LNN-EL: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Short-text Entity Linking

Hang Jiang, Sairam Gurajada, Qiuhao Lu, Sumit Neelam, Lucian Popa, Prithviraj Sen, Yunyao Li, Alexander Gray


Abstract
Entity linking (EL) is the task of disambiguating mentions appearing in text by linking them to entities in a knowledge graph, a crucial task for text understanding, question answering or conversational systems. In the special case of short-text EL, which poses additional challenges due to limited context, prior approaches have reached good performance by employing heuristics-based methods or purely neural approaches. Here, we take a different, neuro-symbolic approach that combines the advantages of using interpretable rules based on first-order logic with the performance of neural learning. Even though constrained to use rules, we show that we reach competitive or better performance with SoTA black-box neural approaches. Furthermore, our framework has the benefits of extensibility and transferability. We show that we can easily blend existing rule templates given by a human expert, with multiple types of features (priors, BERT encodings, box embeddings, etc), and even with scores resulting from previous EL methods, thus improving on such methods. As an example of improvement, on the LC-QuAD-1.0 dataset, we show more than 3% increase in F1 score relative to previous SoTA. Finally, we show that the inductive bias offered by using logic results in a set of learned rules that transfers from one dataset to another, sometimes without finetuning, while still having high accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
775–787
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.64
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.64
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hang Jiang, Sairam Gurajada, Qiuhao Lu, Sumit Neelam, Lucian Popa, Prithviraj Sen, Yunyao Li, and Alexander Gray. 2021. LNN-EL: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Short-text Entity Linking. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 775–787, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LNN-EL: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Short-text Entity Linking (Jiang et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.64.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.64.mp4
Code
 IBM/LNN