Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension

We show that relation extraction can be reduced to answering simple reading comprehension questions, by associating one or more natural-language questions with each relation slot. This reduction has several advantages: we can (1) learn relation-extraction models by extending recent neural reading-comprehension techniques, (2) build very large training sets for those models by combining relation-specific crowd-sourced questions with distant supervision, and even (3) do zero-shot learning by extracting new relation types that are only specified at test-time, for which we have no labeled training examples. Experiments on a Wikipedia slot-filling task demonstrate that the approach can generalize to new questions for known relation types with high accuracy, and that zero-shot generalization to unseen relation types is possible, at lower accuracy levels, setting the bar for future work on this task.Comment: CoNLL 201

Revisiting Unsupervised Relation Extraction

Unsupervised relation extraction (URE) extracts relations between named entities from raw text without manually-labelled data and existing knowledge bases (KBs). URE methods can be categorised into generative and discriminative approaches, which rely either on hand-crafted features or surface form. However, we demonstrate that by using only named entities to induce relation types, we can outperform existing methods on two popular datasets. We conduct a comparison and evaluation of our findings with other URE techniques, to ascertain the important features in URE. We conclude that entity types provide a strong inductive bias for URE.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables. Accepted in ACL 202

Semi-automatic Data Enhancement for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision from Large Language Models

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE), which aims to extract relations from a long context, is a critical challenge in achieving fine-grained structural comprehension and generating interpretable document representations. Inspired by recent advances in in-context learning capabilities emergent from large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, we aim to design an automated annotation method for DocRE with minimum human effort. Unfortunately, vanilla in-context learning is infeasible for document-level relation extraction due to the plenty of predefined fine-grained relation types and the uncontrolled generations of LLMs. To tackle this issue, we propose a method integrating a large language model (LLM) and a natural language inference (NLI) module to generate relation triples, thereby augmenting document-level relation datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by introducing an enhanced dataset known as DocGNRE, which excels in re-annotating numerous long-tail relation types. We are confident that our method holds the potential for broader applications in domain-specific relation type definitions and offers tangible benefits in advancing generalized language semantic comprehension

Riesgos de interpretación errónea en la evaluación de la Supervisión Distante para la Extracción de Relaciones

Distant Supervision is frequently used for addressing Relation Extraction. The evaluation of Distant Supervision in Relation Extraction has been attempted through Precision-Recall curves and/or calculation of Precision at N elements. However, such evaluation is challenging because the labeling of the instances results from an automatic process that can introduce noise into the labels. Consequently, the labels are not necessarily correct, affecting the learning process and the interpretation of the evaluation results. Therefore, this research aims to show that the performance of the methods measured with the mentioned evaluation strategies varies significantly if the correct labels are used during the evaluation. Besides, based on the preceding, the current interpretation of the results of these measures is questioned. To this end, we manually labeled a subset of a well-known data set and evaluated the performance of 6 traditional Distant Supervision approaches. We demonstrate quantitative differences in the evaluation scores when considering manually versus automatically labeled subsets. Consequently, the ranking of performance among distant supervision methods is different with both labeled.La Supervisión Distante se utiliza con frecuencia para abordar la extracción de relaciones. La evaluación de la Supervisión Distante en la Extracción de Relaciones se ha realizado mediante curvas de Precisión-Cobertura y/o el cálculo de la Precisión en N elementos. Sin embargo, dicha evaluación es un desafío porque el etiquetado de las instancias es el resultado de un proceso automático. En consecuencia, las etiquetas no son necesariamente correctas, afectando no solo el proceso de aprendizaje sino también la interpretación de los resultados de la evaluación. El objetivo de esta investigación es mostrar que el desempeño de los métodos medido con las estrategias de evaluación mencionadas varía de manera significativa si se utilizan las etiquetas correctas durante la evaluación. Además, basado en lo anterior, se cuestiona la interpretación actual de los resultados de estas medidas. Con este fin, etiquetamos manualmente un subconjunto de un conjunto de datos y evaluamos el desempeño de 6 enfoques tradicionales de Supervisión Distante. Demostramos diferencias cuantitativas en los puntajes de evaluación al considerar subconjuntos etiquetados manualmente versus automáticamente. En consecuencia, el orden de desempeño entre los métodos de Supervisión Distante es diferente con ambos etiquetados.The present work was supported by CONACyT/México (scholarship 937210 and grant CB-2015-01-257383). Additionally, the authors thank CONACYT for the computer resources provided through the INAOE Supercomputing Laboratory’s Deep Learning Platform for Language Technologies

Adversarial Data Programming: Using GANs to Relax the Bottleneck of Curated Labeled Data

Paucity of large curated hand-labeled training data for every domain-of-interest forms a major bottleneck in the deployment of machine learning models in computer vision and other fields. Recent work (Data Programming) has shown how distant supervision signals in the form of labeling functions can be used to obtain labels for given data in near-constant time. In this work, we present Adversarial Data Programming (ADP), which presents an adversarial methodology to generate data as well as a curated aggregated label has given a set of weak labeling functions. We validated our method on the MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR 10 and SVHN datasets, and it outperformed many state-of-the-art models. We conducted extensive experiments to study its usefulness, as well as showed how the proposed ADP framework can be used for transfer learning as well as multi-task learning, where data from two domains are generated simultaneously using the framework along with the label information. Our future work will involve understanding the theoretical implications of this new framework from a game-theoretic perspective, as well as explore the performance of the method on more complex datasets.Comment: CVPR 2018 main conference pape

A Survey on Recent Named Entity Recognition and Relation Classification Methods with Focus on Few-Shot Learning Approaches

Named entity recognition and relation classification are key stages for extracting information from unstructured text. Several natural language processing applications utilize the two tasks, such as information retrieval, knowledge graph construction and completion, question answering and other domain-specific applications, such as biomedical data mining. We present a survey of recent approaches in the two tasks with focus on few-shot learning approaches. Our work compares the main approaches followed in the two paradigms. Additionally, we report the latest metric scores in the two tasks with a structured analysis that considers the results in the few-shot learning scope

A Survey of Document-Level Information Extraction

Document-level information extraction (IE) is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP). This paper conducts a systematic review of recent document-level IE literature. In addition, we conduct a thorough error analysis with current state-of-the-art algorithms and identify their limitations as well as the remaining challenges for the task of document-level IE. According to our findings, labeling noises, entity coreference resolution, and lack of reasoning, severely affect the performance of document-level IE. The objective of this survey paper is to provide more insights and help NLP researchers to further enhance document-level IE performance

TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains [Extended version]

Taxonomies are important building blocks of structured knowledge bases, and their construction from text sources and Wikipedia has received much attention. In this paper we focus on the construction of taxonomies for fictional domains, using noisy category systems from fan wikis or text extraction as input. Such fictional domains are archetypes of entity universes that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, such as also enterprise-specific knowledge bases or highly specialized verticals. Our fiction-targeted approach, called TiFi, consists of three phases: (i) category cleaning, by identifying candidate categories that truly represent classes in the domain of interest, (ii) edge cleaning, by selecting subcategory relationships that correspond to class subsumption, and (iii) top-level construction, by mapping classes onto a subset of high-level WordNet categories. A comprehensive evaluation shows that TiFi is able to construct taxonomies for a diverse range of fictional domains such as Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons or Greek Mythology with very high precision and that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for taxonomy induction by a substantial margin