rich linguistic knowledge by leveraging graph edges, important information can be lost in the splitting procedure. We propose a graph-state LSTM model, which uses a parallel state to model each word, recurrently enriching state values via message passing. Compared with DAG LSTMs, our graph LSTM keeps the original graph structure, and speeds up computation by allowing more parallelization. On a standard benchmark, our model shows the best result in the literature.

Attention mechanism is often used in deep neural networks for distantly supervised relation extraction (DS-RE) to distinguish valid from noisy instances. However, traditional 1-D vector attention model is insufficient for learning of different contexts in the selection of valid instances to predict the relationship for an entity pair. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel multi-level structured (2-D matrix) self-attention mechanism for DS-RE in a multi-instance learning (MIL) framework using bidirectional recurrent neural networks (BiRNN). In the proposed method, a structured word-level self-attention learns a 2-D matrix where each row vector represents a weight distribution for different aspects of an instance regarding two entities. Targeting the MIL issue, the structured sentence-level attention learns a 2-D matrix where each row vector represents a weight distribution on selection of different valid instances. Experiments conducted on two publicly available DS-RE datasets show that the proposed framework with multi-level structured self-attention mechanism significantly outperform baselines in terms of PR curves, P@N and F1 measures.

Dependency trees help relation extraction models capture long-range relations between words. However, existing dependency-based models either neglect crucial information (e.g., negation) by pruning the dependency trees too aggressively, or are computationally inefficient because it is difficult to parallelize over different tree structures. We propose an extension of graph convolutional networks that is tailored for relation extraction, which pools information over arbitrary dependency structures efficiently in parallel. To incorporate relevant information while maximally removing irrelevant content, we further apply a novel pruning strategy to the input trees by keeping words immediately around the shortest path between the two entities among which a relation might hold. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale TACRED dataset, outperforming existing sequence and dependency-based neural models. We also show through detailed analysis that this model has complementary strengths to sequence models, and combining them further improves the state of the art.

Extracting relations is critical for knowledge base completion and construction in which distant supervised methods are widely used to extract relational facts automatically with the existing knowledge bases. However, the automatically constructed datasets comprise amounts of low-quality sentences containing noisy words, which is neglected by current distant supervised methods resulting in unacceptable precisions. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel word-level distant supervised approach for relation extraction. We first build Sub-Tree Parse(STP) to remove noisy words that are irrelevant to relations. Then we construct a neural network inputting the sub-tree while applying the entity-wise attention to identify the important semantic features of relational words in each instance. To make our model more robust against noisy words, we initialize our network with a priori knowledge learned from the relevant task of entity classification by transfer learning. We conduct extensive experiments using the corpora of New York Times(NYT) and Freebase. Experiments show that our approach is effective and improves the area of Precision/Recall(PR) from 0.35 to 0.39 over the state-of-the-art work.

Answering complex questions that involve multiple entities and multiple relations using a standard knowledge base is an open and challenging task. Most existing KBQA approaches focus on simpler questions and do not work very well on complex questions because they were not able to simultaneously represent the question and the corresponding complex query structure. In this work, we encode such complex query structure into a uniform vector representation, and thus successfully capture the interactions between individual semantic components within a complex question. This approach consistently outperforms existing methods on complex questions while staying competitive on simple questions.

We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total). The dialogs involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text. QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative evaluation. We also report results for a number of reference models, including a recently state-of-the-art reading comprehension architecture extended to model dialog context. Our best model underperforms humans by 20 F1, suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this data. Dataset, baseline, and leaderboard available at http://quac.ai.

High-level semantics tasks, e.g., paraphrasing, textual entailment or question answering, involve modeling of text pairs. Before the emergence of neural networks, this has been mostly performed using intra-pair features, which incorporate similarity scores or rewrite rules computed between the members within the same pair. In this paper, we compute scalar products between vectors representing similarity between members of different pairs, in place of simply using a single vector for each pair. This allows us to obtain a representation specific to any pair of pairs, which delivers the state of the art in answer sentence selection. Most importantly, our approach can outperform much more complex algorithms based on neural networks.

Answering compositional questions requiring multi-step reasoning is challenging. We introduce an end-to-end differentiable model for interpreting questions about a knowledge graph (KG), which is inspired by formal approaches to semantics. Each span of text is represented by a denotation in a KG and a vector that captures ungrounded aspects of meaning. Learned composition modules recursively combine constituent spans, culminating in a grounding for the complete sentence which answers the question. For example, to interpret “not green”, the model represents “green” as a set of KG entities and “not” as a trainable ungrounded vector—and then uses this vector to parameterize a composition function that performs a complement operation. For each sentence, we build a parse chart subsuming all possible parses, allowing the model to jointly learn both the composition operators and output structure by gradient descent from end-task supervision. The model learns a variety of challenging semantic operators, such as quantifiers, disjunctions and composed relations, and infers latent syntactic structure. It also generalizes well to longer questions than seen in its training data, in contrast to RNN, its tree-based variants, and semantic parsing baselines.

Sequence encoders are crucial components in many neural architectures for learning to read and comprehend. This paper presents a new compositional encoder for reading comprehension (RC). Our proposed encoder is not only aimed at being fast but also expressive. Specifically, the key novelty behind our encoder is that it explicitly models across multiple granularities using a new dilated composition mechanism. In our approach, gating functions are learned by modeling relationships and reasoning over multi-granular sequence information, enabling compositional learning that is aware of both long and short term information. We conduct experiments on three RC datasets, showing that our proposed encoder demonstrates very promising results both as a standalone encoder as well as a complementary building block. Empirical results show that simple Bi-Attentive architectures augmented with our proposed encoder not only achieves state-of-the-art / highly competitive results but is also considerably faster than other published works.

