VER: Unifying Verbalizing Entities and Relations

Jie Huang, Kevin Chang


Abstract
Entities and relationships between entities are vital in the real world. Essentially, we understand the world by understanding entities and relations. For instance, to understand a field, e.g., computer science, we need to understand the relevant concepts, e.g., machine learning, and the relationships between concepts, e.g., machine learning and artificial intelligence. To understand a person, we should first know who he/she is and how he/she is related to others. To understand entities and relations, humans may refer to natural language descriptions. For instance, when learning a new scientific term, people usually start by reading its definition in dictionaries or encyclopedias. To know the relationship between two entities, humans tend to create a sentence to connect them. In this paper, we propose VER: a unified model for Verbalizing Entities and Relations. Specifically, we attempt to build a system that takes any entity or entity set as input and generates a sentence to represent entities and relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can generate high-quality sentences describing entities and entity relationships and facilitate various tasks on entities and relations, including definition modeling, relation modeling, and generative commonsense reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1051
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15700–15710
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1051
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1051
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jie Huang and Kevin Chang. 2023. VER: Unifying Verbalizing Entities and Relations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15700–15710, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VER: Unifying Verbalizing Entities and Relations (Huang & Chang, Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1051.pdf