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1. It Takes Two Flints to Make a Fire: Multitask Learning of Neural Relation and Explanation Classifiers

   https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00463  

   Tang, Zheng ; Surdeanu, Mihai ( January 2023 , Computational Linguistics)

   Abstract We propose an explainable approach for relation extraction that mitigates the tension between generalization and explainability by jointly training for the two goals. Our approach uses a multi-task learning architecture, which jointly trains a classifier for relation extraction, and a sequence model that labels words in the context of the relations that explain the decisions of the relation classifier. We also convert the model outputs to rules to bring global explanations to this approach. This sequence model is trained using a hybrid strategy: supervised, when supervision from pre-existing patterns is available, and semi-supervised otherwise. In the latter situation, we treat the sequence model’s labels as latent variables, and learn the best assignment that maximizes the performance of the relation classifier. We evaluate the proposed approach on the two datasets and show that the sequence model provides labels that serve as accurate explanations for the relation classifier’s decisions, and, importantly, that the joint training generally improves the performance of the relation classifier. We also evaluate the performance of the generated rules and show that the new rules are a great add-on to the manual rules and bring the rule-based system much closer to the neural models. 

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2. Bootstrapping Neural Relation and Explanation Classifiers

   Zheng, Tang ; Surdeanu, Mihai ( July 2023 , Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL))

   We introduce a method that self trains (or bootstraps) neural relation and explanation classifiers. Our work expands the supervised approach of (Tang and Surdeanu, 2022), which jointly trains a relation classifier with an explanation classifier that identifies context words important for the relation at hand, to semi- supervised scenarios. In particular, our approach iteratively converts the explainable mod- els’ outputs to rules and applies them to unlabeled text to produce new annotations. Our evaluation on the TACRED dataset shows that our method outperforms the rule-based model we started from by 15 F1 points, outperforms traditional self-training that relies just on the relation classifier by 5 F1 points, and performs comparatively with the prompt-based approach of Sainz et al. (2021) (without requiring an additional natural language inference component). 

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3. ASPER: Answer Set Programming Enhanced Neural Network Models for Joint Entity-Relation Extraction

   https://doi.org/10.1017/s1471068423000297  

   LE, TRUNG HOANG ; CAO, HUIPING ; CAO SON, TRAN ( January 2023 , Theory and Practice of Logic Programming)

   Abstract A plethora of approaches have been proposed for joint entity-relation (ER) extraction. Most of these methods largely depend on a large amount of manually annotated training data. However, manual data annotation is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. Human beings learn using both data (through induction) and knowledge (through deduction). Answer Set Programming (ASP) has been a widely utilized approach for knowledge representation and reasoning that is elaboration tolerant and adept at reasoning with incomplete information. This paper proposes a new approach, ASP-enhanced Entity-Relation extraction (ASPER), to jointly recognize entities and relations by learning from both data and domain knowledge. In particular, ASPER takes advantage of the factual knowledge (represented as facts in ASP) and derived knowledge (represented as rules in ASP) in the learning process of neural network models. We have conducted experiments on two real datasets and compare our method with three baselines. The results show that our ASPER model consistently outperforms the baselines. 

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4. Adaptive Graph Guided Embedding for Multi-label Annotation

   https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/388  

   Wang, Lichen ; Ding, Zhengming ; Fu, Yun ( July 2018 , IJCAI)

   Multi-label annotation is challenging since a large amount of well-labeled training data are required to achieve promising performance. However, providing such data is expensive while unlabeled data are widely available. To this end, we propose a novel Adaptive Graph Guided Embedding (AG2E) approach for multi-label annotation in a semi-supervised fashion, which utilizes limited labeled data associating with large-scale unlabeled data to facilitate learning performance. Specifically, a multi-label propagation scheme and an effective embedding are jointly learned to seek a latent space where unlabeled instances tend to be well assigned multiple labels. Furthermore, a locality structure regularizer is designed to preserve the intrinsic structure and enhance the multi-label annotation. We evaluate our model in both conventional multi-label learning and zero-shot learning scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other compared state-of-the-art methods.

    

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5. Learning Sample-Specific Policies for Sequential Image Augmentation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3474085.3475602  

   Li, Pu ; Liu, Xiaobai ; Xie, Xiaohui ( October 2021 , MM '21: Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Multimedia)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper presents a policy-driven sequential image augmentation approach for image-related tasks. Our approach applies a sequence of image transformations (e.g., translation, rotation) over a training image, one transformation at a time, with the augmented image from the previous time step treated as the input for the next transformation. This sequential data augmentation substantially improves sample diversity, leading to improved test performance, especially for data-hungry models (e.g., deep neural networks). However, the search for the optimal transformation of each image at each time step of the sequence has high complexity due to its combination nature. To address this challenge, we formulate the search task as a sequential decision process and introduce a deep policy network that learns to produce transformations based on image content. We also develop an iterative algorithm to jointly train a classifier and the policy network in the reinforcement learning setting. The immediate reward of a potential transformation is defined to encourage transformations producing hard samples for the current classifier. At each iteration, we employ the policy network to augment the training dataset, train a classifier with the augmented data, and train the policy net with the aid of the classifier. We apply the above approach to both public image classification benchmarks and a newly collected image dataset for material recognition. Comparisons to alternative augmentation approaches show that our policy-driven approach achieves comparable or improved classification performance while using significantly fewer augmented images. The code is available at https://github.com/Paul-LiPu/rl_autoaug. 

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