Structured knowledge bases (KBs) are an asset for search engines and other applications but are inevitably incomplete. Language models (LMs) have been proposed for unsupervised knowledge base completion (KBC), yet, their ability to do this at scale and with high accuracy remains an open question. Prior experimental studies mostly fall short because they only evaluate on popular subjects, or sample already existing facts from KBs. In this work, we perform a careful evaluation of GPT’s potential to complete the largest public KB: Wikidata. We find that, despite their size and capabilities, models like GPT-3, ChatGPT and GPT-4 do not achieve fully convincing results on this task. Nonetheless, it provides solid improvements over earlier approaches with smaller LMs. In particular, we show that it is feasible to extend Wikidata by 27M facts at 90% precision.

The widespread usage of latent language representations via pre-trained language models (LMs) suggests that they are a promising source of structured knowledge. However, existing methods focus only on a single object per subject-relation pair, even though often multiple objects are correct. To overcome this limitation, we analyze these representations for their potential to yield materialized multi-object relational knowledge. We formulate the problem as a rank-then-select task. For ranking candidate objects, we evaluate existing prompting techniques and propose new ones incorporating domain knowledge. Among the selection methods, we find that choosing objects with a likelihood above a learned relation-specific threshold gives a 49.5% F1 score. Our results highlight the difficulty of employing LMs for the multi-valued slot-filling task, and pave the way for further research on extracting relational knowledge from latent language representations.

Despite their impressive scale, knowledge bases (KBs), such as Wikidata, still contain significant gaps. Language models (LMs) have been proposed as a source for filling these gaps. However, prior works have focused on prominent entities with rich coverage by LMs, neglecting the crucial case of long-tail entities. In this paper, we present a novel method for LM-based-KB completion that is specifically geared for facts about long-tail entities. The method leverages two different LMs in two stages: for candidate retrieval and for candidate verification and disambiguation. To evaluate our method and various baselines, we introduce a novel dataset, called MALT, rooted in Wikidata. Our method outperforms all baselines in F1, with major gains especially in recall.

This paper presents a new task of predicting the coverage of a text document for relation extraction (RE): Does the document contain many relational tuples for a given entity? Coverage predictions are useful in selecting the best documents for knowledge base construction with large input corpora. To study this problem, we present a dataset of 31,366 diverse documents for 520 entities. We analyze the correlation of document coverage with features like length, entity mention frequency, Alexa rank, language complexity, and information retrieval scores. Each of these features has only moderate predictive power. We employ methods combining features with statistical models like TF-IDF and language models like BERT. The model combining features and BERT, HERB, achieves an F1 score of up to 46%. We demonstrate the utility of coverage predictions on two use cases: KB construction and claim refutation.

Modern web content - news articles, blog posts, educational resources, marketing brochures - is predominantly multimodal. A notable trait is the inclusion of media such as images placed at meaningful locations within a textual narrative. Most often, such images are accompanied by captions - either factual or stylistic (humorous, metaphorical, etc.) - making the narrative more engaging to the reader. While standalone image captioning has been extensively studied, captioning an image based on external knowledge such as its surrounding text remains under-explored. In this paper, we study this new task: given an image and an associated unstructured knowledge snippet, the goal is to generate a contextual caption for the image.

High-quality alignment between movie scripts and plot summaries is an asset for learning to summarize stories and to generate dialogues. The alignment task is challenging as scripts and summaries substantially differ in details and abstraction levels as well as in linguistic register. This paper addresses the alignment problem by devising a fully unsupervised approach based on a global optimization model. Experimental results on ten movies show the viability of our method with 76% F1-score and its superiority over a previous baseline. We publish alignments for 914 movies to foster research in this new topic.

ASCENT is a fully automated methodology for extracting and consolidating commonsense assertions from web contents (Nguyen et al., 2021). It advances traditional triple-based commonsense knowledge representation by capturing semantic facets like locations and purposes, and composite concepts, i.e., subgroups and related aspects of subjects. In this demo, we present a web portal that allows users to understand its construction process, explore its content, and observe its impact in the use case of question answering. The demo website (https://ascent.mpi-inf.mpg.de) and an introductory video (https://youtu.be/qMkJXqu_Yd4) are both available online.

The Internet contains a multitude of social media posts and other of stories where text is interspersed with images. In these contexts, images are not simply used for general illustration, but are judiciously placed in certain spots of a story for multimodal descriptions and narration. In this work we analyze the problem of text-image alignment, and present SANDI, a methodology for automatically selecting images from an image collection and aligning them with text paragraphs of a story. SANDI combines visual tags, user-provided tags and background knowledge, and uses an Integer Linear Program to compute alignments that are semantically meaningful. Experiments show that SANDI can select and align images with texts with high quality of semantic fit.

