United States

Zero-shot relation extraction aims to identify novel relations which cannot be observed at the training stage. However, it still faces some challenges since the unseen relations of instances are similar or the input sentences have similar entities, the unseen relation representations from different categories tend to overlap and lead to errors. In this paper, we propose a novel Relation Contrastive Learning framework (RCL) to mitigate above two types of similar problems: Similar Relations and Similar Entities. By jointly optimizing a contrastive instance loss with a relation classification loss on seen relations, RCL can learn subtle difference between instances and achieve better separation between different relation categories in the representation space simultaneously. Especially in contrastive instance learning, the dropout noise as data augmentation is adopted to amplify the semantic difference between similar instances without breaking relation representation, so as to promote model to learn more effective representations. Experiments conducted on two well-known datasets show that RCL can signiﬁcantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, if the seen relations are insufficient, RCL can also obtain comparable results with the model trained on the full training set, showing the robustness of our approach.

NAACL 2022

RCL: Relation Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

relation extraction

contrastive learning

zero-shot learning

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

poster

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Open relation extraction is the task to extract relational facts without pre-defined relation types from open-domain corpora. However, since there are some hard or semi-hard instances sharing similar context and entity information but belonging to different underlying relation, current OpenRE methods always cluster them into the same relation type. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Instance Ranking and Label Calibration strategies (IRLC) to learn discriminative representations for open relation extraction. Due to lacking the original instance label, we provide three surrogate strategies to generate the positive, hard negative, and semi-hard negative instances for the original instance. Instance ranking aims to refine the relational feature space by pushing the hard and semi-hard negative instances apart from the original instance with different margins and pulling the original instance and its positive instance together. To refine the cluster probability distributions of these instances, we introduce a label calibration strategy to model the constraint relationship between instances. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can signiﬁcantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Discriminative Representations for Open Relation Extraction with Instance Ranking and Label Calibration

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) aims to borrow the entity information from the source domain to help the entity recognition in the target domain with limited labeled data. Despite the promising performance of existing approaches, most of them focus on reducing the discrepancy of token representation between source and target domains, while the transfer of the valuable label information is often not explicitly considered or even ignored. Therefore, we propose a novel autoregressive framework to advance cross-domain NER by first enhancing the relationship between labels and tokens and then further improving the transferability of label information. Specifically, we associate each label with an embedding vector, and for each token, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) to encode the labels of its previous tokens for modeling internal context information and label dependence. Afterward, we propose a Bi-Attention module that merges the token representation from a pre-trained model and the label features from the Bi-LSTM as the label-aware information, which is concatenated to the token representation to facilitate cross-domain NER. In doing so, label information contained in the embedding vectors can be effectively transferred to the target domain, and Bi-LSTM can further model the label relationship among different domains by pre-train and then fine-tune setting. Experimental results on several datasets confirm the effectiveness of our model, where our model achieves significant improvements over the state of the arts.

A Label-Aware Autoregressive Framework for Cross-Domain NER

Temporal Expression Extraction (TEE) is essential for understanding time in natural language. It has applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering, information retrieval, and causal inference. To date, work in this area has mostly focused on English as there is a scarcity of labeled data for other languages. We propose XLTime, a novel framework for multilingual TEE. XLTime works on top of pre-trained language models and leverages multi-task learning to prompt cross-language knowledge transfer both from English and within the non-English languages. XLTime alleviates problems caused by a shortage of data in the target language. We apply XLTime with different language models and show that it outperforms the previous automatic SOTA methods on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque, by large margins. XLTime also closes the gap considerably on the handcrafted HeidelTime method.

XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction

Recent years have witnessed the improving performance of Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) from proposing new frameworks or incorporating word lexicons.  However, the inner composition of entity mentions in character-level Chinese NER has been rarely studied. Actually, most mentions of regular types have strong name regularity. For example, entities end with indicator words such as "公司 (company) ” or “银行 (bank)” usually belong to organization. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method for investigating the regularity of entity spans in Chinese NER, dubbed as Regularity-Inspired reCOgnition Network (RICON). Specifically, the proposed model consists of two branches: a regularity-aware module and a regularity-agnostic module. The regularity-aware module captures the internal regularity of each span for better entity type prediction, while the regularity-agnostic module is employed to locate the boundary of entities and relieve the excessive attention to span regularity. An orthogonality space is further constructed to encourage two modules to extract different aspects of regularity features. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and a practical medical dataset. The experimental results show that our RICON significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, including various lexicon-based methods.

