Lifu Huang

Liberal Event Extraction and Event Schema Induction

We propose a brand new “Liberal” Event Extraction paradigm to extract events and discover event schemas from any input corpus simultaneously. We incorporate symbolic (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation) and distributional semantics to detect and represent event structures and adopt a joint typing framework to simultaneously extract event types and argument roles and discover an event schema. Experiments on general and specific domains demonstrate that this framework can construct high-quality schemas with many event and argument role types, covering a high proportion of event types and argument roles in manually defined schemas. We show that extraction performance using discovered schemas is comparable to supervised models trained from a large amount of data labeled according to predefined event types. The extraction quality of new event types is also promising.

AFET: Automatic Fine-Grained Entity Typing by Hierarchical Partial-Label Embedding

Distant supervision has been widely used in current systems of fine-grained entity typing to automatically assign categories (entity types) to entity mentions. However, the types so obtained from knowledge bases are often incorrect for the entity mention’s local context. This paper proposes a novel embedding method to separately model “clean” and “noisy” mentions, and incorporates the given type hierarchy to induce loss functions. We formulate a joint optimization problem to learn embeddings for mentions and typepaths, and develop an iterative algorithm to solve the problem. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, with an average 15% improvement in accuracy over the next best compared method1.

Bridge Text and Knowledge by Learning Multi-Prototype Entity Mention Embedding.

Integrating text and knowledge into a unified semantic space has attracted significant research interests recently. However, the ambiguity in the common space remains a challenge, namely that the same mention phrase usually refers to various entities. In this paper, to deal with the ambiguity of entity mentions, we propose a novel Multi-Prototype Mention Embedding model, which learns multiple sense embeddings for each mention by jointly modeling words from textual contexts and entities derived from a knowledge base. In addition, we further design an efficient language model based approach to disambiguate each mention to a specific sense. In experiments, both qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrate the high quality of the word, entity and multi-prototype mention embeddings. Using entity linking as a study case, we apply our disambiguation method as well as the multi-prototype mention embeddings on the benchmark dataset, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Liberal entity extraction: Rapid construction of fine-grained entity typing systems

The ability of automatically recognizing and typing entities in natural language without prior knowledge (e.g., predefined entity types) is a major challenge in processing such data. Most existing entity typing systems are limited to certain domains, genres, and languages. In this article, we propose a novel unsupervised entity-typing framework by combining symbolic and distributional semantics. We start from learning three types of representations for each entity mention: general semantic representation, specific context representation, and knowledge representation based on knowledge bases. Then we develop a novel joint hierarchical clustering and linking algorithm to type all mentions using these representations. This framework does not rely on any annotated data, predefined typing schema, or handcrafted features; therefore, it can be quickly adapted to a new domain, genre, and/or language. Experiments on genres (news and discussion forum) show comparable performance with state-of-the-art supervised typing systems trained from a large amount of labeled data. Results on various languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Hausa, and Yoruba) and domains (general and biomedical) demonstrate the portability of our framework.