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Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition (NER) show that document-level contexts can significantly improve model performance. In many application scenarios, however, such contexts are not available. In this paper, we propose to find external contexts of a sentence by retrieving and selecting a set of semantically relevant texts through a search engine, with the original sentence as the query. We find empirically that the contextual representations computed on the retrieval-based input view, constructed through the concatenation of a sentence and its external contexts, can achieve significantly improved performance compared to the original input view based only on the sentence. Furthermore, we can improve the model performance of both input views by Cooperative Learning, a training method that encourages the two input views to produce similar contextual representations or output label distributions. Experiments show that our approach can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 8 NER data sets across 5 domains.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning

multi-view learning

named entity recognition

information retrieval

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

We study the learning of a matching model for dialogue response selection. Motivated by the recent finding that models trained with random negative samples are not ideal in real-world scenarios, we propose a hierarchical curriculum learning framework that trains the matching model in an ``easy-to-difficult" scheme. Our learning framework consists of two complementary curricula: (1) corpus-level curriculum (CC); and (2) instance-level curriculum (IC). In CC, the model gradually increases its ability in finding the matching clues between the dialogue context and a response candidate. As for IC, it progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the mismatching information between the dialogue context and a response candidate. Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models demonstrate that the proposed learning framework significantly improves the model performance across various evaluation metrics.

Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning

In this paper, we present a neural model for joint dropped pronoun recovery (DPR) and conversational discourse parsing (CDP) in Chinese conversational speech. We show that DPR and CDP are closely related, and a joint model benefits both tasks. We refer to our model as DiscProReco, and it first encodes the tokens in each utterance in a conversation with a directed Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). The token states for an utterance are then aggregated to produce a single state for each utterance. The utterance states are then fed into a biaffine classifier to construct a conversational discourse graph. A second (multi-relational) GCN is then applied to the utterance states to produce a discourse relation-augmented representation for the utterances, which are then fused together with token states in each utterance as input to a dropped pronoun recovery layer. The joint model is trained and evaluated on a new Structure Parsing-enhanced Dropped Pronoun Recovery (SPDPR) data set that we annotated with both two types of information. Experimental results on the SPDPR dataset and other benchmarks show that DiscProReco significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines of both tasks.

A Joint Model for Dropped Pronoun Recovery and Conversational Discourse Parsing in Chinese Conversational Speech

Large pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-2 have demonstrated their effectiveness as language priors by reaching state-of-the-art results in various language generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on task-oriented dialog tasks is still under-explored. We propose a Pre-trainedRole Alternating Language model (PRAL), explicitly designed for task-oriented conversational systems. We design several techniques: start position randomization, knowledge distillation, and history discount to improve pre-training performance. In addition, we introduce a high-quality large-scale task-oriented dialog pre-training dataset by post-prossessing13 dialog datasets. We effectively adapt PRALon three downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art models.

PRAL: A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation

Knowledge bases (KBs) and text often contain complementary knowledge: KBs store structured knowledge that can support long range reasoning, while text stores more comprehensive and timely knowledge in an unstructured way. Separately embedding the individual knowledge sources into vector spaces has demonstrated tremendous successes in encoding the respective knowledge, but how to jointly embed and reason with both knowledge sources to fully leverage the complementary information is still largely an open problem. We conduct a large-scale, systematic investigation of aligning KB and text embeddings for joint reasoning. We set up a novel evaluation framework with two evaluation tasks, few-shot link prediction and analogical reasoning, and evaluate an array of KB-text embedding alignment methods. We also demonstrate how such alignment can infuse textual information into KB embeddings for more accurate link prediction on emerging entities and events, using COVID-19 as a case study.

A Systematic Investigation of KB-Text Embedding Alignment at Scale

Weak supervision has shown promising results in many natural language processing tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Existing work mainly focuses on learning deep NER models only with weak supervision, i.e., without any human annotation, and shows that by merely using weakly labeled data, one can achieve good performance, though still underperforms fully supervised NER with manually/strongly labeled data.
In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario, where we have both a small amount of strongly labeled data and a large amount of weakly labeled data. Unfortunately, we observe that weakly labeled data does not necessarily improve, or even deteriorate the model performance (due to the extensive noise in the weak labels) when we train deep NER models over a simple or weighted combination of the strongly labeled and weakly labeled data.
To address this issue, we propose a new multi-stage computational framework -- NEEDLE with three essential ingredients: (1) weak label completion, (2) noise-aware loss function, and (3) final fine-tuning over the strongly labeled data. Through experiments on E-commerce query NER and Biomedical NER, we demonstrate that NEEDLE can effectively suppress the noise of the weak labels and outperforms existing methods. In particular, we achieve new SOTA F1-scores on 3 Biomedical NER datasets: BC5CDR-chem 93.74, BC5CDR-disease 90.69, NCBI-disease 92.28.

