Acronyms and long-forms are commonly found in research documents, more so in documents from scientific and legal domains. Many acronyms used in such documents are domain-specific and are very rarely found in normal text corpora. Owing to this, transformer-based NLP models often detect OOV (Out of Vocabulary) for acronym tokens, especially for non-English languages, and their performance suffers while linking acronyms to their long forms during extraction. Moreover, pretrained transformer models like BERT are not specialized to handle scientific and legal documents. With these points being the overarching motivation behind this work, we propose a novel framework CABACE: Character-Aware BERT for ACronym Extraction, which takes into account character sequences in text and is adapted to scientific and legal domains by masked language modelling. We further use an objective with an augmented loss function, adding the max loss and mask loss terms to the standard cross-entropy loss for training CABACE. We further leverage pseudo labelling and adversarial data generation to improve the generalizability of the framework. Experimental results prove the superiority of the proposed framework in comparison to various baselines. Additionally, we show that the proposed framework is better suited than baseline models for zero-shot generalization to non-English languages, thus reinforcing the effectiveness of our approach. Our team BacKGProp secured the highest scores on the French dataset, second-highest on Danish and Vietnamese, and third-highest in the English-Legal dataset on the global leaderboard for the acronym extraction (AE) shared task at SDU AAAI-22.
Unsupervised domain adaptation approaches have recently succeeded in various medical image segmentation tasks. The reported works often tackle the domain shift problem by aligning the domain-invariant features and minimizing the domain-specific discrepancies. That strategy works well when the difference between a specific domain and between different domains is slight. However, the generalization ability of these models on diverse imaging modalities remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces UDA-VAE++, an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for cardiac segmentation with a compact loss function lower bound. To estimate this new lower bound, we develop a novel Structure Mutual Information Estimation (SMIE) block with a global estimator, a local estimator, and a prior information matching estimator to maximize the mutual information between the reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Specifically, we design a novel sequential reparameterization scheme that enables information flow and variance correction from the low-resolution latent space to the high-resolution latent space. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark cardiac segmentation datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art qualitatively and quantitatively. The code is available at //github.com/LOUEY233/Toward-Mutual-Information}{//github.com/LOUEY233/Toward-Mutual-Information
Biomedical research is growing at such an exponential pace that scientists, researchers, and practitioners are no more able to cope with the amount of published literature in the domain. The knowledge presented in the literature needs to be systematized in such a way that claims and hypotheses can be easily found, accessed, and validated. Knowledge graphs can provide such a framework for semantic knowledge representation from literature. However, in order to build a knowledge graph, it is necessary to extract knowledge as relationships between biomedical entities and normalize both entities and relationship types. In this paper, we present and compare a few rule-based and machine learning-based (Naive Bayes, Random Forests as examples of traditional machine learning methods and DistilBERT and T5-based models as examples of modern deep learning transformers) methods for scalable relationship extraction from biomedical literature, and for the integration into the knowledge graphs. We examine how resilient are these various methods to unbalanced and fairly small datasets. Our experiments show that transformer-based models handle well both small (due to pre-training on a large dataset) and unbalanced datasets. The best performing model was the DistilBERT-based model fine-tuned on balanced data, with a reported F1-score of 0.89.
Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Early studies mainly focused on answering simple questions over KBs and achieved great success. However, their performance on complex questions is still far from satisfactory. Therefore, in recent years, researchers propose a large number of novel methods, which looked into the challenges of answering complex questions. In this survey, we review recent advances on KBQA with the focus on solving complex questions, which usually contain multiple subjects, express compound relations, or involve numerical operations. In detail, we begin with introducing the complex KBQA task and relevant background. Then, we describe benchmark datasets for complex KBQA task and introduce the construction process of these datasets. Next, we present two mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods. Specifically, we illustrate their procedures with flow designs and discuss their major differences and similarities. After that, we summarize the challenges that these two categories of methods encounter when answering complex questions, and explicate advanced solutions and techniques used in existing work. Finally, we conclude and discuss several promising directions related to complex KBQA for future research.
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) is a promising way to alleviate performance drop of detectors in new scenes. Albeit great effort made in single source domain adaptation, a more generalized task with multiple source domains remains not being well explored, due to knowledge degradation during their combination. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, namely target-relevant knowledge preservation (TRKP), to unsupervised multi-source DAOD. Specifically, TRKP adopts the teacher-student framework, where the multi-head teacher network is built to extract knowledge from labeled source domains and guide the student network to learn detectors in unlabeled target domain. The teacher network is further equipped with an adversarial multi-source disentanglement (AMSD) module to preserve source domain-specific knowledge and simultaneously perform cross-domain alignment. Besides, a holistic target-relevant mining (HTRM) scheme is developed to re-weight the source images according to the source-target relevance. By this means, the teacher network is enforced to capture target-relevant knowledge, thus benefiting decreasing domain shift when mentoring object detection in the target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on various widely used benchmarks with new state-of-the-art scores reported, highlighting the effectiveness.
