University of Pittsburgh




Abstract:Knowledge graph question answering (i.e., KGQA) based on information retrieval aims to answer a question by retrieving answer from a large-scale knowledge graph. Most existing methods first roughly retrieve the knowledge subgraphs (KSG) that may contain candidate answer, and then search for the exact answer in the subgraph. However, the coarsely retrieved KSG may contain thousands of candidate nodes since the knowledge graph involved in querying is often of large scale. To tackle this problem, we first propose to partition the retrieved KSG to several smaller sub-KSGs via a new subgraph partition algorithm and then present a graph-augmented learning to rank model to select the top-ranked sub-KSGs from them. Our proposed model combines a novel subgraph matching networks to capture global interactions in both question and subgraphs and an Enhanced Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching model to capture local interactions. Finally, we apply an answer selection model on the full KSG and the top-ranked sub-KSGs respectively to validate the effectiveness of our proposed graph-augmented learning to rank method. The experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.




Abstract:Predicting the next interaction of a short-term sequence is a challenging task in session-based recommendation (SBR).Multi-behavior session recommendation considers session sequence with multiple interaction types, such as click and purchase, to capture more effective user intention representation sufficiently.Despite the superior performance of existing multi-behavior based methods for SBR, there are still several severe limitations:(i) Almost all existing works concentrate on single target type of next behavior and fail to model multiplex behavior sessions uniformly.(ii) Previous methods also ignore the semantic relations between various next behavior and historical behavior sequence, which are significant signals to obtain current latent intention for SBR.(iii) The global cross-session item-item graph established by some existing models may incorporate semantics and context level noise for multi-behavior session-based recommendation. To overcome the limitations (i) and (ii), we propose two novel tasks for SBR, which require the incorporation of both historical behaviors and next behaviors into unified multi-behavior recommendation modeling. To this end, we design a Multi-behavior Graph Contextual Aware Network (MGCNet) for multi-behavior session-based recommendation for the two proposed tasks. Specifically, we build a multi-behavior global item transition graph based on all sessions involving all interaction types. Based on the global graph, MGCNet attaches the global interest representation to final item representation based on local contextual intention to address the limitation (iii). In the end, we utilize the next behavior information explicitly to guide the learning of general interest and current intention for SBR. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets show that MGCNet can outperform state-of-the-art models for multi-behavior session-based recommendation.




Abstract:Social recommendation based on social network has achieved great success in improving the performance of recommendation system. Since social network (user-user relations) and user-item interactions are both naturally represented as graph-structured data, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have thus been widely applied for social recommendation. In this work, we propose an end-to-end heterogeneous global graph learning framework, namely Graph Learning Augmented Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (GL-HGNN) for social recommendation. GL-HGNN aims to learn a heterogeneous global graph that makes full use of user-user relations, user-item interactions and item-item similarities in a unified perspective. To this end, we design a Graph Learner (GL) method to learn and optimize user-user and item-item connections separately. Moreover, we employ a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HGNN) to capture the high-order complex semantic relations from our learned heterogeneous global graph. To scale up the computation of graph learning, we further present the Anchor-based Graph Learner (AGL) to reduce computational complexity. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.




Abstract:Deep learning's performance has been extensively recognized recently. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to deal with graph-structural data that classical deep learning does not easily manage. Since most GNNs were created using distinct theories, direct comparisons are impossible. Prior research has primarily concentrated on categorizing existing models, with little attention paid to their intrinsic connections. The purpose of this study is to establish a unified framework that integrates GNNs based on spectral graph and approximation theory. The framework incorporates a strong integration between spatial- and spectral-based GNNs while tightly associating approaches that exist within each respective domain.




Abstract:Predicting the next interaction of a short-term interaction session is a challenging task in session-based recommendation. Almost all existing works rely on item transition patterns, and neglect the impact of user historical sessions while modeling user preference, which often leads to non-personalized recommendation. Additionally, existing personalized session-based recommenders capture user preference only based on the sessions of the current user, but ignore the useful item-transition patterns from other user's historical sessions. To address these issues, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Global Graph Neural Networks (HG-GNN) to exploit the item transitions over all sessions in a subtle manner for better inferring user preference from the current and historical sessions. To effectively exploit the item transitions over all sessions from users, we propose a novel heterogeneous global graph that contains item transitions of sessions, user-item interactions and global co-occurrence items. Moreover, to capture user preference from sessions comprehensively, we propose to learn two levels of user representations from the global graph via two graph augmented preference encoders. Specifically, we design a novel heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) on the heterogeneous global graph to learn the long-term user preference and item representations with rich semantics. Based on the HGNN, we propose the Current Preference Encoder and the Historical Preference Encoder to capture the different levels of user preference from the current and historical sessions, respectively. To achieve personalized recommendation, we integrate the representations of the user current preference and historical interests to generate the final user preference representation. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.




