Hongming Zhang, Daniel Khashabi, Yangqiu Song, Dan Roth
Commonsense knowledge acquisition is a key problem for artificial intelligence. Conventional methods of acquiring commonsense knowledge generally require laborious and costly human annotations, which are not feasible on a large scale. In this paper, we explore a practical way of mining commonsense knowledge from linguistic graphs, with the goal of transferring cheap knowledge obtained with linguistic patterns into expensive commonsense knowledge. The result is a conversion of ASER [Zhang et al., 2020], a large-scale selectional preference knowledge resource, into TransOMCS, of the same representation as ConceptNet [Liu and Singh, 2004] but two orders of magnitude larger. Experimental results demonstrate the transferability of linguistic knowledge to commonsense knowledge and the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of quantity, novelty, and quality. TransOMCS is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/TransOMCS.
Jie Huang, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
Network representation learning has aroused widespread interests in recent years. While most of the existing methods deal with edges as pairwise relationships, only a few studies have been proposed for hyper-networks to capture more complicated tuplewise relationships among multiple nodes. A hyper-network is a network where each edge, called hyperedge, connects an arbitrary number of nodes. Different from conventional networks, hyper-networks have certain degrees of indecomposability such that the nodes in a subset of a hyperedge may not possess a strong relationship. That is the main reason why traditional algorithms fail in learning representations in hyper-networks by simply decomposing hyperedges into pairwise relationships. In this paper, we firstly define a metric to depict the degrees of indecomposability for hyper-networks. Then we propose a new concept called hyper-path and design hyper-path-based random walks to preserve the structural information of hyper-networks according to the analysis of the indecomposability. Then a carefully designed algorithm, Hyper-gram, utilizes these random walks to capture both pairwise relationships and tuplewise relationships in the whole hyper-networks. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several real-world datasets covering the tasks of link prediction and hyper-network reconstruction, and results demonstrate the rationality, validity, and effectiveness of our methods compared with those existing state-of-the-art models designed for conventional networks or hyper-networks.
Xin Liu, Haojie Pan, Mutian He, Yangqiu Song, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang
In this paper, we study a new graph learning problem: learning to count subgraph isomorphisms. Different from other traditional graph learning problems such as node classification and link prediction, subgraph isomorphism counting is NP-complete and requires more global inference to oversee the whole graph. To make it scalable for large-scale graphs and patterns, we propose a learning framework which augments different representation learning architectures and iteratively attends pattern and target data graphs to memorize subgraph isomorphisms for the global counting. We develop both small graphs (<= 1,024 subgraph isomorphisms in each) and large graphs (<= 4,096 subgraph isomorphisms in each) sets to evaluate different models. A mutagenic compound dataset, MUTAG, is also used to evaluate neural models and demonstrate the success of transfer learning. While the learning based approach is inexact, we are able to generalize to count large patterns and data graphs in linear time compared to the exponential time of the original NP-complete problem. Experimental results show that learning based subgraph isomorphism counting can speed up the traditional algorithm, VF2, 10-1,000 times with acceptable errors. Domain adaptation based on fine-tuning also shows the usefulness of our approach in real-world applications.
Xintong Yu, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yan Song, Changshui Zhang
Grounding a pronoun to a visual object it refers to requires complex reasoning from various information sources, especially in conversational scenarios. For example, when people in a conversation talk about something all speakers can see, they often directly use pronouns (e.g., it) to refer to it without previous introduction. This fact brings a huge challenge for modern natural language understanding systems, particularly conventional context-based pronoun coreference models. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we formally define the task of visual-aware pronoun coreference resolution (PCR) and introduce VisPro, a large-scale dialogue PCR dataset, to investigate whether and how the visual information can help resolve pronouns in dialogues. We then propose a novel visual-aware PCR model, VisCoref, for this task and conduct comprehensive experiments and case studies on our dataset. Results demonstrate the importance of the visual information in this PCR case and show the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Xiaojun Yang, Haoyu Zhong, Penglin Du, Keyi Zhou, Xingjin Lai, Zhengdong Wang, Yik Lun Lau, Yangqiu Song, Liyaning Tang
Practices in the built environment have become more digitalized with the rapid development of modern design and construction technologies. However, the requirement of practitioners or scholars to gather complicated professional knowledge in the built environment has not been satisfied yet. In this paper, more than 80,000 paper abstracts in the built environment field were obtained to build a knowledge graph, a knowledge base storing entities and their connective relations in a graph-structured data model. To ensure the retrieval accuracy of the entities and relations in the knowledge graph, two well-annotated datasets have been created, containing 2,000 instances and 1,450 instances each in 29 relations for the named entity recognition task and relation extraction task respectively. These two tasks were solved by two BERT-based models trained on the proposed dataset. Both models attained an accuracy above 85% on these two tasks. More than 200,000 high-quality relations and entities were obtained using these models to extract all abstract data. Finally, this knowledge graph is presented as a self-developed visualization system to reveal relations between various entities in the domain. Both the source code and the annotated dataset can be found here: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/BEKG.
