No Arabic abstract
In this work, we investigate the problems of semantic parsing in a few-shot learning setting. In this setting, we are provided with utterance-logical form pairs per new predicate. The state-of-the-art neural semantic parsers achieve less than 25% accuracy on benchmark datasets when k= 1. To tackle this problem, we proposed to i) apply a designated meta-learning method to train the model; ii) regularize attention scores with alignment statistics; iii) apply a smoothing technique in pre-training. As a result, our method consistently outperforms all the baselines in both one and two-shot settings.
We propose a large scale semantic parsing dataset focused on instruction-driven communication with an agent in Minecraft. We describe the data collection process which yields additional 35K human generated instructions with their semantic annotations. We report the performance of three baseline models and find that while a dataset of this size helps us train a usable instruction parser, it still poses interesting generalization challenges which we hope will help develop better and more robust models.
Partial-label learning (PLL) generally focuses on inducing a noise-tolerant multi-class classifier by training on overly-annotated samples, each of which is annotated with a set of labels, but only one is the valid label. A basic promise of existing PLL solutions is that there are sufficient partial-label (PL) samples for training. However, it is more common than not to have just few PL samples at hand when dealing with new tasks. Furthermore, existing few-shot learning algorithms assume precise labels of the support set; as such, irrelevant labels may seriously mislead the meta-learner and thus lead to a compromised performance. How to enable PLL under a few-shot learning setting is an important problem, but not yet well studied. In this paper, we introduce an approach called FsPLL (Few-shot PLL). FsPLL first performs adaptive distance metric learning by an embedding network and rectifying prototypes on the tasks previously encountered. Next, it calculates the prototype of each class of a new task in the embedding network. An unseen example can then be classified via its distance to each prototype. Experimental results on widely-used few-shot datasets (Omniglot and miniImageNet) demonstrate that our FsPLL can achieve a superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods across different settings, and it needs fewer samples for quickly adapting to new tasks.
Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of a two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. We make Few-NERD public at https://ningding97.github.io/fewnerd/.
Sequence labeling is an important technique employed for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), slot tagging for dialog systems and semantic parsing. Large-scale pre-trained language models obtain very good performance on these tasks when fine-tuned on large amounts of task-specific labeled data. However, such large-scale labeled datasets are difficult to obtain for several tasks and domains due to the high cost of human annotation as well as privacy and data access constraints for sensitive user applications. This is exacerbated for sequence labeling tasks requiring such annotations at token-level. In this work, we develop techniques to address the label scarcity challenge for neural sequence labeling models. Specifically, we develop self-training and meta-learning techniques for training neural sequence taggers with few labels. While self-training serves as an effective mechanism to learn from large amounts of unlabeled data -- meta-learning helps in adaptive sample re-weighting to mitigate error propagation from noisy pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets including two for massive multilingual NER and four slot tagging datasets for task-oriented dialog systems demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. With only 10 labeled examples for each class for each task, our method obtains 10% improvement over state-of-the-art systems demonstrating its effectiveness for the low-resource setting.
Few-shot learning has been proposed and rapidly emerging as a viable means for completing various tasks. Many few-shot models have been widely used for relation learning tasks. However, each of these models has a shortage of capturing a certain aspect of semantic features, for example, CNN on long-range dependencies part, Transformer on local features. It is difficult for a single model to adapt to various relation learning, which results in the high variance problem. Ensemble strategy could be competitive on improving the accuracy of few-shot relation extraction and mitigating high variance risks. This paper explores an ensemble approach to reduce the variance and introduces fine-tuning and feature attention strategies to calibrate relation-level features. Results on several few-shot relation learning tasks show that our model significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models.