For named entity recognition (NER) in zero-resource languages, utilizing knowledge distillation methods to transfer language-independent knowledge from the rich-resource source languages to zero-resource languages is an effective means. Typically, these approaches adopt a teacher-student architecture, where the teacher network is trained in the source language, and the student network seeks to learn knowledge from the teacher network and is expected to perform well in the target language. Despite the impressive performance achieved by these methods, we argue that they have two limitations. Firstly, the teacher network fails to effectively learn language-independent knowledge shared across languages due to the differences in the feature distribution between the source and target languages. Secondly, the student network acquires all of its knowledge from the teacher network and ignores the learning of target language-specific knowledge. Undesirably, these limitations would hinder the model's performance in the target language. This paper proposes an unsupervised prototype knowledge distillation network (ProKD) to address these issues. Specifically, ProKD presents a contrastive learning-based prototype alignment method to achieve class feature alignment by adjusting the distance among prototypes in the source and target languages, boosting the teacher network's capacity to acquire language-independent knowledge. In addition, ProKD introduces a prototypical self-training method to learn the intrinsic structure of the language by retraining the student network on the target data using samples' distance information from prototypes, thereby enhancing the student network's ability to acquire language-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments on three benchmark cross-lingual NER datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Large multilingual models trained with self-supervision achieve state-of-the-art results in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Self-supervised pretrained models are often fine-tuned on parallel data from one or multiple language pairs for machine translation. Multilingual fine-tuning improves performance on low-resource languages but requires modifying the entire model and can be prohibitively expensive. Training a new adapter on each language pair or training a single adapter on all language pairs without updating the pretrained model has been proposed as a parameter-efficient alternative. However, the former does not permit any sharing between languages, while the latter shares parameters for all languages and is susceptible to negative interference. In this paper, we propose training language-family adapters on top of mBART-50 to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. Our approach outperforms related baselines, yielding higher translation scores on average when translating from English to 17 different low-resource languages. We also show that language-family adapters provide an effective method to translate to languages unseen during pretraining.
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective training strategy to improve the lightweight student models under the guidance of cumbersome teachers. However, the large architecture difference across the teacher-student pairs limits the distillation gains. In contrast to previous adaptive distillation methods to reduce the teacher-student gap, we explore a novel training-free framework to search for the best student architectures for a given teacher. Our work first empirically show that the optimal model under vanilla training cannot be the winner in distillation. Secondly, we find that the similarity of feature semantics and sample relations between random-initialized teacher-student networks have good correlations with final distillation performances. Thus, we efficiently measure similarity matrixs conditioned on the semantic activation maps to select the optimal student via an evolutionary algorithm without any training. In this way, our student architecture search for Distillation WithOut Training (DisWOT) significantly improves the performance of the model in the distillation stage with at least 180$\times$ training acceleration. Additionally, we extend similarity metrics in DisWOT as new distillers and KD-based zero-proxies. Our experiments on CIFAR, ImageNet and NAS-Bench-201 demonstrate that our technique achieves state-of-the-art results on different search spaces. Our project and code are available at //lilujunai.github.io/DisWOT-CVPR2023/.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
There has been appreciable progress in unsupervised network representation learning (UNRL) approaches over graphs recently with flexible random-walk approaches, new optimization objectives and deep architectures. However, there is no common ground for systematic comparison of embeddings to understand their behavior for different graphs and tasks. In this paper we theoretically group different approaches under a unifying framework and empirically investigate the effectiveness of different network representation methods. In particular, we argue that most of the UNRL approaches either explicitly or implicit model and exploit context information of a node. Consequently, we propose a framework that casts a variety of approaches -- random walk based, matrix factorization and deep learning based -- into a unified context-based optimization function. We systematically group the methods based on their similarities and differences. We study the differences among these methods in detail which we later use to explain their performance differences (on downstream tasks). We conduct a large-scale empirical study considering 9 popular and recent UNRL techniques and 11 real-world datasets with varying structural properties and two common tasks -- node classification and link prediction. We find that there is no single method that is a clear winner and that the choice of a suitable method is dictated by certain properties of the embedding methods, task and structural properties of the underlying graph. In addition we also report the common pitfalls in evaluation of UNRL methods and come up with suggestions for experimental design and interpretation of results.
Few-shot learning aims to learn novel categories from very few samples given some base categories with sufficient training samples. The main challenge of this task is the novel categories are prone to dominated by color, texture, shape of the object or background context (namely specificity), which are distinct for the given few training samples but not common for the corresponding categories (see Figure 1). Fortunately, we find that transferring information of the correlated based categories can help learn the novel concepts and thus avoid the novel concept being dominated by the specificity. Besides, incorporating semantic correlations among different categories can effectively regularize this information transfer. In this work, we represent the semantic correlations in the form of structured knowledge graph and integrate this graph into deep neural networks to promote few-shot learning by a novel Knowledge Graph Transfer Network (KGTN). Specifically, by initializing each node with the classifier weight of the corresponding category, a propagation mechanism is learned to adaptively propagate node message through the graph to explore node interaction and transfer classifier information of the base categories to those of the novel ones. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset show significant performance improvement compared with current leading competitors. Furthermore, we construct an ImageNet-6K dataset that covers larger scale categories, i.e, 6,000 categories, and experiments on this dataset further demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
For languages with no annotated resources, transferring knowledge from rich-resource languages is an effective solution for named entity recognition (NER). While all existing methods directly transfer from source-learned model to a target language, in this paper, we propose to fine-tune the learned model with a few similar examples given a test case, which could benefit the prediction by leveraging the structural and semantic information conveyed in such similar examples. To this end, we present a meta-learning algorithm to find a good model parameter initialization that could fast adapt to the given test case and propose to construct multiple pseudo-NER tasks for meta-training by computing sentence similarities. To further improve the model's generalization ability across different languages, we introduce a masking scheme and augment the loss function with an additional maximum term during meta-training. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-lingual named entity recognition with minimal resources over five target languages. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across the board.
We study the problem of embedding-based entity alignment between knowledge graphs (KGs). Previous works mainly focus on the relational structure of entities. Some further incorporate another type of features, such as attributes, for refinement. However, a vast of entity features are still unexplored or not equally treated together, which impairs the accuracy and robustness of embedding-based entity alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that unifies multiple views of entities to learn embeddings for entity alignment. Specifically, we embed entities based on the views of entity names, relations and attributes, with several combination strategies. Furthermore, we design some cross-KG inference methods to enhance the alignment between two KGs. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art embedding-based entity alignment methods. The selected views, cross-KG inference and combination strategies all contribute to the performance improvement.
Previous cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment studies rely on entity embeddings derived only from monolingual KG structural information, which may fail at matching entities that have different facts in two KGs. In this paper, we introduce the topic entity graph, a local sub-graph of an entity, to represent entities with their contextual information in KG. From this view, the KB-alignment task can be formulated as a graph matching problem; and we further propose a graph-attention based solution, which first matches all entities in two topic entity graphs, and then jointly model the local matching information to derive a graph-level matching vector. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net).
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.