We study the problem of incorporating prior knowledge into a deep Transformer-based model,i.e.,Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to enhance its performance on semantic textual matching tasks. By probing and analyzing what BERT has already known when solving this task, we obtain better understanding of what task-specific knowledge BERT needs the most and where it is most needed. The analysis further motivates us to take a different approach than most existing works. Instead of using prior knowledge to create a new training task for fine-tuning BERT, we directly inject knowledge into BERT's multi-head attention mechanism. This leads us to a simple yet effective approach that enjoys fast training stage as it saves the model from training on additional data or tasks other than the main task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed knowledge-enhanced BERT is able to consistently improve semantic textual matching performance over the original BERT model, and the performance benefit is most salient when training data is scarce.
When trying to apply the recent advance of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies to real-world applications, privacy preservation imposes a crucial challenge, which, unfortunately, has not been well resolved. To address this issue, we study how to improve the effectiveness of NLU models under a Local Privacy setting, using BERT, a widely-used pretrained Language Model (LM), as an example. We systematically study the strengths and weaknesses of imposing dx-privacy, a relaxed variant of Local Differential Privacy, at different stages of language modeling: input text, token embeddings, and sequence representations. We then focus on the former two with privacy-constrained fine-tuning experiments to reveal the utility of BERT under local privacy constraints. More importantly, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose privacy-adaptive LM pretraining methods and demonstrate that they can significantly improve model performance on privatized text input. We also interpret the level of privacy preservation and provide our guidance on privacy parameter selections.
To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or similar query patterns in the document. However, we argue that they are inherently based on local interactions and do not generalise to ubiquitous, non-consecutive contextual relationships.In this work, we propose a novel relevance matching model based on graph neural networks to leverage the document-level word relationships for ad-hoc retrieval. In addition to the local interactions, we explicitly incorporate all contexts of a term through the graph-of-word text format. Matching patterns can be revealed accordingly to provide a more accurate relevance score. Our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two ad-hoc benchmarks. We also experimentally compare our model with BERT and show our ad-vantages on long documents.
Transformer-based models are now widely used in NLP, but we still do not understand a lot about their inner workings. This paper describes what is known to date about the famous BERT model (Devlin et al. 2019), synthesizing over 40 analysis studies. We also provide an overview of the proposed modifications to the model and its training regime. We then outline the directions for further research.
For many computer vision applications such as image captioning, visual question answering, and person search, learning discriminative feature representations at both image and text level is an essential yet challenging problem. Its challenges originate from the large word variance in the text domain as well as the difficulty of accurately measuring the distance between the features of the two modalities. Most prior work focuses on the latter challenge, by introducing loss functions that help the network learn better feature representations but fail to account for the complexity of the textual input. With that in mind, we introduce TIMAM: a Text-Image Modality Adversarial Matching approach that learns modality-invariant feature representations using adversarial and cross-modal matching objectives. In addition, we demonstrate that BERT, a publicly-available language model that extracts word embeddings, can successfully be applied in the text-to-image matching domain. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art cross-modal matching performance on four widely-used publicly-available datasets resulting in absolute improvements ranging from 2% to 5% in terms of rank-1 accuracy.
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.
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in learning universal language representations. As a state-of-the-art language model pre-training model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has achieved amazing results in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments to investigate different fine-tuning methods of BERT on text classification task and provide a general solution for BERT fine-tuning. Finally, the proposed solution obtains new state-of-the-art results on eight widely-studied text classification datasets.
This paper explores the problem of matching entities across different knowledge graphs. Given a query entity in one knowledge graph, we wish to find the corresponding real-world entity in another knowledge graph. We formalize this problem and present two large-scale datasets for this task based on exiting cross-ontology links between DBpedia and Wikidata, focused on several hundred thousand ambiguous entities. Using a classification-based approach, we find that a simple multi-layered perceptron based on representations derived from RDF2Vec graph embeddings of entities in each knowledge graph is sufficient to achieve high accuracy, with only small amounts of training data. The contributions of our work are datasets for examining this problem and strong baselines on which future work can be based.
Short text classification is one of important tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Unlike paragraphs or documents, short texts are more ambiguous since they have not enough contextual information, which poses a great challenge for classification. In this paper, we retrieve knowledge from external knowledge source to enhance the semantic representation of short texts. We take conceptual information as a kind of knowledge and incorporate it into deep neural networks. For the purpose of measuring the importance of knowledge, we introduce attention mechanisms and propose deep Short Text Classification with Knowledge powered Attention (STCKA). We utilize Concept towards Short Text (C- ST) attention and Concept towards Concept Set (C-CS) attention to acquire the weight of concepts from two aspects. And we classify a short text with the help of conceptual information. Unlike traditional approaches, our model acts like a human being who has intrinsic ability to make decisions based on observation (i.e., training data for machines) and pays more attention to important knowledge. We also conduct extensive experiments on four public datasets for different tasks. The experimental results and case studies show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, justifying the effectiveness of knowledge powered attention.
In this paper, we study the problem of image-text matching. Inferring the latent semantic alignment between objects or other salient stuffs (e.g. snow, sky, lawn) and the corresponding words in sentences allows to capture fine-grained interplay between vision and language, and makes image-text matching more interpretable. Prior works either simply aggregate the similarity of all possible pairs of regions and words without attending differentially to more and less important words or regions, or use a multi-step attentional process to capture limited number of semantic alignments which is less interpretable. In this paper, we present Stacked Cross Attention to discover the full latent alignments using both image regions and words in sentence as context and infer the image-text similarity. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on the MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets. On Flickr30K, our approach outperforms the current best methods by 22.1% in text retrieval from image query, and 18.2% in image retrieval with text query (based on Recall@1). On MS-COCO, our approach improves sentence retrieval by 17.8% and image retrieval by 16.6% (based on Recall@1 using the 5K test set).
Deep convolutional networks for semantic image segmentation typically require large-scale labeled data, e.g. ImageNet and MS COCO, for network pre-training. To reduce annotation efforts, self-supervised semantic segmentation is recently proposed to pre-train a network without any human-provided labels. The key of this new form of learning is to design a proxy task (e.g. image colorization), from which a discriminative loss can be formulated on unlabeled data. Many proxy tasks, however, lack the critical supervision signals that could induce discriminative representation for the target image segmentation task. Thus self-supervision's performance is still far from that of supervised pre-training. In this study, we overcome this limitation by incorporating a "mix-and-match" (M&M) tuning stage in the self-supervision pipeline. The proposed approach is readily pluggable to many self-supervision methods and does not use more annotated samples than the original process. Yet, it is capable of boosting the performance of target image segmentation task to surpass fully-supervised pre-trained counterpart. The improvement is made possible by better harnessing the limited pixel-wise annotations in the target dataset. Specifically, we first introduce the "mix" stage, which sparsely samples and mixes patches from the target set to reflect rich and diverse local patch statistics of target images. A "match" stage then forms a class-wise connected graph, which can be used to derive a strong triplet-based discriminative loss for fine-tuning the network. Our paradigm follows the standard practice in existing self-supervised studies and no extra data or label is required. With the proposed M&M approach, for the first time, a self-supervision method can achieve comparable or even better performance compared to its ImageNet pre-trained counterpart on both PASCAL VOC2012 dataset and CityScapes dataset.