Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Type Induction

Traditional event extraction methods require predefined event types and their corresponding annotations to learn event extractors. These prerequisites are often hard to be satisfied in real-world applications. This work presents a corpus-based open-domain event type induction method that automatically discovers a set of event types from a given corpus. As events of the same type could be expressed in multiple ways, we propose to represent each event type as a cluster of <predicate sense, object head> pairs. Specifically, our method (1) selects salient predicates and object heads, (2) disambiguates predicate senses using only a verb sense dictionary, and (3) obtains event types by jointly embedding and clustering <predicate sense, object head> pairs in a latent spherical space. Our experiments, on three datasets from different domains, show our method can discover salient and high-quality event types, according to both automatic and human evaluations.

Eider: Evidence-enhanced Document-level Relation Extraction

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims at extracting the semantic relations among entity pairs in a document. In DocRE, a subset of the sentences in a document, called the evidence sentences, might be sufficient for predicting the relation between a specific entity pair. To make better use of the evidence sentences, in this paper, we propose a three-stage evidence-enhanced DocRE framework consisting of joint relation and evidence extraction, evidence-centered relation extraction (RE), and fusion of extraction results. We first jointly train an RE model with a simple and memory-efficient evidence extraction model. Then, we construct pseudo documents based on the extracted evidence sentences and run the RE model again. Finally, we fuse the extraction results of the first two stages using a blending layer and make a final prediction. Extensive experiments show that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DocRED dataset, outperforming the second-best method by 0.76/0.82 Ign F1/F1. In particular, our method significantly improves the performance on inter-sentence relations by 1.23 Inter F1.

Training ELECTRA Augmented with Multi-word Selection

Pre-trained text encoders such as BERT and its variants have recently achieved state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks. While being effective, these pre-training methods typically demand massive computation resources. To accelerate pre-training, ELECTRA trains a discriminator that predicts whether each input token is replaced by a generator. However, this new task, as a binary classification, is less semantically informative. In this study, we present a new text encoder pre-training method that improves ELECTRA based on multi-task learning. Specifically, we train the discriminator to simultaneously detect replaced tokens and select original tokens from candidate sets. We further develop two techniques to effectively combine all pre-training tasks: (1) using attention-based networks for task-specific heads, and (2) sharing bottom layers of the generator and the discriminator. Extensive experiments on GLUE and SQuAD datasets demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposed method.

Who Should Go First? A Self-Supervised Concept Sorting Model for Improving Taxonomy Expansion

Taxonomies have been widely used in various machine learning and text mining systems to organize knowledge and facilitate downstream tasks. One critical challenge is that, as data and business scope grow in real applications, existing taxonomies need to be expanded to incorporate new concepts. Previous works on taxonomy expansion process the new concepts independently and simultaneously, ignoring the potential relationships among them and the appropriate order of inserting operations. However, in reality, the new concepts tend to be mutually correlated and form local hypernym-hyponym structures. In such a scenario, ignoring the dependencies of new concepts and the order of insertion may trigger error propagation. For example, existing taxonomy expansion systems may insert hyponyms to existing taxonomies before their hypernym, leading to sub-optimal expanded taxonomies. To complement existing taxonomy expansion systems, we propose TaxoOrder, a novel self-supervised framework that simultaneously discovers the local hypernym-hyponym structure among new concepts and decides the order of insertion. TaxoOrder can be directly plugged into any taxonomy expansion system and improve the quality of expanded taxonomies. Experiments on the real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of TaxoOrder to enhance taxonomy expansion systems, leading to better-resulting taxonomies with comparison to baselines under various evaluation metrics.

