arXiv subjects

Lei Hou

Publications and source records attributed to Lei Hou.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation

Event extraction (EE) is a crucial task aiming at extracting events from texts, which includes two subtasks: event detection (ED) and event argument extraction (EAE). In this paper, we check the reliability of EE evaluations and identify three major pitfalls: (1) The data preprocessing discrepancy makes the evaluation results on the same dataset not directly comparable, but the data preprocessing details are not widely noted and specified in papers. (2) The output space discrepancy of different model paradigms makes different-paradigm EE models lack grounds for comparison and also leads to unclear mapping issues between predictions and annotations. (3) The absence of pipeline evaluation of many EAE-only works makes them hard to be directly compared with EE works and may not well reflect the model performance in real-world pipeline scenarios. We demonstrate the significant influence of these pitfalls through comprehensive meta-analyses of recent papers and empirical experiments. To avoid these pitfalls, we suggest a series of remedies, including specifying data preprocessing, standardizing outputs, and providing pipeline evaluation results. To help implement these remedies, we develop a consistent evaluation framework OMNIEVENT, which can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/OmniEvent.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Answering Complex Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs via Query Computation Tree Optimization

Answering complex logical queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task, and has been widely studied. Embedding-based methods require training on complex queries, and cannot generalize well to out-of-distribution query structures. Recent work frames this task as an end-to-end optimization problem, and it only requires a pretrained link predictor. However, due to the exponentially large combinatorial search space, the optimal solution can only be approximated, limiting the final accuracy. In this work, we propose QTO (Query Computation Tree Optimization) that can efficiently find the exact optimal solution. QTO finds the optimal solution by a forward-backward propagation on the tree-like computation graph, i.e., query computation tree. In particular, QTO utilizes the independence encoded in the query computation tree to reduce the search space, where only local computations are involved during the optimization procedure. Experiments on 3 datasets show that QTO obtains state-of-the-art performance on complex query answering, outperforming previous best results by an average of 22%. Moreover, QTO can interpret the intermediate solutions for each of the one-hop atoms in the query with over 90% accuracy. The code of our paper is at https://github.com/bys0318/QTO.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking

Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features. However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention. We categorize mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrase, and propose an entity linking dataset NEL that focuses on the NIL prediction problem. NEL takes ambiguous entities as seeds, collects relevant mention context in the Wikipedia corpus, and ensures the presence of mentions linking to NIL by human annotation and entity masking. We conduct a series of experiments with the widely used bi-encoder and cross-encoder entity linking models, results show that both types of NIL mentions in training data have a significant influence on the accuracy of NIL prediction. Our code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/solitaryzero/NIL_EL

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering

Explainable question answering (XQA) aims to answer a given question and provide an explanation why the answer is selected. Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. However, integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources is essential to answer complex questions. In this paper, we propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration, by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones, and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. To facilitate reasoning, we propose a novel two-stage XQA framework, Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree (RoHT). First, we build the Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree (HQDT) to understand the semantics of a complex question; then, we conduct probabilistic reasoning over HQDT from root to leaves recursively, to aggregate heterogeneous knowledge at different tree levels and search for a best solution considering the decomposing and answering probabilities. The experiments on complex QA datasets KQA Pro and Musique show that our framework outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging question decomposing for knowledge integration and our RoHT framework.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

MoocRadar: A Fine-grained and Multi-aspect Knowledge Repository for Improving Cognitive Student Modeling in MOOCs

Student modeling, the task of inferring a student's learning characteristics through their interactions with coursework, is a fundamental issue in intelligent education. Although the recent attempts from knowledge tracing and cognitive diagnosis propose several promising directions for improving the usability and effectiveness of current models, the existing public datasets are still insufficient to meet the need for these potential solutions due to their ignorance of complete exercising contexts, fine-grained concepts, and cognitive labels. In this paper, we present MoocRadar, a fine-grained, multi-aspect knowledge repository consisting of 2,513 exercise questions, 5,600 knowledge concepts, and over 12 million behavioral records. Specifically, we propose a framework to guarantee a high-quality and comprehensive annotation of fine-grained concepts and cognitive labels. The statistical and experimental results indicate that our dataset provides the basis for the future improvements of existing methods. Moreover, to support the convenient usage for researchers, we release a set of tools for data querying, model adaption, and even the extension of our repository, which are now available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/MOOC-Radar.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Syntactically Robust Training on Partially-Observed Data for Open Information Extraction