Huan Zhao, Xiaogang Xu, Yangqiu Song, Dik Lun Lee, Zhao Chen, Han Gao
PageRank has been widely used to measure the authority or the influence of a user in social networks. However, conventional PageRank only makes use of edge-based relations, which represent first-order relations between two connected nodes. It ignores higher-order relations that may exist between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, motif-based PageRank (MPR), to incorporate higher-order relations into the conventional PageRank computation. Motifs are subgraphs consisting of a small number of nodes. We use motifs to capture higher-order relations between nodes in a network and introduce two methods, one linear and one non-linear, to combine PageRank with higher-order relations. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world networks, namely, DBLP, Epinions, and Ciao. We study different types of motifs, including 3-node simple and anchor motifs, 4-node and 5-node motifs. Besides using single motif, we also run MPR with ensemble of multiple motifs. We also design a learning task to evaluate the abilities of authority prediction with motif-based features. All experimental results demonstrate that MPR can significantly improve the performance of user ranking in social networks compared to the baseline methods.
Xin Liu, Jiefu Ou, Yangqiu Song, Xin Jiang
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most difficult parts in shallow discourse parsing as the relation prediction without explicit connectives requires the language understanding at both the text span level and the sentence level. Previous studies mainly focus on the interactions between two arguments. We argue that a powerful contextualized representation module, a bilateral multi-perspective matching module, and a global information fusion module are all important to implicit discourse analysis. We propose a novel model to combine these modules together. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model outperforms BERT and other state-of-the-art systems on the PDTB dataset by around 8% and CoNLL 2016 datasets around 16%. We also analyze the effectiveness of different modules in the implicit discourse relation classification task and demonstrate how different levels of representation learning can affect the results.
Ziqian Zeng, Wenxuan Zhou, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification. Instead of using user-generated ratings or annotations provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as "supervision." These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment polarity classifier to predict the sentiment polarity of each aspect given a document. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity, to the objective function, we can inject the sentiment polarity classifier to the objective via the variational lower bound. We can learn a sentiment polarity classifier by optimizing the lower bound. We show that our method can outperform weakly supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets and can be comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised method with hundreds of labels per aspect.
Yan Liang, Xin Liu, Jianwen Zhang, Yangqiu Song
Unsupervised relation discovery aims to discover new relations from a given text corpus without annotated data. However, it does not consider existing human annotated knowledge bases even when they are relevant to the relations to be discovered. In this paper, we study the problem of how to use out-of-relation knowledge bases to supervise the discovery of unseen relations, where out-of-relation means that relations to discover from the text corpus and those in knowledge bases are not overlapped. We construct a set of constraints between entity pairs based on the knowledge base embedding and then incorporate constraints into the relation discovery by a variational auto-encoder based algorithm. Experiments show that our new approach can improve the state-of-the-art relation discovery performance by a large margin.
Hongming Zhang, Jiaxin Bai, Yan Song, Kun Xu, Changlong Yu, Yangqiu Song, Wilfred Ng, Dong Yu
Conventional word embeddings represent words with fixed vectors, which are usually trained based on co-occurrence patterns among words. In doing so, however, the power of such representations is limited, where the same word might be functionalized separately under different syntactic relations. To address this limitation, one solution is to incorporate relational dependencies of different words into their embeddings. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multiplex word embedding model, which can be easily extended according to various relations among words. As a result, each word has a center embedding to represent its overall semantics, and several relational embeddings to represent its relational dependencies. Compared to existing models, our model can effectively distinguish words with respect to different relations without introducing unnecessary sparseness. Moreover, to accommodate various relations, we use a small dimension for relational embeddings and our model is able to keep their effectiveness. Experiments on selectional preference acquisition and word similarity demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, and a further study of scalability also proves that our embeddings only need 1/20 of the original embedding size to achieve better performance.
