Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions

Lajanugen Logeswaran, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, Jacob Devlin, Honglak Lee


Abstract
We present the zero-shot entity linking task, where mentions must be linked to unseen entities without in-domain labeled data. The goal is to enable robust transfer to highly specialized domains, and so no metadata or alias tables are assumed. In this setting, entities are only identified by text descriptions, and models must rely strictly on language understanding to resolve the new entities. First, we show that strong reading comprehension models pre-trained on large unlabeled data can be used to generalize to unseen entities. Second, we propose a simple and effective adaptive pre-training strategy, which we term domain-adaptive pre-training (DAP), to address the domain shift problem associated with linking unseen entities in a new domain. We present experiments on a new dataset that we construct for this task and show that DAP improves over strong pre-training baselines, including BERT. The data and code are available at https://github.com/lajanugen/zeshel.
Anthology ID:
P19-1335
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3449–3460
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1335
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1335
Award:
 Outstanding Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lajanugen Logeswaran, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, Jacob Devlin, and Honglak Lee. 2019. Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3449–3460, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions (Logeswaran et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1335.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1335.mp4
Code
 lajanugen/zeshel +  additional community code
Data
ZESHEL