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1. Fine-Grained Entity Typing for Domain Independent Entity Linking

   Onoe, Yasumasa; Durrett, Greg (January 2020, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a "domain" is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grained entity properties, which can help disambiguate between even closely related entities. We derive a large inventory of types (tens of thousands) from Wikipedia categories, and use hyperlinked mentions in Wikipedia to distantly label data and train an entity typing model. At test time, we classify a mention with this typing model and use soft type predictions to link the mention to the most similar candidate entity. We evaluate our entity linking system on the CoNLL-YAGO dataset and show that our approach outperforms prior domain-independent entity linking systems. We also test our approach in a harder setting derived from the WikilinksNED dataset where all the mention-entity pairs are unseen during test time. Results indicate that our approach generalizes better than a state-of-the-art neural model on the dataset. 

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2. Interpretable Entity Representations through Large-Scale Typing

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.54  

   Onoe, Yasumasa; Durrett, Greg (January 2020, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020)

   null (Ed.)

   In standard methodology for natural language processing, entities in text are typically embedded in dense vector spaces with pre-trained models. The embeddings produced this way are effective when fed into downstream models, but they require end-task fine-tuning and are fundamentally difficult to interpret. In this paper, we present an approach to creating entity representations that are human readable and achieve high performance on entity-related tasks out of the box. Our representations are vectors whose values correspond to posterior probabilities over fine-grained entity types, indicating the confidence of a typing model’s decision that the entity belongs to the corresponding type. We obtain these representations using a fine-grained entity typing model, trained either on supervised ultra-fine entity typing data (Choi et al., 2018) or distantly-supervised examples from Wikipedia. On entity probing tasks involving recognizing entity identity, our embeddings used in parameter-free downstream models achieve competitive performance with ELMo- and BERT-based embeddings in trained models. We also show that it is possible to reduce the size of our type set in a learning-based way for particular domains. Finally, we show that these embeddings can be post-hoc modified through a small number of rules to incorporate domain knowledge and improve performance. 

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3. Entity Linking via Explicit Mention-Mention Coreference Modeling

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.343  

   Agarwal, Dhruv; Angell, Rico; Monath, Nicholas; McCallum, Andrew (July 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies)

   Learning representations of entity mentions is a core component of modern entity linking systems for both candidate generation and making linking predictions. In this paper, we present and empirically analyze a novel training approach for learning mention and entity representations that is based on building minimum spanning arborescences (i.e., directed spanning trees) over mentions and entities across documents to explicitly model mention coreference relationships. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by showing significant improvements in both candidate generation recall and linking accuracy on the Zero-Shot Entity Linking dataset and MedMentions, the largest publicly available biomedical dataset. In addition, we show that our improvements in candidate generation yield higher quality re-ranking models downstream, setting a new SOTA result in linking accuracy on MedMentions. Finally, we demonstrate that our improved mention representations are also effective for the discovery of new entities via cross-document coreference. 

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4. Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing

   Xu, Nan; Wang, Fei; Li, Bangzheng; Dong, Mingtao; Chen, Muhao (January 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Entity typing aims at predicting one or more words that describe the type(s) of a specific mention in a sentence. Due to shortcuts from surface patterns to annotated entity labels and biased training, existing entity typing models are subject to the problem of spurious correlations. To comprehensively investigate the faithfulness and reliability of entity typing methods, we first systematically define distinct kinds of model biases that are reflected mainly from spurious correlations. Particularly, we identify six types of existing model biases, including mention-context bias, lexical overlapping bias, named entity bias, pronoun bias, dependency bias, and overgeneralization bias. To mitigate model biases, we then introduce a counterfactual data augmentation method. By augmenting the original training set with their debiasedcounterparts, models are forced to fully comprehend sentences and discover the fundamental cues for entity typing, rather than relying on spurious correlations for shortcuts. Experimental results on the UFET dataset show our counterfactual data augmentation approach helps improve generalization of different entity typing models with consistently better performance on both the original and debiased test sets. 

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5. Unsupervised Entity Linking with Guided Summarization and Multiple-Choice Selection

   Cho, Young-Min; Zhang, Li; Callison-Burch, Chris (December 2022, The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022))

   Entity linking, the task of linking potentially ambiguous mentions in texts to corresponding knowledge-base entities, is an important component for language understanding. We address two challenge in entity linking: how to leverage wider contexts surrounding a mention, and how to deal with limited training data. We propose a fully unsupervised model called SumMC that first generates a guided summary of the contexts conditioning on the mention, and then casts the task to a multiple-choice problem where the model chooses an entity from a list of candidates. In addition to evaluating our model on existing datasets that focus on named entities, we create a new dataset that links noun phrases from WikiHow to Wikidata. We show that our SumMC model achieves state-of-the-art unsupervised performance on our new dataset and on exiting datasets. 

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