In the last decade, many deep learning models have been well trained and made a great success in various fields of machine intelligence, especially for computer vision and natural language processing. To better leverage the potential of these well-trained models in intra-domain or cross-domain transfer learning situations, knowledge distillation (KD) and domain adaptation (DA) are proposed and become research highlights. They both aim to transfer useful information from a well-trained model with original training data. However, the original data is not always available in many cases due to privacy, copyright or confidentiality. Recently, the data-free knowledge transfer paradigm has attracted appealing attention as it deals with distilling valuable knowledge from well-trained models without requiring to access to the training data. In particular, it mainly consists of the data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) and source data-free domain adaptation (SFDA). On the one hand, DFKD aims to transfer the intra-domain knowledge of original data from a cumbersome teacher network to a compact student network for model compression and efficient inference. On the other hand, the goal of SFDA is to reuse the cross-domain knowledge stored in a well-trained source model and adapt it to a target domain. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on data-free knowledge transfer from the perspectives of knowledge distillation and unsupervised domain adaptation, to help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Applications and challenges of the two areas are briefly reviewed, respectively. Furthermore, we provide some insights to the subject of future research.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
Recent work pre-training Transformers with self-supervised objectives on large text corpora has shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks including text summarization. However, pre-training objectives tailored for abstractive text summarization have not been explored. Furthermore there is a lack of systematic evaluation across diverse domains. In this work, we propose pre-training large Transformer-based encoder-decoder models on massive text corpora with a new self-supervised objective. In PEGASUS, important sentences are removed/masked from an input document and are generated together as one output sequence from the remaining sentences, similar to an extractive summary. We evaluated our best PEGASUS model on 12 downstream summarization tasks spanning news, science, stories, instructions, emails, patents, and legislative bills. Experiments demonstrate it achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 12 downstream datasets measured by ROUGE scores. Our model also shows surprising performance on low-resource summarization, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results on 6 datasets with only 1000 examples. Finally we validated our results using human evaluation and show that our model summaries achieve human performance on multiple datasets.
Generating texts which express complex ideas spanning multiple sentences requires a structured representation of their content (document plan), but these representations are prohibitively expensive to manually produce. In this work, we address the problem of generating coherent multi-sentence texts from the output of an information extraction system, and in particular a knowledge graph. Graphical knowledge representations are ubiquitous in computing, but pose a significant challenge for text generation techniques due to their non-hierarchical nature, collapsing of long-distance dependencies, and structural variety. We introduce a novel graph transforming encoder which can leverage the relational structure of such knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. Incorporated into an encoder-decoder setup, we provide an end-to-end trainable system for graph-to-text generation that we apply to the domain of scientific text. Automatic and human evaluations show that our technique produces more informative texts which exhibit better document structure than competitive encoder-decoder methods.
Current state-of-the-art semantic role labeling (SRL) uses a deep neural network with no explicit linguistic features. However, prior work has shown that gold syntax trees can dramatically improve SRL decoding, suggesting the possibility of increased accuracy from explicit modeling of syntax. In this work, we present linguistically-informed self-attention (LISA): a neural network model that combines multi-head self-attention with multi-task learning across dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, predicate detection and SRL. Unlike previous models which require significant pre-processing to prepare linguistic features, LISA can incorporate syntax using merely raw tokens as input, encoding the sequence only once to simultaneously perform parsing, predicate detection and role labeling for all predicates. Syntax is incorporated by training one attention head to attend to syntactic parents for each token. Moreover, if a high-quality syntactic parse is already available, it can be beneficially injected at test time without re-training our SRL model. In experiments on CoNLL-2005 SRL, LISA achieves new state-of-the-art performance for a model using predicted predicates and standard word embeddings, attaining 2.5 F1 absolute higher than the previous state-of-the-art on newswire and more than 3.5 F1 on out-of-domain data, nearly 10% reduction in error. On ConLL-2012 English SRL we also show an improvement of more than 2.5 F1. LISA also out-performs the state-of-the-art with contextually-encoded (ELMo) word representations, by nearly 1.0 F1 on news and more than 2.0 F1 on out-of-domain text.