Hongming Zhang, Yan Song, Yangqiu Song
Linking pronominal expressions to the correct references requires, in many cases, better analysis of the contextual information and external knowledge. In this paper, we propose a two-layer model for pronoun coreference resolution that leverages both context and external knowledge, where a knowledge attention mechanism is designed to ensure the model leveraging the appropriate source of external knowledge based on different context. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of our model, where it outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin.
Hongming Zhang, Hantian Ding, Yangqiu Song
Selectional Preference (SP) is a commonly observed language phenomenon and proved to be useful in many natural language processing tasks. To provide a better evaluation method for SP models, we introduce SP-10K, a large-scale evaluation set that provides human ratings for the plausibility of 10,000 SP pairs over five SP relations, covering 2,500 most frequent verbs, nouns, and adjectives in American English. Three representative SP acquisition methods based on pseudo-disambiguation are evaluated with SP-10K. To demonstrate the importance of our dataset, we investigate the relationship between SP-10K and the commonsense knowledge in ConceptNet5 and show the potential of using SP to represent the commonsense knowledge. We also use the Winograd Schema Challenge to prove that the proposed new SP relations are essential for the hard pronoun coreference resolution problem.
Yangqiu Song, Stephen Mayhew, Dan Roth
This paper presents an approach to classify documents in any language into an English topical label space, without any text categorization training data. The approach, Cross-Lingual Dataless Document Classification (CLDDC) relies on mapping the English labels or short category description into a Wikipedia-based semantic representation, and on the use of the target language Wikipedia. Consequently, performance could suffer when Wikipedia in the target language is small. In this paper, we focus on languages with small Wikipedias, (Small-Wikipedia languages, SWLs). We use a word-level dictionary to convert documents in a SWL to a large-Wikipedia language (LWLs), and then perform CLDDC based on the LWL's Wikipedia. This approach can be applied to thousands of languages, which can be contrasted with machine translation, which is a supervision heavy approach and can be done for about 100 languages. We also develop a ranking algorithm that makes use of language similarity metrics to automatically select a good LWL, and show that this significantly improves classification of SWLs' documents, performing comparably to the best bridge possible.
Hongming Zhang, Xinran Zhao, Yangqiu Song
In this paper, we present the first comprehensive categorization of essential commonsense knowledge for answering the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC). For each of the questions, we invite annotators to first provide reasons for making correct decisions and then categorize them into six major knowledge categories. By doing so, we better understand the limitation of existing methods (i.e., what kind of knowledge cannot be effectively represented or inferred with existing methods) and shed some light on the commonsense knowledge that we need to acquire in the future for better commonsense reasoning. Moreover, to investigate whether current WSC models can understand the commonsense or they simply solve the WSC questions based on the statistical bias of the dataset, we leverage the collected reasons to develop a new task called WinoWhy, which requires models to distinguish plausible reasons from very similar but wrong reasons for all WSC questions. Experimental results prove that even though pre-trained language representation models have achieved promising progress on the original WSC dataset, they are still struggling at WinoWhy. Further experiments show that even though supervised models can achieve better performance, the performance of these models can be sensitive to the dataset distribution. WinoWhy and all codes are available at: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/WinoWhy.
Hongming Zhang, Xin Liu, Haojie Pan, Yangqiu Song, Cane Wing-Ki Leung
Understanding human's language requires complex world knowledge. However, existing large-scale knowledge graphs mainly focus on knowledge about entities while ignoring knowledge about activities, states, or events, which are used to describe how entities or things act in the real world. To fill this gap, we develop ASER (activities, states, events, and their relations), a large-scale eventuality knowledge graph extracted from more than 11-billion-token unstructured textual data. ASER contains 15 relation types belonging to five categories, 194-million unique eventualities, and 64-million unique edges among them. Both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of ASER.
