From Examples to Rules: Neural Guided Rule Synthesis for Information Extraction

Robert Vacareanu, Marco A. Valenzuela-Escárcega, George Caique Gouveia Barbosa, Rebecca Sharp, Gustave Hahn-Powell, Mihai Surdeanu


Abstract
While deep learning approaches to information extraction have had many successes, they can be difficult to augment or maintain as needs shift. Rule-based methods, on the other hand, can be more easily modified. However, crafting rules requires expertise in linguistics and the domain of interest, making it infeasible for most users. Here we attempt to combine the advantages of these two directions while mitigating their drawbacks. We adapt recent advances from the adjacent field of program synthesis to information extraction, synthesizing rules from provided examples. We use a transformer-based architecture to guide an enumerative search, and show that this reduces the number of steps that need to be explored before a rule is found. Further, we show that without training the synthesis algorithm on the specific domain, our synthesized rules achieve state-of-the-art performance on the 1-shot scenario of a task that focuses on few-shot learning for relation classification, and competitive performance in the 5-shot scenario.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.665
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6180–6189
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.665
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robert Vacareanu, Marco A. Valenzuela-Escárcega, George Caique Gouveia Barbosa, Rebecca Sharp, Gustave Hahn-Powell, and Mihai Surdeanu. 2022. From Examples to Rules: Neural Guided Rule Synthesis for Information Extraction. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6180–6189, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
From Examples to Rules: Neural Guided Rule Synthesis for Information Extraction (Vacareanu et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.665.pdf
Code
 clulab/releases
Data
TACRED