Named Entity Recognition with Small Strongly Labeled and Large Weakly Labeled Data

Recently, there is an effort to extend fine-grained entity typing by using a richer and ultra-fine set of types, and labeling noun phrases including pronouns and nominal nouns instead of just named entity mentions. A key challenge for this ultra-fine entity typing task is that human annotated data are extremely scarce, and the annotation ability of existing distant or weak supervision approaches is very limited. To remedy this problem, in this paper, we propose to obtain training data for ultra-fine entity typing by using a BERT Masked Language Model (MLM). Given a mention in a sentence, our approach constructs an input for the BERT MLM so that it predicts context dependent hypernyms of the mention, which can be used as type labels. Experimental results demonstrate that, with the help of these automatically generated labels, the performance of an ultra-fine entity typing model can be improved substantially. We also show that our approach can be applied to improve traditional fine-grained entity typing after performing simple type mapping.

Ultra-Fine Entity Typing with Weak Supervision from a Masked Language Model

In multi-label text classification (MLTC), each given document is associated with a set of correlated labels. To capture label correlations, previous classifier-chain and sequence-to-sequence models transform MLTC to a sequence prediction task. However, they tend to suffer from label order dependency, label combination over-fitting and error propagation problems. To address these problems, we introduce a novel approach with multi-task learning to enhance label correlation feedback. We first utilize a joint embedding (JE) mechanism to obtain the text and label representation simultaneously. In MLTC task, a document-label cross attention (CA) mechanism is adopted to generate a more discriminative document representation. Furthermore, we propose two auxiliary label co-occurrence prediction tasks to enhance label correlation learning: 1) Pairwise Label Co-occurrence Prediction (PLCP), and 2) Conditional Label Co-occurrence Prediction (CLCP). Experimental results on AAPD and RCV1-V2 datasets show that our method outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin.
We analyze low-frequency label performance, label dependency, label combination diversity and coverage speed to show the effectiveness of our proposed method on label correlation learning.

Enhancing Label Correlation Feedback in Multi-Label Text Classification via Multi-Task Learning

Commonsense question answering (QA) requires a model to grasp commonsense and factual knowledge to answer questions about world events. Many prior methods couple language modeling with knowledge graphs (KG). However, although a KG contains rich structural information, it lacks the context to provide a more precise understanding of the concepts. This creates a gap when fusing knowledge graphs into language modeling, especially when there is insufficient labeled data.
Thus, we propose to employ external entity descriptions to provide contextual information for knowledge understanding. 
We retrieve descriptions of related concepts from Wiktionary and feed them as additional input to pre-trained language models. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art result in the CommonsenseQA dataset and the best result among non-generative models in OpenBookQA.

Fusing Context Into Knowledge Graph for Commonsense Question Answering

Time-to-event prediction tasks are common in conversation modelling, for applications such as predicting the length of a conversation or when a user will stop contributing to a platform. Despite the fact that it is natural to frame such predictions as regression tasks, recent work has modelled them as classification tasks, determining whether the time-to-event is greater than a pre-determined cut-off point. While this allows for the application of classification models which are well studied in NLP, it imposes a formulation that is contrived, as well as less informative. In this paper, we explore how to handle time-to-event forecasting in conversations as regression tasks. We focus on a family of regression techniques known as survival regression, which are commonly used in the context of healthcare and reliability engineering. We adapt these models to time-to-event prediction in conversations, using linguistic markers as features. On three datasets, we demonstrate that they outperform commonly considered text regression methods and comparable classification models.

Survival text regression for time-to-event prediction in conversations

Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has been recently put forth as a strategy to learn resource-poor languages in a sample-efficient fashion. Nevertheless, the properties of these languages are often not well represented by those available during training. Hence, we argue that the i.i.d. assumption ingrained in MAML makes it ill-suited for cross-lingual NLP. In fact, under a decision-theoretic framework, MAML can be interpreted as minimising the expected risk across training languages (with a uniform prior), which is known as Bayes criterion. To increase its robustness to outlier languages, we create two variants of MAML based on alternative criteria: Minimax MAML reduces the maximum risk across languages, while Neyman–Pearson MAML constrains the risk in each language to a maximum threshold. Both criteria constitute fully differentiable two-player games. In light of this, we propose a new adaptive optimiser solving for a local approximation to their Nash equilibrium. We evaluate both model variants on two popular NLP tasks, part-of-speech tagging and question answering. We report gains for their average and minimum performance across low-resource languages in zero- and few-shot settings, compared to joint multi-source transfer and vanilla MAML. The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/rahular/robust-maml

Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning

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Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning

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Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning

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Investigation on Data Adaptation Techniques for Neural Named Entity Recognition

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