Nedjma Ousidhoum, Zizheng Lin, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Dit-Yan Yeung
Current research on hate speech analysis is typically oriented towards monolingual and single classification tasks. In this paper, we present a new multilingual multi-aspect hate speech analysis dataset and use it to test the current state-of-the-art multilingual multitask learning approaches. We evaluate our dataset in various classification settings, then we discuss how to leverage our annotations in order to improve hate speech detection and classification in general.
Yangqiu Song, Dan Roth
Machine learning has become pervasive in multiple domains, impacting a wide variety of applications, such as knowledge discovery and data mining, natural language processing, information retrieval, computer vision, social and health informatics, ubiquitous computing, etc. Two essential problems of machine learning are how to generate features and how to acquire labels for machines to learn. Particularly, labeling large amount of data for each domain-specific problem can be very time consuming and costly. It has become a key obstacle in making learning protocols realistic in applications. In this paper, we will discuss how to use the existing general-purpose world knowledge to enhance machine learning processes, by enriching the features or reducing the labeling work. We start from the comparison of world knowledge with domain-specific knowledge, and then introduce three key problems in using world knowledge in learning processes, i.e., explicit and implicit feature representation, inference for knowledge linking and disambiguation, and learning with direct or indirect supervision. Finally we discuss the future directions of this research topic.
Mutian He, Yangqiu Song, Kun Xu, Dong Yu
Commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs) like Atomic and ASER are substantially different from conventional KGs as they consist of much larger number of nodes formed by loosely-structured text, which, though, enables them to handle highly diverse queries in natural language related to commonsense, leads to unique challenges for automatic KG construction methods. Besides identifying relations absent from the KG between nodes, such methods are also expected to explore absent nodes represented by text, in which different real-world things, or entities, may appear. To deal with the innumerable entities involved with commonsense in the real world, we introduce to CKG construction methods conceptualization, i.e., to view entities mentioned in text as instances of specific concepts or vice versa. We build synthetic triples by conceptualization, and further formulate the task as triple classification, handled by a discriminatory model with knowledge transferred from pretrained language models and fine-tuned by negative sampling. Experiments demonstrate that our methods can effectively identify plausible triples and expand the KG by triples of both new nodes and edges of high diversity and novelty.
Yinghua Zhang, Yu Zhang, Ying Wei, Kun Bai, Yangqiu Song, Qiang Yang
Deep domain adaptation models learn a neural network in an unlabeled target domain by leveraging the knowledge from a labeled source domain. This can be achieved by learning a domain-invariant feature space. Though the learned representations are separable in the source domain, they usually have a large variance and samples with different class labels tend to overlap in the target domain, which yields suboptimal adaptation performance. To fill the gap, a Fisher loss is proposed to learn discriminative representations which are within-class compact and between-class separable. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the Fisher loss is a general and effective loss for deep domain adaptation. Noticeable improvements are brought when it is used together with widely adopted transfer criteria, including MMD, CORAL and domain adversarial loss. For example, an absolute improvement of 6.67% in terms of the mean accuracy is attained when the Fisher loss is used together with the domain adversarial loss on the Office-Home dataset.
Haotian Li, Huan Wei, Yong Wang, Yangqiu Song, Huamin Qu
Student performance prediction is critical to online education. It can benefit many downstream tasks on online learning platforms, such as estimating dropout rates, facilitating strategic intervention, and enabling adaptive online learning. Interactive online question pools provide students with interesting interactive questions to practice their knowledge in online education. However, little research has been done on student performance prediction in interactive online question pools. Existing work on student performance prediction targets at online learning platforms with predefined course curriculum and accurate knowledge labels like MOOC platforms, but they are not able to fully model knowledge evolution of students in interactive online question pools. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to achieve better student performance prediction in interactive online question pools. Specifically, we model the relationship between students and questions using student interactions to construct the student-interaction-question network and further present a new GNN model, called R^2GCN, which intrinsically works for the heterogeneous networks, to achieve generalizable student performance prediction in interactive online question pools. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world dataset consisting of 104,113 mouse trajectories generated in the problem-solving process of over 4000 students on 1631 questions. The experiment results show that our approach can achieve a much higher accuracy of student performance prediction than both traditional machine learning approaches and GNN models.