Delving Deep into Regularity: A Simple but Effective Method for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Leveraging the dependency tree of the input sentence is able to improve the model performance for relation extraction. A challenging issue is how to remove confusions from the tree. Efforts have been made to utilize the dependency connections between words to selectively emphasize target-relevant information. However, these approaches are limited in focusing on exploiting dependency types. In this paper, we propose dependency position encoding (DPE), an efficient way of incorporating both dependency connections and dependency types into the self-attention mechanism to distinguish the importance of different word dependencies for the task. In contrast to previous studies that process input sentence and dependency information in separate streams, DPE can be seamlessly incorporated into the Transformer and makes it possible to use an one-stream scheme to extract relations between entity pairs. Extensive experiments show that models with our DPE significantly outperform the previous methods on SemEval 2010 Task 8, KBP37, and TACRED.

Dependency Position Encoding for Relation Extraction

Few-shot relation classiﬁcation is difﬁcult because the few instances available may not represent well the relation patterns. Some existing approaches explored extra information such as relation deﬁnition, in addition to the instances, to learn a better relation representation. However, the encoding of the extra information has been performed independently from the labeled instances. In this paper, we propose to learn a prototype encoder from relation deﬁnition in a way that is useful for relation instance classiﬁcation. To this end, we use a joint training approach to train both a prototype encoder from deﬁnition and an instance encoder. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our prototype encoder from deﬁnition text, enabling us to outperform state-of-the-art approaches.

Improving Few-Shot Relation Classiﬁcation by Prototypical Representation Learning with Deﬁnition Text

Solving text classification in a weakly supervised manner is important for real-world applications where human annotations are scarce. 
In this paper, we propose to query a masked language model with cloze style prompts to obtain supervision signals. 
We design a prompt which combines the document itself and ``this article is talking about \tt[MASK].'' 
A masked language model can generate words for the \tt[MASK] token. 
The generated words which summarize the content of a document can be utilized as supervision signals. 
We propose a latent variable model to learn a word distribution learner which associates generated words to pre-defined categories and a document classifier simultaneously without using any annotated data. 
Evaluation on three datasets, AGNews, 20Newsgroups, and UCINews, shows that our method can outperform baselines by 2\%, 4\%, and 3\%. 

Weakly Supervised Text Classification using Supervision Signals  from a Language Model

Cross-Lingual Retrieval Question Answering (CL-ReQA) is concerned with retrieving answer documents or passages to a question written in a different language. A common approach to CL-ReQA is to create a multilingual sentence embedding space such that question-answer pairs across different languages are close to each other.  In this paper, we propose a novel CL-ReQA method utilizing the concept of language knowledge transfer and a new cross-lingual consistency training technique to create a multilingual embedding space for ReQA. To assess the effectiveness of our work, we conducted comprehensive experiments on CL-ReQA and a downstream task, machine reading QA. We compared our proposed method with the current state-of-the-art solutions across three public CL-ReQA corpora. Our method outperforms competitors in 19 out of 21 settings of CL-ReQA. When used with a downstream machine reading QA task, our method outperforms the best existing language-model-based method by 10% in F1 while being 10 times faster in sentence embedding computation. The code and models are available at https://github.com/mrpeerat/CL-ReLKT.

CL-ReLKT: Cross-lingual Language Knowledge Transfer for Multilingual Retrieval Question Answering

Pre-training on larger datasets with ever increasing model size is
now a proven recipe for increased performance across almost all NLP tasks.
A notable exception is information retrieval, where additional pre-training
has so far failed to produce convincing results.  We show that, with the
right pre-training setup, this barrier can be overcome.  We demonstrate this
by pre-training large bi-encoder models on 1) a recently released set of 65 million
synthetically generated questions, and 2) 200 million post-comment pairs from a preexisting dataset of Reddit conversations made available by pushshift.io.
We evaluate on a set of information retrieval and dialogue retrieval benchmarks, 
showing substantial improvements over supervised baselines.

Domain-matched Pre-training Tasks for Dense Retrieval

Generating high-quality textual adversarial examples is critical for investigating the pitfalls of natural language processing (NLP) models and further promoting their robustness. Existing attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality, both affecting the attack effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Phrase-Level Textual Adversarial ATtack (PLAT) that generates adversarial samples through phrase-level perturbations. PLAT first extracts the vulnerable phrases as attack targets by a syntactic parser, and then perturbs them by a pre-trained blank-infilling model. Such flexible perturbation design substantially expands the search space for more effective attacks without introducing too many modifications, and meanwhile maintaining the textual fluency and grammaticality via contextualized generation using surrounding texts. Moreover, we develop a label preservation filter leveraging the likelihoods of language models fine-tuned on each class, rather than textual similarity, to rule out those perturbations that potentially alter the original class label for humans. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that PLAT has a superior attack effectiveness as well as a better label consistency than strong baselines.

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Learning Discriminative Representations for Open Relation Extraction with Instance Ranking and Label Calibration

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