Open Information Extraction models have shown promising results with sufficient supervision. However, these models face a fundamental challenge that the syntactic distribution of training data is partially observable in comparison to the real world. In this paper, we propose a syntactically robust training framework that enables models to be trained on a syntactic-abundant distribution based on diverse paraphrase generation. To tackle the intrinsic problem of knowledge deformation of paraphrasing, two algorithms based on semantic similarity matching and syntactic tree walking are used to restore the expressionally transformed knowledge. The training framework can be generally applied to other syntactic partial observable domains. Based on the proposed framework, we build a new evaluation set called CaRB-AutoPara, a syntactically diverse dataset consistent with the real-world setting for validating the robustness of the models. Experiments including a thorough analysis show that the performance of the model degrades with the increase of the difference in syntactic distribution, while our framework gives a robust boundary. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/qijimrc/RobustOIE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Unveiling the Black Box of PLMs with Semantic Anchors: Towards Interpretable Neural Semantic Parsing

The recent prevalence of pretrained language models (PLMs) has dramatically shifted the paradigm of semantic parsing, where the mapping from natural language utterances to structured logical forms is now formulated as a Seq2Seq task. Despite the promising performance, previous PLM-based approaches often suffer from hallucination problems due to their negligence of the structural information contained in the sentence, which essentially constitutes the key semantics of the logical forms. Furthermore, most works treat PLM as a black box in which the generation process of the target logical form is hidden beneath the decoder modules, which greatly hinders the model's intrinsic interpretability. To address these two issues, we propose to incorporate the current PLMs with a hierarchical decoder network. By taking the first-principle structures as the semantic anchors, we propose two novel intermediate supervision tasks, namely Semantic Anchor Extraction and Semantic Anchor Alignment, for training the hierarchical decoders and probing the model intermediate representations in a self-adaptive manner alongside the fine-tuning process. We conduct intensive experiments on several semantic parsing benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach can consistently outperform the baselines. More importantly, by analyzing the intermediate representations of the hierarchical decoders, our approach also makes a huge step toward the intrinsic interpretability of PLMs in the domain of semantic parsing.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Exploring Universal Intrinsic Task Subspace via Prompt Tuning

Why can pre-trained language models (PLMs) learn universal representations and effectively adapt to broad NLP tasks differing a lot superficially? In this work, we empirically find evidence indicating that the adaptations of PLMs to various few-shot tasks can be reparameterized as optimizing only a few free parameters in a unified low-dimensional intrinsic task subspace, which may help us understand why PLMs could easily adapt to various NLP tasks with small-scale data. To find such a subspace and examine its universality, we propose an analysis pipeline called intrinsic prompt tuning (IPT). Specifically, we resort to the recent success of prompt tuning and decompose the soft prompts of multiple NLP tasks into the same low-dimensional nonlinear subspace, then we learn to adapt the PLM to unseen data or tasks by only tuning parameters in this subspace. In the experiments, we study diverse few-shot NLP tasks and surprisingly find that in a 250-dimensional subspace found with 100 tasks, by only tuning 250 free parameters, we can recover 97% and 83% of the full prompt tuning performance for 100 seen tasks (using different training data) and 20 unseen tasks, respectively, showing great generalization ability of the found intrinsic task subspace. Besides being an analysis tool, IPT could further help us improve the prompt tuning stability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction

