Korea, Republic of

Named Entity Recognition is the task to locate and classify the entities in the text. However, Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER datasets seriously hinders the improvement of NER performance. This paper proposes SCL-RAI to cope with this problem. Firstly, we decrease the distance of span representations with the same label while increasing it for different ones via span-based contrastive learning, which relieves the ambiguity among entities and improves the robustness of the model over unlabeled entities. Then we propose retrieval augmented inference to mitigate the decision boundary shifting problem. Our method significantly outperforms the previous SOTA method by 4.21% and 8.64% F1-score on two real-world datasets.

COLING 2022

SCL-RAI: Span-based Contrastive Learning with Retrieval Augmented Inference for Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER

retrieval augmented inference

unlabeled entity problem

contrastive learning

named entity recognition

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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Multi-hop question generation (QG) is the process of generating answer related questions, which requires aggregating multiple pieces of information and reasoning from different parts of the texts.
This is opposed to single-hop QG which generates questions from sentences containing an answer in a given paragraph. Single-hop QG requires no reasoning or complexity, while multi-hop QG often requires logical reasoning to derive an answer related question, making it a dual task.
Not enough research has been made on the multi-hop QG due to its complexity. 
Also, a question should be created using the question type and words related to the correct answer as a prompt so that multi-hop questions can get more information. In this view, we propose a new type-dependent prompt cycleQAG (cyclic question-answer-generation), with a cycle consistency loss in which QG and Question Answering (QA) are learnt in a cyclic manner. The novelty is that the cycle consistency loss uses the negative cross entropy to generate syntactically diverse questions that enable selecting different word representations. Empirical evaluation on the multi-hop dataset with automatic and human evaluation metrics outperforms the baseline model by about 10.38% based on ROUGE score.

Type-dependent prompt CycleQAG : Cycle consistency for Multi-hop Question Generation

Emotion cause pair extraction (ECPE), as one of the derived subtasks of emotion cause analysis (ECA), shares rich inter-related features with emotion extraction (EE) and cause extraction (CE).Therefore EE and CE are frequently utilized as auxiliary tasks for better feature learning, modeled via multi-task learning (MTL) framework by prior works to achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) ECPE results. However, existing MTL-based methods either fail to simultaneously model the specific features and the interactive feature in between,or suffer from the inconsistency of label prediction.In this work, we consider addressing the above challenges for improving ECPE by performing two alignment mechanisms with a novel A^2 Net model.We first propose a feature-task alignment to explicitly model the specific emotion-&cause-specific features and the shared interactive feature.Besides, an inter-task alignment is implemented, in which the label distance between the ECPE and the combinations of EE&CE are learned to be narrowed for better label consistency.Evaluations of benchmarks show that our methods outperform current best-performing systems on all ECA subtasks.Further analysis proves the importance of our proposed alignment mechanisms for the task.

Joint Alignment of Multi-Task Feature and Label Spaces for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

Despite having achieved great success for sentiment analysis, existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis. This may be due to the fact that they may latch onto spurious correlations (“shortcuts”, e.g., focusing only on explicit sentiment words), resulting in undermining the effectiveness and robustness of the learned model. In this work, we propose a CausaL intervention model for implicit sEntiment ANalysis using instrumental variable (CLEAN). We first review sentiment analysis from a causal perspective and analyze the confounders existing in this task. Then, we
introduce an instrumental variable to eliminate the confounding causal effects, thus extracting the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment. We compare the proposed CLEAN model with several strong baselines on both the general implicit sentiment analysis and aspect-based implicit sentiment analysis tasks. The results
indicate the great advantages of our model and the efficacy of implicit sentiment reasoning.

Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysis

Multi-hop reasoning requires aggregating mul- tiple documents to answer a complex question. Existing methods usually decompose the multi- hop question into simpler single-hop questions to solve the problem for illustrating the explain- able reasoning process. However, they ignore grounding on the supporting facts of each rea- soning step, which tends to generate inaccu- rate decompositions. In this paper, we pro- pose an interpretable stepwise reasoning frame- work to incorporate both single-hop supporting sentence identification and single-hop question generation at each intermediate step, and uti- lize the inference of the current hop for the next until reasoning out the final result. We em- ploy a unified reader model for both intermedi- ate hop reasoning and final hop inference and adopt joint optimization for more accurate and robust multi-hop reasoning. We conduct exper- iments on two benchmark datasets HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The results show that our method can effectively boost performance and also yields a better interpretable reasoning process without decomposition supervision.

