No Arabic abstract
With the emerging branch of incorporating factual knowledge into pre-trained language models such as BERT, most existing models consider shallow, static, and separately pre-trained entity embeddings, which limits the performance gains of these models. Few works explore the potential of deep contextualized knowledge representation when injecting knowledge. In this paper, we propose the Contextualized Language and Knowledge Embedding (CoLAKE), which jointly learns contextualized representation for both language and knowledge with the extended MLM objective. Instead of injecting only entity embeddings, CoLAKE extracts the knowledge context of an entity from large-scale knowledge bases. To handle the heterogeneity of knowledge context and language context, we integrate them in a unified data structure, word-knowledge graph (WK graph). CoLAKE is pre-trained on large-scale WK graphs with the modified Transformer encoder. We conduct experiments on knowledge-driven tasks, knowledge probing tasks, and language understanding tasks. Experimental results show that CoLAKE outperforms previous counterparts on most of the tasks. Besides, CoLAKE achieves surprisingly high performance on our synthetic task called word-knowledge graph completion, which shows the superiority of simultaneously contextualizing language and knowledge representation.
Complex node interactions are common in knowledge graphs, and these interactions also contain rich knowledge information. However, traditional methods usually treat a triple as a training unit during the knowledge representation learning (KRL) procedure, neglecting contextualized information of the nodes in knowledge graphs (KGs). We generalize the modeling object to a very general form, which theoretically supports any subgraph extracted from the knowledge graph, and these subgraphs are fed into a novel transformer-based model to learn the knowledge embeddings. To broaden usage scenarios of knowledge, pre-trained language models are utilized to build a model that incorporates the learned knowledge representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several medical NLP tasks, and improvement above TransE indicates that our KRL method captures the graph contextualized information effectively.
Several recent efforts have been devoted to enhancing pre-trained language models (PLMs) by utilizing extra heterogeneous knowledge in knowledge graphs (KGs) and achieved consistent improvements on various knowledge-driven NLP tasks. However, most of these knowledge-enhanced PLMs embed static sub-graphs of KGs (knowledge context), regardless of that the knowledge required by PLMs may change dynamically according to specific text (textual context). In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Coke to dynamically select contextual knowledge and embed knowledge context according to textual context for PLMs, which can avoid the effect of redundant and ambiguous knowledge in KGs that cannot match the input text. Our experimental results show that Coke outperforms various baselines on typical knowledge-driven NLP tasks, indicating the effectiveness of utilizing dynamic knowledge context for language understanding. Besides the performance improvements, the dynamically selected knowledge in Coke can describe the semantics of text-related knowledge in a more interpretable form than the conventional PLMs. Our source code and datasets will be available to provide more details for Coke.
Knowledge graph embedding, which projects symbolic entities and relations into continuous vector spaces, is gaining increasing attention. Previous methods allow a single static embedding for each entity or relation, ignoring their intrinsic contextual nature, i.e., entities and relations may appear in different graph contexts, and accordingly, exhibit different properties. This work presents Contextualized Knowledge Graph Embedding (CoKE), a novel paradigm that takes into account such contextual nature, and learns dynamic, flexible, and fully contextualized entity and relation embeddings. Two types of graph contexts are studied: edges and paths, both formulated as sequences of entities and relations. CoKE takes a sequence as input and uses a Transformer encoder to obtain contextualized representations. These representations are hence naturally adaptive to the input, capturing contextual meanings of entities and relations therein. Evaluation on a wide variety of public benchmarks verifies the superiority of CoKE in link prediction and path query answering. It performs consistently better than, or at least equally well as current state-of-the-art in almost every case, in particular offering an absolute improvement of 21.0% in H@10 on path query answering. Our code is available at url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/KG/CoKE}.
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) aims to teach machines to read and comprehend human languages, which is a long-standing goal of natural language processing (NLP). With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of contextualized language models (CLMs), the research of MRC has experienced two significant breakthroughs. MRC and CLM, as a phenomenon, have a great impact on the NLP community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and comparative review on MRC covering overall research topics about 1) the origin and development of MRC and CLM, with a particular focus on the role of CLMs; 2) the impact of MRC and CLM to the NLP community; 3) the definition, datasets, and evaluation of MRC; 4) general MRC architecture and technical methods in the view of two-stage Encoder-Decoder solving architecture from the insights of the cognitive process of humans; 5) previous highlights, emerging topics, and our empirical analysis, among which we especially focus on what works in different periods of MRC researches. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. The primary views we have arrived at are that 1) MRC boosts the progress from language processing to understanding; 2) the rapid improvement of MRC systems greatly benefits from the development of CLMs; 3) the theme of MRC is gradually moving from shallow text matching to cognitive reasoning.
It is challenging to perform lifelong language learning (LLL) on a stream of different tasks without any performance degradation comparing to the multi-task counterparts. To address this issue, we present Lifelong Language Knowledge Distillation (L2KD), a simple but efficient method that can be easily applied to existing LLL architectures in order to mitigate the degradation. Specifically, when the LLL model is trained on a new task, we assign a teacher model to first learn the new task, and pass the knowledge to the LLL model via knowledge distillation. Therefore, the LLL model can better adapt to the new task while keeping the previously learned knowledge. Experiments show that the proposed L2KD consistently improves previous state-of-the-art models, and the degradation comparing to multi-task models in LLL tasks is well mitigated for both sequence generation and text classification tasks.