Abstract:Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for Natural Language Processing.




Abstract:Contrastive Learning has emerged as a powerful representation learning method and facilitates various downstream tasks especially when supervised data is limited. How to construct efficient contrastive samples through data augmentation is key to its success. Unlike vision tasks, the data augmentation method for contrastive learning has not been investigated sufficiently in language tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to constructing contrastive samples for language tasks using text summarization. We use these samples for supervised contrastive learning to gain better text representations which greatly benefit text classification tasks with limited annotations. To further improve the method, we mix up samples from different classes and add an extra regularization, named mix-sum regularization, in addition to the cross-entropy-loss. Experiments on real-world text classification datasets (Amazon-5, Yelp-5, AG News) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive learning framework with summarization-based data augmentation and mix-sum regularization.




Abstract:Many data scientists use Jupyter notebook to experiment code, visualize results, and document rationales or interpretations. The code documentation generation CDG task in notebooks is related but different from the code summarization task in software engineering, as one documentation (markdown cell) may consist of a text (informative summary or indicative rationale) for multiple code cells. Our work aims to solve the CDG task by encoding the multiple code cells as separated AST graph structures, for which we propose a hierarchical attention-based ConvGNN component to augment the Seq2Seq network. We build a dataset with publicly available Kaggle notebooks and evaluate our model (HAConvGNN) against baseline models (e.g., Code2Seq or Graph2Seq).




Abstract:This paper describes an end-to-end solution for the relationship prediction task in heterogeneous, multi-relational graphs. We particularly address two building blocks in the pipeline, namely heterogeneous graph representation learning and negative sampling. Existing message passing-based graph neural networks use edges either for graph traversal and/or selection of message encoding functions. Ignoring the edge semantics could have severe repercussions on the quality of embeddings, especially when dealing with two nodes having multiple relations. Furthermore, the expressivity of the learned representation depends on the quality of negative samples used during training. Although existing hard negative sampling techniques can identify challenging negative relationships for optimization, new techniques are required to control false negatives during training as false negatives could corrupt the learning process. To address these issues, first, we propose RelGNN -- a message passing-based heterogeneous graph attention model. In particular, RelGNN generates the states of different relations and leverages them along with the node states to weigh the messages. RelGNN also adopts a self-attention mechanism to balance the importance of attribute features and topological features for generating the final entity embeddings. Second, we introduce a parameter-free negative sampling technique -- adaptive self-adversarial (ASA) negative sampling. ASA reduces the false-negative rate by leveraging positive relationships to effectively guide the identification of true negative samples. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that RelGNN optimized by ASA for relationship prediction improves state-of-the-art performance across established benchmarks as well as on a real industrial dataset.




Abstract:While substantial scholarship has focused on estimating the susceptibility of jobs to automation, little has examined how job contents evolve in the information age despite the fact that new technologies typically substitute for specific job tasks, shifting job skills rather than eliminating whole jobs. Here we explore the process and consequences of changes in occupational skill contents and characterize occupations subject to the most re-skilling pressure. Recent research suggests that high-skilled STEM and technology-intensive business occupations have experienced the highest rates of skill content change. Using a dataset covering the near universe of U.S. online job postings between 2010 and 2018, we find that when the number and similarity of skills within a job are taken into account, the re-skilling pressure is much higher for workers in low complexity, low education and low compensation occupations. We use high-dimensional embeddings of skills estimated across all jobs to precisely assess skill similarity, and characterize occupational skill transformations, demonstrating that skills requiring machine-operation and interface rise sharply in importance in the past decade, much more than human interface skills in low and mid-education occupations. We establish that large organizations buffer jobs from skill instability and obsolescence, especially low-skilled jobs with unstable skill requirements. Finally, the gap in re-skilling pressure between low/mid-education and high-education occupations is smaller in large organizations, suggesting that by controlling the surrounding skill environment, such organizations reduce the rate of required re-skilling and sustain short-term productivity for those occupations.