The diverse relationships among real-world events, including coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are fundamental to understanding natural languages. However, two drawbacks of existing datasets limit event relation extraction (ERE) tasks: (1) Small scale. Due to the annotation complexity, the data scale of existing datasets is limited, which cannot well train and evaluate data-hungry models. (2) Absence of unified annotation. Different types of event relations naturally interact with each other, but existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. To address these issues, we construct a unified large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset MAVEN-ERE with improved annotation schemes. It contains 103,193 event coreference chains, 1,216,217 temporal relations, 57,992 causal relations, and 15,841 subevent relations, which is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. Experiments show that ERE on MAVEN-ERE is quite challenging, and considering relation interactions with joint learning can improve performances. The dataset and source codes can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/MAVEN-ERE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Finding Skill Neurons in Pre-trained Transformer-based Language Models

Transformer-based pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it remains unclear how the skills required to handle these tasks distribute among model parameters. In this paper, we find that after prompt tuning for specific tasks, the activations of some neurons within pre-trained Transformers are highly predictive of the task labels. We dub these neurons skill neurons and confirm they encode task-specific skills by finding that: (1) Skill neurons are crucial for handling tasks. Performances of pre-trained Transformers on a task significantly drop when corresponding skill neurons are perturbed. (2) Skill neurons are task-specific. Similar tasks tend to have similar distributions of skill neurons. Furthermore, we demonstrate the skill neurons are most likely generated in pre-training rather than fine-tuning by showing that the skill neurons found with prompt tuning are also crucial for other fine-tuning methods freezing neuron weights, such as the adapter-based tuning and BitFit. We also explore the applications of skill neurons, including accelerating Transformers with network pruning and building better transferability indicators. These findings may promote further research on understanding Transformers. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/Skill-Neuron.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense behind texts, designing probes for conceptual knowledge is hard. Inspired by knowledge representation schemata, we comprehensively evaluate conceptual knowledge of PLMs by designing three tasks to probe whether PLMs organize entities by conceptual similarities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts, respectively. For the tasks, we collect and annotate 24k data instances covering 393 concepts, which is COPEN, a COnceptual knowledge Probing bENchmark. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of PLMs show that existing PLMs systematically lack conceptual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing human-like cognition in PLMs. COPEN and our codes are publicly released at https://github.com/THU-KEG/COPEN.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation

Subject to the huge semantic gap between natural and formal languages, neural semantic parsing is typically bottlenecked by its complexity of dealing with both input semantics and output syntax. Recent works have proposed several forms of supplementary supervision but none is generalized across multiple formal languages. This paper proposes a unified intermediate representation (IR) for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR. It has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. Therefore, a neural semantic parser can more precisely convert user queries into GraphQ IR, which can be later losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks including KQA Pro, Overnight, GrailQA, and MetaQA-Cypher under standard i.i.d., out-of-distribution, and low-resource settings validate GraphQ IR's superiority over the previous state-of-the-arts with a maximum 11% accuracy improvement.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

SQUIRE: A Sequence-to-sequence Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Multi-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to provide interpretable predictions on missing links with evidential paths. Most previous works use reinforcement learning (RL) based methods that learn to navigate the path towards the target entity. However, these methods suffer from slow and poor convergence, and they may fail to infer a certain path when there is a missing edge along the path. Here we present SQUIRE, the first Sequence-to-sequence based multi-hop reasoning framework, which utilizes an encoder-decoder Transformer structure to translate the query to a path. Our framework brings about two benefits: (1) It can learn and predict in an end-to-end fashion, which gives better and faster convergence; (2) Our Transformer model does not rely on existing edges to generate the path, and has the flexibility to complete missing edges along the path, especially in sparse KGs. Experiments on standard and sparse KGs show that our approach yields significant improvement over prior methods, while converging 4x-7x faster.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