Taxonomy Completion via Triplet Matching Network

Automatically constructing taxonomy finds many applications in e-commerce and web search. One critical challenge is as data and business scope grow in real applications, new concepts are emerging and needed to be added to the existing taxonomy. Previous approaches focus on the taxonomy expansion, i.e. finding an appropriate hypernym concept from the taxonomy for a new query concept. In this paper, we formulate a new task, "taxonomy completion", by discovering both the hypernym and hyponym concepts for a query. We propose Triplet Matching Network (TMN), to find the appropriate <hypernym, hyponym> pairs for a given query concept. TMN consists of one primal scorer and multiple auxiliary scorers. These auxiliary scorers capture various fine-grained signals (e.g., query to hypernym or query to hyponym semantics), and the primal scorer makes a holistic prediction on <query, hypernym, hyponym> triplet based on the internal feature representations of all auxiliary scorers. Also, an innovative channel-wise gating mechanism that retains task-specific information in concept representations is introduced to further boost model performance. Experiments on four real-world large-scale datasets show that TMN achieves the best performance on both taxonomy completion task and the previous taxonomy expansion task, outperforming existing methods.

Near-imperceptible Neural Linguistic Steganography via Self-Adjusting Arithmetic Coding

Linguistic steganography studies how to hide secret messages in natural language cover texts. Traditional methods aim to transform a secret message into an innocent text via lexical substitution or syntactical modification. Recently, advances in neural language models (LMs) enable us to directly generate cover text conditioned on the secret message. In this study, we present a new linguistic steganography method which encodes secret messages using self-adjusting arithmetic coding based on a neural language model. We formally analyze the statistical imperceptibility of this method and empirically show it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on four datasets by 15.3% and 38.9% in terms of bits/word and KL metrics, respectively. Finally, human evaluations show that 51% of generated cover texts can indeed fool eavesdroppers.

SynSetExpan: An Iterative Framework for Joint Entity Set Expansion and Synonym Discovery

Entity set expansion and synonym discovery are two critical NLP tasks. Previous studies accomplish them separately, without exploring their interdependencies. In this work, we hypothesize that these two tasks are tightly coupled because two synonymous entities tend to have similar likelihoods of belonging to various semantic classes. This motivates us to design SynSetExpan, a novel framework that enables two tasks to mutually enhance each other. SynSetExpan uses a synonym discovery model to include popular entities' infrequent synonyms into the set, which boosts the set expansion recall. Meanwhile, the set expansion model, being able to determine whether an entity belongs to a semantic class, can generate pseudo training data to fine-tune the synonym discovery model towards better accuracy. To facilitate the research on studying the interplays of these two tasks, we create the first large-scale Synonym-Enhanced Set Expansion (SE2) dataset via crowdsourcing. Extensive experiments on the SE2 dataset and previous benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SynSetExpan for both entity set expansion and synonym discovery tasks.

STEAM: Self-Supervised Taxonomy Expansion with Mini-Paths

Taxonomies are important knowledge ontologies that underpin numerous applications on a daily basis, but many taxonomies used in practice suffer from the low coverage issue. We study the taxonomy expansion problem, which aims to expand existing taxonomies with new concept terms. We propose a self-supervised taxonomy expansion model named STEAM, which leverages natural supervision in the existing taxonomy for expansion. To generate natural self-supervision signals, STEAM samples mini-paths from the existing taxonomy, and formulates a node attachment prediction task between anchor mini-paths and query terms. To solve the node attachment task, it learns feature representations for query-anchor pairs from multiple views and performs multi-view co-training for prediction. Extensive experiments show that STEAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods for taxonomy expansion by 11.6\% in accuracy and 7.0\% in mean reciprocal rank on three public benchmarks. The implementation of STEAM can be found at \url{https://github.com/yueyu1030/STEAM}.

Empower Entity Set Expansion via Language Model Probing

Entity set expansion, aiming at expanding a small seed entity set with new entities belonging to the same semantic class, is a critical task that benefits many downstream NLP and IR applications, such as question answering, query understanding, and taxonomy construction. Existing set expansion methods bootstrap the seed entity set by adaptively selecting context features and extracting new entities. A key challenge for entity set expansion is to avoid selecting ambiguous context features which will shift the class semantics and lead to accumulative errors in later iterations. In this study, we propose a novel iterative set expansion framework that leverages automatically generated class names to address the semantic drift issue. In each iteration, we select one positive and several negative class names by probing a pre-trained language model, and further score each candidate entity based on selected class names. Experiments on two datasets show that our framework generates high-quality class names and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods significantly.