No Arabic abstract
In standard methodology for natural language processing, entities in text are typically embedded in dense vector spaces with pre-trained models. The embeddings produced this way are effective when fed into downstream models, but they require end-task fine-tuning and are fundamentally difficult to interpret. In this paper, we present an approach to creating entity representations that are human readable and achieve high performance on entity-related tasks out of the box. Our representations are vectors whose values correspond to posterior probabilities over fine-grained entity types, indicating the confidence of a typing models decision that the entity belongs to the corresponding type. We obtain these representations using a fine-grained entity typing model, trained either on supervised ultra-fine entity typing data (Choi et al. 2018) or distantly-supervised examples from Wikipedia. On entity probing tasks involving recognizing entity identity, our embeddings used in parameter-free downstream models achieve competitive performance with ELMo- and BERT-based embeddings in trained models. We also show that it is possible to reduce the size of our type set in a learning-based way for particular domains. Finally, we show that these embeddings can be post-hoc modified through a small number of rules to incorporate domain knowledge and improve performance.
Pre-trained language models induce dense entity representations that offer strong performance on entity-centric NLP tasks, but such representations are not immediately interpretable. This can be a barrier to model uptake in important domains such as biomedicine. There has been recent work on general interpretable representation learning (Onoe and Durrett, 2020), but these domain-agnostic representations do not readily transfer to the important domain of biomedicine. In this paper, we create a new entity type system and training set from a large corpus of biomedical texts by mapping entities to concepts in a medical ontology, and from these to Wikipedia pages whose categories are our types. From this mapping we derive Biomedical Interpretable Entity Representations(BIERs), in which dimensions correspond to fine-grained entity types, and values are predicted probabilities that a given entity is of the corresponding type. We propose a novel method that exploits BIERs final sparse and intermediate dense representations to facilitate model and entity type debugging. We show that BIERs achieve strong performance in biomedical tasks including named entity disambiguation and entity label classification, and we provide error analysis to highlight the utility of their interpretability, particularly in low-supervision settings. Finally, we provide our induced 68K biomedical type system, the corresponding 37 million triples of derived data used to train BIER models and our best performing model.
Automated knowledge discovery from trending chemical literature is essential for more efficient biomedical research. How to extract detailed knowledge about chemical reactions from the core chemistry literature is a new emerging challenge that has not been well studied. In this paper, we study the new problem of fine-grained chemical entity typing, which poses interesting new challenges especially because of the complex name mentions frequently occurring in chemistry literature and graphic representation of entities. We introduce a new benchmark data set (CHEMET) to facilitate the study of the new task and propose a novel multi-modal representation learning framework to solve the problem of fine-grained chemical entity typing by leveraging external resources with chemical structures and using cross-modal attention to learn effective representation of text in the chemistry domain. Experiment results show that the proposed framework outperforms multiple state-of-the-art methods.
Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a domain is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grained entity properties, which can help disambiguate between even closely related entities. We derive a large inventory of types (tens of thousands) from Wikipedia categories, and use hyperlinked mentions in Wikipedia to distantly label data and train an entity typing model. At test time, we classify a mention with this typing model and use soft type predictions to link the mention to the most similar candidate entity. We evaluate our entity linking system on the CoNLL-YAGO dataset (Hoffart et al., 2011) and show that our approach outperforms prior domain-independent entity linking systems. We also test our approach in a harder setting derived from the WikilinksNED dataset (Eshel et al., 2017) where all the mention-entity pairs are unseen during test time. Results indicate that our approach generalizes better than a state-of-the-art neural model on the dataset.
Current systems of fine-grained entity typing use distant supervision in conjunction with existing knowledge bases to assign categories (type labels) to entity mentions. However, the type labels so obtained from knowledge bases are often noisy (i.e., incorrect for the entity mentions local context). We define a new task, Label Noise Reduction in Entity Typing (LNR), to be the automatic identification of correct type labels (type-paths) for training examples, given the set of candidate type labels obtained by distant supervision with a given type hierarchy. The unknown type labels for individual entity mentions and the semantic similarity between entity types pose unique challenges for solving the LNR task. We propose a general framework, called PLE, to jointly embed entity mentions, text features and entity types into the same low-dimensional space where, in that space, objects whose types are semantically close have similar representations. Then we estimate the type-path for each training example in a top-down manner using the learned embeddings. We formulate a global objective for learning the embeddings from text corpora and knowledge bases, which adopts a novel margin-based loss that is robust to noisy labels and faithfully models type correlation derived from knowledge bases. Our experiments on three public typing datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of PLE, with an average of 25% improvement in accuracy compared to next best method.
Interpretable rationales for model predictions play a critical role in practical applications. In this study, we develop models possessing interpretable inference process for structured prediction. Specifically, we present a method of instance-based learning that learns similarities between spans. At inference time, each span is assigned a class label based on its similar spans in the training set, where it is easy to understand how much each training instance contributes to the predictions. Through empirical analysis on named entity recognition, we demonstrate that our method enables to build models that have high interpretability without sacrificing performance.