Event extraction aims to recognize pre-defined event triggers and arguments from texts, which suffer from the lack of high-quality annotations. In most NLP applications, involving a large scale of synthetic training data is a practical and effective approach to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. However, when applying to the task of event extraction, recent data augmentation methods often neglect the problem of grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting, leading to unsatisfactory performances. In order to solve these problems, we propose a denoised structure-to-text augmentation framework for event extraction DAEE, which generates additional training data through the knowledge-based structure-to-text generation model and selects the effective subset from the generated data iteratively with a deep reinforcement learning agent. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extraction and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art.
Document-level event extraction is a long-standing challenging information retrieval problem involving a sequence of sub-tasks: entity extraction, event type judgment, and event type-specific multi-event extraction. However, addressing the problem as multiple learning tasks leads to increased model complexity. Also, existing methods insufficiently utilize the correlation of entities crossing different events, resulting in limited event extraction performance. This paper introduces a novel framework for document-level event extraction, incorporating a new data structure called token-event-role and a multi-channel argument role prediction module. The proposed data structure enables our model to uncover the primary role of tokens in multiple events, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of event relationships. By leveraging the multi-channel prediction module, we transform entity and multi-event extraction into a single task of predicting token-event pairs, thereby reducing the overall parameter size and enhancing model efficiency. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 9.5 percentage points in terms of the F1 score, highlighting its superior performance in event extraction. Furthermore, an ablation study confirms the significant value of the proposed data structure in improving event extraction tasks, further validating its importance in enhancing the overall performance of the framework.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
What matters for contrastive learning? We argue that contrastive learning heavily relies on informative features, or "hard" (positive or negative) features. Early works include more informative features by applying complex data augmentations and large batch size or memory bank, and recent works design elaborate sampling approaches to explore informative features. The key challenge toward exploring such features is that the source multi-view data is generated by applying random data augmentations, making it infeasible to always add useful information in the augmented data. Consequently, the informativeness of features learned from such augmented data is limited. In response, we propose to directly augment the features in latent space, thereby learning discriminative representations without a large amount of input data. We perform a meta learning technique to build the augmentation generator that updates its network parameters by considering the performance of the encoder. However, insufficient input data may lead the encoder to learn collapsed features and therefore malfunction the augmentation generator. A new margin-injected regularization is further added in the objective function to avoid the encoder learning a degenerate mapping. To contrast all features in one gradient back-propagation step, we adopt the proposed optimization-driven unified contrastive loss instead of the conventional contrastive loss. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets.
Answering complex questions about images is an ambitious goal for machine intelligence, which requires a joint understanding of images, text, and commonsense knowledge, as well as a strong reasoning ability. Recently, multimodal Transformers have made great progress in the task of Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR), by jointly understanding visual objects and text tokens through layers of cross-modality attention. However, these approaches do not utilize the rich structure of the scene and the interactions between objects which are essential in answering complex commonsense questions. We propose a Scene Graph Enhanced Image-Text Learning (SGEITL) framework to incorporate visual scene graphs in commonsense reasoning. To exploit the scene graph structure, at the model structure level, we propose a multihop graph transformer for regularizing attention interaction among hops. As for pre-training, a scene-graph-aware pre-training method is proposed to leverage structure knowledge extracted in the visual scene graph. Moreover, we introduce a method to train and generate domain-relevant visual scene graphs using textual annotations in a weakly-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on VCR and other tasks show a significant performance boost compared with the state-of-the-art methods and prove the efficacy of each proposed component.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
Most previous event extraction studies have relied heavily on features derived from annotated event mentions, thus cannot be applied to new event types without annotation effort. In this work, we take a fresh look at event extraction and model it as a grounding problem. We design a transferable neural architecture, mapping event mentions and types jointly into a shared semantic space using structural and compositional neural networks, where the type of each event mention can be determined by the closest of all candidate types . By leveraging (1)~available manual annotations for a small set of existing event types and (2)~existing event ontologies, our framework applies to new event types without requiring additional annotation. Experiments on both existing event types (e.g., ACE, ERE) and new event types (e.g., FrameNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. \textit{Without any manual annotations} for 23 new event types, our zero-shot framework achieved performance comparable to a state-of-the-art supervised model which is trained from the annotations of 500 event mentions.