EDUKG: a Heterogeneous Sustainable K-12 Educational Knowledge Graph

Web and artificial intelligence technologies, especially semantic web and knowledge graph (KG), have recently raised significant attention in educational scenarios. Nevertheless, subject-specific KGs for K-12 education still lack sufficiency and sustainability from knowledge and data perspectives. To tackle these issues, we propose EDUKG, a heterogeneous sustainable K-12 Educational Knowledge Graph. We first design an interdisciplinary and fine-grained ontology for uniformly modeling knowledge and resource in K-12 education, where we define 635 classes, 445 object properties, and 1314 datatype properties in total. Guided by this ontology, we propose a flexible methodology for interactively extracting factual knowledge from textbooks. Furthermore, we establish a general mechanism based on our proposed generalized entity linking system for EDUKG's sustainable maintenance, which can dynamically index numerous heterogeneous resources and data with knowledge topics in EDUKG. We further evaluate EDUKG to illustrate its sufficiency, richness, and variability. We publish EDUKG with more than 252 million entities and 3.86 billion triplets. Our code and data repository is now available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/EDUKG.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Step out of KG: Knowledge Graph Completion via Knowledgeable Retrieval and Reading Comprehension

Knowledge graphs, as the cornerstone of many AI applications, usually face serious incompleteness problems. In recent years, there have been many efforts to study automatic knowledge graph completion (KGC), most of which use existing knowledge to infer new knowledge. However, in our experiments, we find that not all relations can be obtained by inference, which constrains the performance of existing models. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new model based on information retrieval and reading comprehension, namely IR4KGC. Specifically, we pre-train a knowledge-based information retrieval module that can retrieve documents related to the triples to be completed. Then, the retrieved documents are handed over to the reading comprehension module to generate the predicted answers. In experiments, we find that our model can well solve relations that cannot be inferred from existing knowledge, and achieve good results on KGC datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Interactive Contrastive Learning for Self-supervised Entity Alignment

Self-supervised entity alignment (EA) aims to link equivalent entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) without seed alignments. The current SOTA self-supervised EA method draws inspiration from contrastive learning, originally designed in computer vision based on instance discrimination and contrastive loss, and suffers from two shortcomings. Firstly, it puts unidirectional emphasis on pushing sampled negative entities far away rather than pulling positively aligned pairs close, as is done in the well-established supervised EA. Secondly, KGs contain rich side information (e.g., entity description), and how to effectively leverage those information has not been adequately investigated in self-supervised EA. In this paper, we propose an interactive contrastive learning model for self-supervised EA. The model encodes not only structures and semantics of entities (including entity name, entity description, and entity neighborhood), but also conducts cross-KG contrastive learning by building pseudo-aligned entity pairs. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms previous best self-supervised results by a large margin (over 9% average improvement) and performs on par with previous SOTA supervised counterparts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the interactive contrastive learning for self-supervised EA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ConstGCN: Constrained Transmission-based Graph Convolutional Networks for Document-level Relation Extraction

Document-level relation extraction with graph neural networks faces a fundamental graph construction gap between training and inference - the golden graph structure only available during training, which causes that most methods adopt heuristic or syntactic rules to construct a prior graph as a pseudo proxy. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{ConstGCN}$, a novel graph convolutional network which performs knowledge-based information propagation between entities along with all specific relation spaces without any prior graph construction. Specifically, it updates the entity representation by aggregating information from all other entities along with each relation space, thus modeling the relation-aware spatial information. To control the information flow passing through the indeterminate relation spaces, we propose to constrain the propagation using transmitting scores learned from the Noise Contrastive Estimation between fact triples. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on the DocRE dataset.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Multimodal Entity Tagging with Multimodal Knowledge Base

To enhance research on multimodal knowledge base and multimodal information processing, we propose a new task called multimodal entity tagging (MET) with a multimodal knowledge base (MKB). We also develop a dataset for the problem using an existing MKB. In an MKB, there are entities and their associated texts and images. In MET, given a text-image pair, one uses the information in the MKB to automatically identify the related entity in the text-image pair. We solve the task by using the information retrieval paradigm and implement several baselines using state-of-the-art methods in NLP and CV. We conduct extensive experiments and make analyses on the experimental results. The results show that the task is challenging, but current technologies can achieve relatively high performance. We will release the dataset, code, and models for future research.

cs.IR↗