skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: ASPER: Attention-based approach to extract syntactic patterns denoting semantic relations in sentential context
Semantic relationships, such as hyponym–hypernym, cause–effect, meronym–holonym etc., between a pair of entities in a sentence are usually reflected through syntactic patterns. Automatic extraction of such patterns benefits several downstream tasks, including, entity extraction, ontology building, and question answering. Unfortunately, automatic extraction of such patterns has not yet received much attention from NLP and information retrieval researchers. In this work, we propose an attention-based supervised deep learning model, ASPER, which extracts syntactic patterns between entities exhibiting a given semantic relation in the sentential context. We validate the performance of ASPER on three distinct semantic relations—hyponym–hypernym, cause–effect, and meronym–holonym on six datasets. Experimental results show that for all these semantic relations, ASPER can automatically identify a collection of syntactic patterns reflecting the existence of such a relation between a pair of entities in a sentence. In comparison to the existing methodologies of syntactic pattern extraction, ASPER’s performance is substantially superior.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1909916
PAR ID:
10495054
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Elsevier
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Natural Language Processing Journal
Volume:
3
Issue:
C
ISSN:
2949-7191
Page Range / eLocation ID:
100011
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Syntactic pattern, Syntactic pattern extraction
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    Relation Extraction (RE) is one of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction. The goal of this task is to find the semantic relations between entity mentions in text. It has been shown in many previous work that the structure of the sentences (i.e., dependency trees) can provide important information/features for the RE models. However, the common limitation of the previous work on RE is the reliance on some external parsers to obtain the syntactic trees for the sentence structures. On the one hand, it is not guaranteed that the independent external parsers can offer the optimal sentence structures for RE and the customized structures for RE might help to further improve the performance. On the other hand, the quality of the external parsers might suffer when applied to different domains, thus also affecting the performance of the RE models on such domains. In order to overcome this issue, we introduce a novel method for RE that simultaneously induces the structures and predicts the relations for the input sentences, thus avoiding the external parsers and potentially leading to better sentence structures for RE. Our general strategy to learn the RE-specific structures is to apply two different methods to infer the structures for the input sentences (i.e., two views). We then introduce several mechanisms to encourage the structure and semantic consistencies between these two views so the effective structure and semantic representations for RE can emerge. We perform extensive experiments on the ACE 2005 and SemEval 2010 datasets to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on such datasets. 
    more » « less
  2. Recent developments in Neural Relation Extraction (NRE) have made significant strides towards Automated Knowledge Base Construction. While much attention has been dedicated towards improvements in accuracy, there have been no attempts in the literature to evaluate social biases exhibited in NRE systems. In this paper, we create WikiGenderBias, a distantly supervised dataset composed of over 45,000 sentences including a 10% human annotated test set for the purpose of analyzing gender bias in relation extraction systems. We find that when extracting spouse-of and hypernym (i.e., occupation) relations, an NRE system performs differently when the gender of the target entity is different. However, such disparity does not appear when extracting relations such as birthDate or birthPlace. We also analyze how existing bias mitigation techniques, such as name anonymization, word embedding debiasing, and data augmentation affect the NRE system in terms of maintaining the test performance and reducing biases. Unfortunately, due to NRE models rely heavily on surface level cues, we find that existing bias mitigation approaches have a negative effect on NRE. Our analysis lays groundwork for future quantifying and mitigating bias in NRE. 
    more » « less
  3. Duh, Kevin; G'omez-Adorno, Helena; Bethard, Steven (Ed.)
    The field of relation extraction (RE) is experiencing a notable shift towards generative relation extraction (GRE), leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, we discovered that traditional relation extraction (RE) metrics like precision and recall fall short in evaluating GRE methods. This shortfall arises because these metrics rely on exact matching with human-annotated reference relations, while GRE methods often produce diverse and semantically accurate relations that differ from the references. To fill this gap, we introduce GENRES for a multidimensional assessment in terms of the topic similarity, uniqueness, granularity, factualness, and completeness of the GRE results. With GENRES, we empirically identified that (1) precision/recall fails to justify the performance of GRE methods; (2) human-annotated referential relations can be incomplete; (3) prompting LLMs with a fixed set of relations or entities can cause hallucinations. Next, we conducted a human evaluation of GRE methods that shows GENRES is consistent with human preferences for RE quality. Last, we made a comprehensive evaluation of fourteen leading LLMs using GENRES across document, bag, and sentence level RE datasets, respectively, to set the benchmark for future research in GRE. 
    more » « less
  4. This paper studies the task of comparative preference classification (CPC). Given two entities in a sentence, our goal is to classify whether the first (or the second) entity is preferred over the other or no comparison is expressed at all between the two entities. Existing works either do not learn entity-aware representations well and fail to deal with sentences involving multiple entity pairs or use sequential modeling approaches that are unable to capture long-range dependencies between the entities. Some also use traditional machine learning approaches that do not generalize well. This paper proposes a novel Entity-aware Dependency-based Deep Graph Attention Network (ED-GAT) that employs a multi-hop graph attention over a dependency graph sentence representation to leverage both the semantic information from word embeddings and the syntactic information from the dependency graph to solve the problem. Empirical evaluation shows that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in comparative preference classification. 
    more » « less
  5. Recent literature focuses on utilizing the entity information in the sentence-level relation extraction (RE), but this risks leaking superficial and spurious clues of relations. As a result, RE still suffers from unintended entity bias, i.e., the spurious correlation between entity mentions (names) and relations. Entity bias can mislead the RE models to extract the relations that do not exist in the text. To combat this issue, some previous work masks the entity mentions to prevent the RE models from over-fitting entity mentions. However, this strategy degrades the RE performance because it loses the semantic information of entities. In this paper, we propose the CoRE (Counterfactual Analysis based Relation Extraction) debiasing method that guides the RE models to focus on the main effects of textual context without losing the entity information. We first construct a causal graph for RE, which models the dependencies between variables in RE models. Then, we propose to conduct counterfactual analysis on our causal graph to distill and mitigate the entity bias, that captures the causal effects of specific entity mentions in each instance. Note that our CoRE method is model-agnostic to debias existing RE systems during inference without changing their training processes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CoRE yields significant gains on both effectiveness and generalization for RE. The source code is provided at: https://github.com/vanoracai/CoRE. 
    more » « less