Hierarchical Losses and New Resources for Fine-grained Entity Typing and Linking

Extraction from raw text to a knowledge base of entities and fine-grained types is often cast as prediction into a flat set of entity and type labels, neglecting the rich hierarchies over types and entities contained in curated ontologies. Previous attempts to incorporate hierarchical structure have yielded little benefit and are restricted to shallow ontologies. This paper presents new methods using real and complex bilinear mappings for integrating hierarchical information, yielding substantial improvement over flat predictions in entity linking and fine-grained entity typing, and achieving new state-of-the-art results for end-to-end models on the benchmark FIGER dataset. We also present two new human-annotated datasets containing wide and deep hierarchies which we will release to the community to encourage further research in this direction: MedMentions, a collection of PubMed abstracts in which 246k mentions have been mapped to the massive UMLS ontology; and TypeNet, which aligns Freebase types with the WordNet hierarchy to obtain nearly 2k entity types. In experiments on all three datasets we show substantial gains from hierarchy-aware training.Comment: ACL 201

Improved Neural Relation Detection for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Relation detection is a core component for many NLP applications including Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). In this paper, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network enhanced by residual learning that detects KB relations given an input question. Our method uses deep residual bidirectional LSTMs to compare questions and relation names via different hierarchies of abstraction. Additionally, we propose a simple KBQA system that integrates entity linking and our proposed relation detector to enable one enhance another. Experimental results evidence that our approach achieves not only outstanding relation detection performance, but more importantly, it helps our KBQA system to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy for both single-relation (SimpleQuestions) and multi-relation (WebQSP) QA benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017 (updated for camera-ready

Entity Type Prediction Leveraging Graph Walks and Entity Descriptions

The entity type information in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) such as DBpedia, Freebase, etc. is often incomplete due to automated generation or human curation. Entity typing is the task of assigning or inferring the semantic type of an entity in a KG. This paper presents \textit{GRAND}, a novel approach for entity typing leveraging different graph walk strategies in RDF2vec together with textual entity descriptions. RDF2vec first generates graph walks and then uses a language model to obtain embeddings for each node in the graph. This study shows that the walk generation strategy and the embedding model have a significant effect on the performance of the entity typing task. The proposed approach outperforms the baseline approaches on the benchmark datasets DBpedia and FIGER for entity typing in KGs for both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes. The results show that the combination of order-aware RDF2vec variants together with the contextual embeddings of the textual entity descriptions achieve the best results

Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs

Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines

Automatic Synonym Discovery with Knowledge Bases

Recognizing entity synonyms from text has become a crucial task in many entity-leveraging applications. However, discovering entity synonyms from domain-specific text corpora (e.g., news articles, scientific papers) is rather challenging. Current systems take an entity name string as input to find out other names that are synonymous, ignoring the fact that often times a name string can refer to multiple entities (e.g., "apple" could refer to both Apple Inc and the fruit apple). Moreover, most existing methods require training data manually created by domain experts to construct supervised-learning systems. In this paper, we study the problem of automatic synonym discovery with knowledge bases, that is, identifying synonyms for knowledge base entities in a given domain-specific corpus. The manually-curated synonyms for each entity stored in a knowledge base not only form a set of name strings to disambiguate the meaning for each other, but also can serve as "distant" supervision to help determine important features for the task. We propose a novel framework, called DPE, to integrate two kinds of mutually-complementing signals for synonym discovery, i.e., distributional features based on corpus-level statistics and textual patterns based on local contexts. In particular, DPE jointly optimizes the two kinds of signals in conjunction with distant supervision, so that they can mutually enhance each other in the training stage. At the inference stage, both signals will be utilized to discover synonyms for the given entities. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework

Embedding Based Link Prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are the most widely used representation of structured information about a particular domain consisting of billions of facts in the form of entities (nodes) and relations (edges) between them. Besides, the KGs also encapsulate the semantic type information of the entities. The last two decades have witnessed a constant growth of KGs in various domains such as government, scholarly data, biomedical domains, etc. KGs have been used in Machine Learning based applications such as entity linking, question answering, recommender systems, etc. Open KGs are mostly heuristically created, automatically generated from heterogeneous resources such as text, images, etc., or are human-curated. However, these KGs are often incomplete, i.e., there are missing links between the entities and missing links between the entities and their corresponding entity types. This thesis focuses on addressing these two challenges of link prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC): \textbf{(i)} General Link Prediction in KGs that include head and tail prediction, triple classification, and \textbf{(ii)} Entity Type Prediction. Most of the graph mining algorithms are proven to be of high complexity, deterring their usage in KG-based applications. In recent years, KG embeddings have been trained to represent the entities and relations in the KG in a low-dimensional vector space preserving the graph structure. In most published works such as the translational models, convolutional models, semantic matching, etc., the triple information is used to generate the latent representation of the entities and relations. In this dissertation, it is argued that contextual information about the entities obtained from the random walks, and textual entity descriptions, are the keys to improving the latent representation of the entities for KGC. The experimental results show that the knowledge obtained from the context of the entities supports the hypothesis. Several methods have been proposed for KGC and their effectiveness is shown empirically in this thesis. Firstly, a novel multi-hop attentive KG embedding model MADLINK is proposed for Link Prediction. It considers the contextual information of the entities by using random walks as well as textual entity descriptions of the entities. Secondly, a novel architecture exploiting the information contained in a pre-trained contextual Neural Language Model (NLM) is proposed for Triple Classification. Thirdly, the limitations of the current state-of-the-art (SoTA) entity type prediction models have been analysed and a novel entity typing model CAT2Type is proposed that exploits the Wikipedia Categories which is one of the most under-treated features of the KGs. This model can also be used to predict missing types of unseen entities i.e., the newly added entities in the KG. Finally, another novel architecture GRAND is proposed to predict the missing entity types in KGs using multi-label, multi-class, and hierarchical classification by leveraging different strategic graph walks in the KGs. The extensive experiments and ablation studies show that all the proposed models outperform the current SoTA models and set new baselines for KGC. The proposed models establish that the NLMs and the contextual information of the entities in the KGs together with the different neural network architectures benefit KGC. The promising results and observations open up interesting scopes for future research involving exploiting the proposed models in domain-specific KGs such as scholarly data, biomedical data, etc. Furthermore, the link prediction model can be exploited as a base model for the entity alignment task as it considers the neighbourhood information of the entities