Open Information Extraction models have shown promising results with sufficient supervision. However, these models face a fundamental challenge that the syntactic distribution of training data is partially observable in comparison to the real world. In this paper, we propose a syntactically robust training framework that enables models to be trained on a syntactic-abundant distribution based on diverse paraphrase generation. To tackle the intrinsic problem of knowledge deformation of paraphrasing, two algorithms based on semantic similarity matching and syntactic tree walking are used to restore the expressionally transformed knowledge. The training framework can be generally applied to other syntactic partial observable domains. Based on the proposed framework, we build a new evaluation set called CaRB-AutoPara, a syntactically diverse dataset consistent with the real-world setting for validating the robustness of the models. Experiments including a thorough analysis show that the performance of the model degrades with the increase of the difference in syntactic distribution, while our framework gives a robust boundary. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/qijimrc/RobustOIE.
Answering complex logical queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task, and has been widely studied. Embedding-based methods require training on complex queries, and cannot generalize well to out-of-distribution query structures. Recent work frames this task as an end-to-end optimization problem, and it only requires a pretrained link predictor. However, due to the exponentially large combinatorial search space, the optimal solution can only be approximated, limiting the final accuracy. In this work, we propose QTO (Query Computation Tree Optimization) that can efficiently find the exact optimal solution. QTO finds the optimal solution by a forward-backward propagation on the tree-like computation graph, i.e., query computation tree. In particular, QTO utilizes the independence encoded in the query computation tree to reduce the search space, where only local computations are involved during the optimization procedure. Experiments on 3 datasets show that QTO obtains state-of-the-art performance on complex query answering, outperforming previous best results by an average of 22%. Moreover, QTO can interpret the intermediate solutions for each of the one-hop atoms in the query with over 90% accuracy.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Transformer-based pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it remains unclear how the skills required to handle these tasks distribute among model parameters. In this paper, we find that after prompt tuning for specific tasks, the activations of some neurons within pre-trained Transformers are highly predictive of the task labels. We dub these neurons skill neurons and confirm they encode task-specific skills by finding that: (1) Skill neurons are crucial for handling tasks. Performances of pre-trained Transformers on a task significantly drop when corresponding skill neurons are perturbed. (2) Skill neurons are task-specific. Similar tasks tend to have similar distributions of skill neurons. Furthermore, we demonstrate the skill neurons are most likely generated in pre-training rather than fine-tuning by showing that the skill neurons found with prompt tuning are also crucial for other fine-tuning methods freezing neuron weights, such as the adapter-based tuning and BitFit. We also explore the applications of skill neurons, including accelerating Transformers with network pruning and building better transferability indicators. These findings may promote further research on understanding Transformers. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/Skill-Neuron.
The diverse relationships among real-world events, including coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are fundamental to understanding natural languages. However, two drawbacks of existing datasets limit event relation extraction (ERE) tasks: (1) Small scale. Due to the annotation complexity, the data scale of existing datasets is limited, which cannot well train and evaluate data-hungry models. (2) Absence of unified annotation. Different types of event relations naturally interact with each other, but existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. To address these issues, we construct a unified large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset MAVEN-ERE with improved annotation schemes. It contains 103,193 event coreference chains, 1,216,217 temporal relations, 57,992 causal relations, and 15,841 subevent relations, which is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. Experiments show that ERE on MAVEN-ERE is quite challenging, and considering relation interactions with joint learning can improve performances. The dataset and source codes can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/MAVEN-ERE.
Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense behind texts, designing probes for conceptual knowledge is hard. Inspired by knowledge representation schemata, we comprehensively evaluate conceptual knowledge of PLMs by designing three tasks to probe whether PLMs organize entities by conceptual similarities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts, respectively. For the tasks, we collect and annotate 24k data instances covering 393 concepts, which is COPEN, a COnceptual knowledge Probing bENchmark. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of PLMs show that existing PLMs systematically lack conceptual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing human-like cognition in PLMs. COPEN and our codes are publicly released at https://github.com/THU-KEG/COPEN.
Knowledge graphs, as the cornerstone of many AI applications, usually face serious incompleteness problems. In recent years, there have been many efforts to study automatic knowledge graph completion (KGC), most of which use existing knowledge to infer new knowledge. However, in our experiments, we find that not all relations can be obtained by inference, which constrains the performance of existing models. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new model based on information retrieval and reading comprehension, namely IR4KGC. Specifically, we pre-train a knowledge-based information retrieval module that can retrieve documents related to the triples to be completed. Then, the retrieved documents are handed over to the reading comprehension module to generate the predicted answers. In experiments, we find that our model can well solve relations that cannot be inferred from existing knowledge, and achieve good results on KGC datasets.
Document-level relation extraction with graph neural networks faces a fundamental graph construction gap between training and inference - the golden graph structure only available during training, which causes that most methods adopt heuristic or syntactic rules to construct a prior graph as a pseudo proxy. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{ConstGCN}$, a novel graph convolutional network which performs knowledge-based information propagation between entities along with all specific relation spaces without any prior graph construction. Specifically, it updates the entity representation by aggregating information from all other entities along with each relation space, thus modeling the relation-aware spatial information. To control the information flow passing through the indeterminate relation spaces, we propose to constrain the propagation using transmitting scores learned from the Noise Contrastive Estimation between fact triples. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on the DocRE dataset.
The recent prevalence of pretrained language models (PLMs) has dramatically shifted the paradigm of semantic parsing, where the mapping from natural language utterances to structured logical forms is now formulated as a Seq2Seq task. Despite the promising performance, previous PLM-based approaches often suffer from hallucination problems due to their negligence of the structural information contained in the sentence, which essentially constitutes the key semantics of the logical forms. Furthermore, most works treat PLM as a black box in which the generation process of the target logical form is hidden beneath the decoder modules, which greatly hinders the model's intrinsic interpretability. To address these two issues, we propose to incorporate the current PLMs with a hierarchical decoder network. By taking the first-principle structures as the semantic anchors, we propose two novel intermediate supervision tasks, namely Semantic Anchor Extraction and Semantic Anchor Alignment, for training the hierarchical decoders and probing the model intermediate representations in a self-adaptive manner alongside the fine-tuning process. We conduct intensive experiments on several semantic parsing benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach can consistently outperform the baselines. More importantly, by analyzing the intermediate representations of the hierarchical decoders, our approach also makes a huge step toward the intrinsic interpretability of PLMs in the domain of semantic parsing.
Recently, there have merged a class of task-oriented dialogue (TOD) datasets collected through Wizard-of-Oz simulated games. However, the Wizard-of-Oz data are in fact simulated data and thus are fundamentally different from real-life conversations, which are more noisy and casual. Recently, the SereTOD challenge is organized and releases the MobileCS dataset, which consists of real-world dialog transcripts between real users and customer-service staffs from China Mobile. Based on the MobileCS dataset, the SereTOD challenge has two tasks, not only evaluating the construction of the dialogue system itself, but also examining information extraction from dialog transcripts, which is crucial for building the knowledge base for TOD. This paper mainly presents a baseline study of the two tasks with the MobileCS dataset. We introduce how the two baselines are constructed, the problems encountered, and the results. We anticipate that the baselines can facilitate exciting future research to build human-robot dialogue systems for real-life tasks.