Locate Then Ask: Interpretable Stepwise Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering

We present a subword regularization method for WordPiece, which uses a maximum matching algorithm for tokenization. The proposed method, MaxMatch-Dropout, randomly drops words in a search using the maximum matching algorithm. It realizes finetuning with subword regularization for popular pretrained language models such as BERT-base. The experimental results demonstrate that MaxMatch-Dropout improves the performance of text classification and machine translation tasks as well as other subword regularization methods. Moreover, we provide a comparative analysis of subword regularization methods: subword regularization with SentencePiece (Unigram), BPE-Dropout, and MaxMatch-Dropout.


MaxMatch-Dropout: Subword Regularization for WordPiece

Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) is the task of using the computer to evaluate the quality of essays automatically. Current research on AES focuses on scoring the overall quality or single trait of prompt-specific essays. However, users expect to obtain not only the overall score but also the instant feedback from different traits to help improve their writing. Therefore, we first annotate a multi-trait dataset ACEA including 1220 argumentative essays from four traits, i.e., the essay organization, topic, logic, and language. And then we design a Hierarchical Multi-task Trait Scorer (HMTS) to evaluate the quality of writing by modeling these four traits. Moreover, we propose an inter-sequence attention mechanism to enhance information interaction between different tasks and design the trait-specific features for various tasks in AES. The experimental results on ACEA show that our HMTS can effectively score essays from multiple traits, outperforming several strong baselines.

Automated Chinese Essay Scoring from Multiple Traits

Rule mining is an effective approach for reasoning over knowledge graph (KG). Existing works mainly concentrate on mining rules. However, there might be several rules that could be applied for reasoning for one relation, and how to select appropriate rules for completion of different triples has not been discussed. In this paper, we propose to take the context information into consideration, which helps select suitable rules for the inference tasks. Based on this idea, we propose a transformer-based rule mining approach, Ruleformer. It consists of two blocks: 1) an encoder extracting the context information from subgraph of head entities with modified attention mechanism, and 2) a decoder which aggregates the subgraph information from the encoder output and generates the probability of relations for each step of reasoning. The basic idea behind Ruleformer is regarding rule mining process as a sequence to sequence task. To make the subgraph a sequence input to the encoder and retain the graph structure, we devise a relational attention mechanism in Transformer. The experiment results show the necessity of considering these information in rule mining task and the effectiveness of our model.

Ruleformer: Context-aware Rule Mining over Knowledge Graph

The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This study frames this task by asking multiple questions with the same set of possible endings as candidate answers, given a short story text. Our resulting dataset, Possible Stories, consists of more than 4.5K questions over 1.3K story texts in English. We discover that even current strong pretrained language models struggle to answer the questions consistently, highlighting that the highest accuracy in an unsupervised setting (60.2\%) is far behind human accuracy (92.5\%). Through a comparison with existing datasets, we observe that the questions in our dataset contain minimal annotation artifacts in the answer options. In addition, our dataset includes examples that require counterfactual reasoning, as well as those requiring readers' reactions and fictional information, suggesting that our dataset can serve as a challenging testbed for future studies on situated commonsense reasoning.

Possible Stories: Evaluating Situated Commonsense Reasoning under Multiple Possible Scenarios

Automatic evaluation of grammatical error correction (GEC) is essential in developing useful GEC systems. Existing methods for automatic evaluation require multiple reference sentences or manual scores. However, such resources are expensive, thereby hindering automatic evaluation for various domains and correction styles. This paper proposes an Impact-based Metric for GEC using PARAllel data, IMPARA, which utilizes correction impacts computed by parallel data comprising pairs of grammatical/ungrammatical sentences. As parallel data is cheaper than manually assessing evaluation scores, IMPARA can reduce the cost of data creation for automatic evaluation. Correlations between IMPARA and human scores indicate that IMPARA is comparable or better than existing evaluation methods. Furthermore, we find that IMPARA can perform evaluations that fit different domains and correction styles trained on various parallel data.

IMPARA: Impact-Based Metric for GEC Using Parallel Data

Answering natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) remains a great challenge in terms of understanding complex questions via multi-hop reasoning.
Previous efforts usually exploit large-scale entity-related text corpus or knowledge graph (KG) embeddings as auxiliary information to facilitate answer selection. However, the rich semantics implied in off-the-shelf relation paths between entities is far from well explored. This paper proposes improving multi-hop KGQA by exploiting relation paths' hybrid semantics. Specifically, we integrate explicit textual information and implicit KG structural features of relation paths based on a novel rotate-and-scale entity link prediction framework. Extensive experiments on three existing KGQA datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, especially in multi-hop scenarios. Further investigation confirms our method's systematical coordination between questions and relation paths to identify answer entities.

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SCL-RAI: Span-based Contrastive Learning with Retrieval Augmented Inference for Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER

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