arXiv subjects

Alberto García-Durán

Publications and source records attributed to Alberto García-Durán.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Efficient Entity Candidate Generation for Low-Resource Languages

Candidate generation is a crucial module in entity linking. It also plays a key role in multiple NLP tasks that have been proven to beneficially leverage knowledge bases. Nevertheless, it has often been overlooked in the monolingual English entity linking literature, as naive approaches obtain very good performance. Unfortunately, the existing approaches for English cannot be successfully transferred to poorly resourced languages. This paper constitutes an in-depth analysis of the candidate generation problem in the context of cross-lingual entity linking with a focus on low-resource languages. Among other contributions, we point out limitations in the evaluation conducted in previous works. We introduce a characterization of queries into types based on their difficulty, which improves the interpretability of the performance of different methods. We also propose a light-weight and simple solution based on the construction of indexes whose design is motivated by more complex transfer learning based neural approaches. A thorough empirical analysis on 9 real-world datasets under 2 evaluation settings shows that our simple solution outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in terms of both quality and efficiency for almost all datasets and query types.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Wikipedia Reader Navigation: When Synthetic Data Is Enough

Every day millions of people read Wikipedia. When navigating the vast space of available topics using hyperlinks, readers describe trajectories on the article network. Understanding these navigation patterns is crucial to better serve readers' needs and address structural biases and knowledge gaps. However, systematic studies of navigation on Wikipedia are hindered by a lack of publicly available data due to the commitment to protect readers' privacy by not storing or sharing potentially sensitive data. In this paper, we ask: How well can Wikipedia readers' navigation be approximated by using publicly available resources, most notably the Wikipedia clickstream data? We systematically quantify the differences between real navigation sequences and synthetic sequences generated from the clickstream data, in 6 analyses across 8 Wikipedia language versions. Overall, we find that the differences between real and synthetic sequences are statistically significant, but with small effect sizes, often well below 10%. This constitutes quantitative evidence for the utility of the Wikipedia clickstream data as a public resource: clickstream data can closely capture reader navigation on Wikipedia and provides a sufficient approximation for most practical downstream applications relying on reader data. More broadly, this study provides an example for how clickstream-like data can generally enable research on user navigation on online platforms while protecting users' privacy.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Low-Rank Subspaces for Unsupervised Entity Linking

Entity linking is an important problem with many applications. Most previous solutions were designed for settings where annotated training data is available, which is, however, not the case in numerous domains. We propose a light-weight and scalable entity linking method, Eigenthemes, that relies solely on the availability of entity names and a referent knowledge base. Eigenthemes exploits the fact that the entities that are truly mentioned in a document (the "gold entities") tend to form a semantically dense subset of the set of all candidate entities in the document. Geometrically speaking, when representing entities as vectors via some given embedding, the gold entities tend to lie in a low-rank subspace of the full embedding space. Eigenthemes identifies this subspace using the singular value decomposition and scores candidate entities according to their proximity to the subspace. On the empirical front, we introduce multiple strong baselines that compare favorably to (and sometimes even outperform) the existing state of the art. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets from a variety of real-world domains showcase the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Recursive input and state estimation: A general framework for learning from time series with missing data

Time series with missing data are signals encountered in important settings for machine learning. Some of the most successful prior approaches for modeling such time series are based on recurrent neural networks that transform the input and previous state to account for the missing observations, and then treat the transformed signal in a standard manner. In this paper, we introduce a single unifying framework, Recursive Input and State Estimation (RISE), for this general approach and reformulate existing models as specific instances of this framework. We then explore additional novel variations within the RISE framework to improve the performance of any instance. We exploit representation learning techniques to learn latent representations of the signals used by RISE instances. We discuss and develop various encoding techniques to learn latent signal representations. We benchmark instances of the framework with various encoding functions on three data imputation datasets, observing that RISE instances always benefit from encoders that learn representations for numerical values from the digits into which they can be decomposed.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Answering Visual-Relational Queries in Web-Extracted Knowledge Graphs

A visual-relational knowledge graph (KG) is a multi-relational graph whose entities are associated with images. We explore novel machine learning approaches for answering visual-relational queries in web-extracted knowledge graphs. To this end, we have created ImageGraph, a KG with 1,330 relation types, 14,870 entities, and 829,931 images crawled from the web. With visual-relational KGs such as ImageGraph one can introduce novel probabilistic query types in which images are treated as first-class citizens. Both the prediction of relations between unseen images as well as multi-relational image retrieval can be expressed with specific families of visual-relational queries. We introduce novel combinations of convolutional networks and knowledge graph embedding methods to answer such queries. We also explore a zero-shot learning scenario where an image of an entirely new entity is linked with multiple relations to entities of an existing KG. The resulting multi-relational grounding of unseen entity images into a knowledge graph serves as a semantic entity representation. We conduct experiments to demonstrate that the proposed methods can answer these visual-relational queries efficiently and accurately.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Knowledge Graph Completion to Predict Polypharmacy Side Effects

The polypharmacy side effect prediction problem considers cases in which two drugs taken individually do not result in a particular side effect; however, when the two drugs are taken in combination, the side effect manifests. In this work, we demonstrate that multi-relational knowledge graph completion achieves state-of-the-art results on the polypharmacy side effect prediction problem. Empirical results show that our approach is particularly effective when the protein targets of the drugs are well-characterized. In contrast to prior work, our approach provides more interpretable predictions and hypotheses for wet lab validation.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2018

Learning Sequence Encoders for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Research on link prediction in knowledge graphs has mainly focused on static multi-relational data. In this work we consider temporal knowledge graphs where relations between entities may only hold for a time interval or a specific point in time. In line with previous work on static knowledge graphs, we propose to address this problem by learning latent entity and relation type representations. To incorporate temporal information, we utilize recurrent neural networks to learn time-aware representations of relation types which can be used in conjunction with existing latent factorization methods. The proposed approach is shown to be robust to common challenges in real-world KGs: the sparsity and heterogeneity of temporal expressions. Experiments show the benefits of our approach on four temporal KGs. The data sets are available under a permissive BSD-3 license 1.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

Generating Factoid Questions With Recurrent Neural Networks: The 30M Factoid Question-Answer Corpus

Over the past decade, large-scale supervised learning corpora have enabled machine learning researchers to make substantial advances. However, to this date, there are no large-scale question-answer corpora available. In this paper we present the 30M Factoid Question-Answer Corpus, an enormous question answer pair corpus produced by applying a novel neural network architecture on the knowledge base Freebase to transduce facts into natural language questions. The produced question answer pairs are evaluated both by human evaluators and using automatic evaluation metrics, including well-established machine translation and sentence similarity metrics. Across all evaluation criteria the question-generation model outperforms the competing template-based baseline. Furthermore, when presented to human evaluators, the generated questions appear comparable in quality to real human-generated questions.

cs.CL↗