While Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a widely studied task, making inferences of entities with only a few labeled data has been challenging, especially for entities with nested structures. Unlike flat entities, entities and their nested entities are more likely to have similar semantic feature representations, drastically increasing difficulties in classifying different entity categories in the few-shot setting. Although prior work has briefly discussed nested structures in the context of few-shot learning, to our best knowledge, this paper is the first one specifically dedicated to studying the few-shot nested NER task. Leveraging contextual dependency to distinguish nested entities, we propose a Biaffine-based Contrastive Learning (BCL) framework. We first design a Biaffine span representation module for learning the contextual span dependency representation for each entity span rather than only learning its semantic representation. We then merge these two representations by the residual connection to distinguish nested entities. Finally, we build a contrastive learning framework to adjust the representation distribution for larger margin boundaries and more generalized domain transfer learning ability. We conducted experimental studies on three English, German, and Russian nested NER datasets. The results show that the BCL outperformed three baseline models on the 1-shot and 5-shot tasks in terms of F1 score.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
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.
With the rise and development of deep learning, computer vision has been tremendously transformed and reshaped. As an important research area in computer vision, scene text detection and recognition has been inescapably influenced by this wave of revolution, consequentially entering the era of deep learning. In recent years, the community has witnessed substantial advancements in mindset, approach and performance. This survey is aimed at summarizing and analyzing the major changes and significant progresses of scene text detection and recognition in the deep learning era. Through this article, we devote to: (1) introduce new insights and ideas; (2) highlight recent techniques and benchmarks; (3) look ahead into future trends. Specifically, we will emphasize the dramatic differences brought by deep learning and the grand challenges still remained. We expect that this review paper would serve as a reference book for researchers in this field. Related resources are also collected and compiled in our Github repository: //github.com/Jyouhou/SceneTextPapers.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.
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.
We study the problem of named entity recognition (NER) from electronic medical records, which is one of the most fundamental and critical problems for medical text mining. Medical records which are written by clinicians from different specialties usually contain quite different terminologies and writing styles. The difference of specialties and the cost of human annotation makes it particularly difficult to train a universal medical NER system. In this paper, we propose a label-aware double transfer learning framework (La-DTL) for cross-specialty NER, so that a medical NER system designed for one specialty could be conveniently applied to another one with minimal annotation efforts. The transferability is guaranteed by two components: (i) we propose label-aware MMD for feature representation transfer, and (ii) we perform parameter transfer with a theoretical upper bound which is also label aware. We conduct extensive experiments on 12 cross-specialty NER tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that La-DTL provides consistent accuracy improvement over strong baselines. Besides, the promising experimental results on non-medical NER scenarios indicate that La-DTL is potential to be seamlessly adapted to a wide range of NER tasks.
In this paper we investigate the role of the dependency tree in a named entity recognizer upon using a set of GCN. We perform a comparison among different NER architectures and show that the grammar of a sentence positively influences the results. Experiments on the ontonotes dataset demonstrate consistent performance improvements, without requiring heavy feature engineering nor additional language-specific knowledge.
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.