Machine reading comprehension helps machines learn to utilize most of the human knowledge written in the form of text. Existing approaches made a significant progress comparable to human-level performance, but they are still limited in understanding, up to a few paragraphs, failing to properly comprehend lengthy document. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture to handle a long-range dependency in RC tasks. In detail, our method has two novel aspects: (1) an advanced memory-augmented architecture and (2) an expanded gated recurrent unit with dense connections that mitigate potential information distortion occurring in the memory. Our proposed architecture is widely applicable to other models. We have performed extensive experiments with well-known benchmark datasets such as TriviaQA, QUASAR-T, and SQuAD. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods, especially for lengthy documents.

We propose the task of Open-Domain Information Narration (OIN) as the reverse task of Open Information Extraction (OIE), to implement the dual structure between language and knowledge in the open domain. Then, we develop an agent, called Orator, to accomplish the OIN task, and assemble the Orator and the recently proposed OIE agent — Logician into a dual system to utilize the duality structure with a reinforcement learning paradigm. Experimental results reveal the dual structure between OIE and OIN tasks helps to build better both OIE agents and OIN agents.

The task of machine reading comprehension (MRC) has evolved from answering simple questions from well-edited text to answering real questions from users out of web data. In the real-world setting, full-body text from multiple relevant documents in the top search results are provided as context for questions from user queries, including not only questions with a single, short, and factual answer, but also questions about reasons, procedures, and opinions. In this case, multiple answers could be equally valid for a single question and each answer may occur multiple times in the context, which should be taken into consideration when we build MRC system. We propose a multi-answer multi-task framework, in which different loss functions are used for multiple reference answers. Minimum Risk Training is applied to solve the multi-occurrence problem of a single answer. Combined with a simple heuristic passage extraction strategy for overlong documents, our model increases the ROUGE-L score on the DuReader dataset from 44.18, the previous state-of-the-art, to 51.09.

Although natural language question answering over knowledge graphs have been studied in the literature, existing methods have some limitations in answering complex questions. To address that, in this paper, we propose a State Transition-based approach to translate a complex natural language question N to a semantic query graph (SQG), which is used to match the underlying knowledge graph to find the answers to question N. In order to generate SQG, we propose four primitive operations (expand, fold, connect and merge) and a learning-based state transition approach. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks (such as QALD, WebQuestions and ComplexQuestions) with two knowledge bases (DBpedia and Freebase) confirm the superiority of our approach compared with state-of-the-arts.

Most work in machine reading focuses on question answering problems where the answer is directly expressed in the text to read. However, many real-world question answering problems require the reading of text not because it contains the literal answer, but because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with the reader’s background knowledge. One example is the task of interpreting regulations to answer “Can I...?” or “Do I have to...?” questions such as “I am working in Canada. Do I have to carry on paying UK National Insurance?” after reading a UK government website about this topic. This task requires both the interpretation of rules and the application of background knowledge. It is further complicated due to the fact that, in practice, most questions are underspecified, and a human assistant will regularly have to ask clarification questions such as “How long have you been working abroad?” when the answer cannot be directly derived from the question and text. In this paper, we formalise this task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect 37k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. We analyse the challenges of this task and assess its difficulty by evaluating the performance of rule-based and machine-learning baselines. We observe promising results when no background knowledge is necessary, and substantial room for improvement whenever background knowledge is needed.

Despite that current reading comprehension systems have achieved significant advancements, their promising performances are often obtained at the cost of making an ensemble of numerous models. Besides, existing approaches are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper tackles these problems by leveraging knowledge distillation, which aims to transfer knowledge from an ensemble model to a single model. We first demonstrate that vanilla knowledge distillation applied to answer span prediction is effective for reading comprehension systems. We then propose two novel approaches that not only penalize the prediction on confusing answers but also guide the training with alignment information distilled from the ensemble. Experiments show that our best student model has only a slight drop of 0.4% F1 on the SQuAD test set compared to the ensemble teacher, while running 12x faster during inference. It even outperforms the teacher on adversarial SQuAD datasets and NarrativeQA benchmark.

The problem of entity-typing has been studied predominantly as a supervised learning problems, mostly with task-specific annotations (for coarse types) and sometimes with distant supervision (for fine types). While such approaches have strong performance within datasets they often lack the flexibility to transfer across text genres and to generalize to new type taxonomies. In this work we propose a zero-shot entity typing approach that requires no annotated data and can flexibly identify newly defined types. Given a type taxonomy, the entries of which we define as Boolean functions of freebase “types,” we ground a given mention to a set of type-compatible Wikipedia entries, and then infer the target mention’s type using an inference algorithm that makes use of the types of these entries. We evaluate our system on a broad range of datasets, including standard fine-grained and coarse-grained entity typing datasets, and on a dataset in the biological domain. Our system is shown to be competitive with state-of-the-art supervised NER systems, and to outperform them on out-of-training datasets. We also show that our system significantly outperforms other zero-shot fine typing systems.

Recent advances in deep neural models allow us to build reliable named entity recognition (NER) systems without handcrafting features. However, such methods require large amounts of manually-labeled training data. There have been efforts on replacing human annotations with distant supervision (in conjunction with external dictionaries), but the generated noisy labels pose significant challenges on learning effective neural models. Here we propose two neural models to suit noisy distant supervision from the dictionary. First, under the traditional sequence labeling framework, we propose a revised fuzzy CRF layer to handle tokens with multiple possible labels. After identifying the nature of noisy labels in distant supervision, we go beyond the traditional framework and propose a novel, more effective neural model AutoNER with a new Tie or Break scheme. In addition, we discuss how to refine distant supervision for better NER performance. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AutoNER achieves the best performance when only using dictionaries with no additional human effort, and delivers competitive results with state-of-the-art supervised benchmarks.