Automatically extracting interpersonal relationships of conversation interlocutors can enrich personal knowledge bases to enhance personalized search, recommenders and chatbots. To infer speakers’ relationships from dialogues we propose PRIDE, a neural multi-label classifier, based on BERT and Transformer for creating a conversation representation. PRIDE utilizes dialogue structure and augments it with external knowledge about speaker features and conversation style. Unlike prior works, we address multi-label prediction of fine-grained relationships. We release large-scale datasets, based on screenplays of movies and TV shows, with directed relationships of conversation participants. Extensive experiments on both datasets show superior performance of PRIDE compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Social media is a rich source of assertions about personal traits, such as “I am a doctor” or “my hobby is playing tennis”. Precisely identifying explicit assertions is difficult, though, because of the users’ highly varied vocabulary and language expressions. Identifying personal traits from implicit assertions like I’ve been at work treating patients all day is even more challenging. This paper presents RedDust, a large-scale annotated resource for user profiling for over 300k Reddit users across five attributes: profession, hobby, family status, age,and gender. We construct RedDust using a diverse set of high-precision patterns and demonstrate its use as a resource for developing learning models to deal with implicit assertions. RedDust consists of users’ personal traits, which are (attribute, value) pairs, along with users’ post ids, which may be used to retrieve the posts from a publicly available crawl or from the Reddit API. We discuss the construction of the resource and show interesting statistics and insights into the data. We also compare different classifiers, which can be learned from RedDust. To the best of our knowledge, RedDust is the first annotated language resource about Reddit users at large scale. We envision further use cases of RedDust for providing background knowledge about user traits, to enhance personalized search and recommendation as well as conversational agents.

Personal knowledge about users’ professions, hobbies, favorite food, and travel preferences, among others, is a valuable asset for individualized AI, such as recommenders or chatbots. Conversations in social media, such as Reddit, are a rich source of data for inferring personal facts. Prior work developed supervised methods to extract this knowledge, but these approaches can not generalize beyond attribute values with ample labeled training samples. This paper overcomes this limitation by devising CHARM: a zero-shot learning method that creatively leverages keyword extraction and document retrieval in order to predict attribute values that were never seen during training. Experiments with large datasets from Reddit show the viability of CHARM for open-ended attributes, such as professions and hobbies.

Fiction and fantasy are archetypes of long-tail domains that lack suitable NLP methodologies and tools. We present ENTYFI, a web-based system for fine-grained typing of entity mentions in fictional texts. It builds on 205 automatically induced high-quality type systems for popular fictional domains, and provides recommendations towards reference type systems for given input texts. Users can exploit the richness and diversity of these reference type systems for fine-grained supervised typing, in addition, they can choose among and combine four other typing modules: pre-trained real-world models, unsupervised dependency-based typing, knowledge base lookups, and constraint-based candidate consolidation. The demonstrator is available at: https://d5demos.mpi-inf.mpg.de/entyfi.

We study relation extraction for knowledge base (KB) enrichment. Specifically, we aim to extract entities and their relationships from sentences in the form of triples and map the elements of the extracted triples to an existing KB in an end-to-end manner. Previous studies focus on the extraction itself and rely on Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) to map triples into the KB space. This way, NED errors may cause extraction errors that affect the overall precision and recall. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end relation extraction model for KB enrichment based on a neural encoder-decoder model. We collect high-quality training data by distant supervision with co-reference resolution and paraphrase detection. We propose an n-gram based attention model that captures multi-word entity names in a sentence. Our model employs jointly learned word and entity embeddings to support named entity disambiguation. Finally, our model uses a modified beam search and a triple classifier to help generate high-quality triples. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 15.51% and 8.38% in terms of F1 score on two real-world datasets.

To bridge the gap between the capabilities of the state-of-the-art in factoid question answering (QA) and what users ask, we need large datasets of real user questions that capture the various question phenomena users are interested in, and the diverse ways in which these questions are formulated. We introduce ComQA, a large dataset of real user questions that exhibit different challenging aspects such as compositionality, temporal reasoning, and comparisons. ComQA questions come from the WikiAnswers community QA platform, which typically contains questions that are not satisfactorily answerable by existing search engine technology. Through a large crowdsourcing effort, we clean the question dataset, group questions into paraphrase clusters, and annotate clusters with their answers. ComQA contains 11,214 questions grouped into 4,834 paraphrase clusters. We detail the process of constructing ComQA, including the measures taken to ensure its high quality while making effective use of crowdsourcing. We also present an extensive analysis of the dataset and the results achieved by state-of-the-art systems on ComQA, demonstrating that our dataset can be a driver of future research on QA.

Scalar implicatures are language features that imply the negation of stronger statements, e.g., “She was married twice” typically implicates that she was not married thrice. In this paper we discuss the importance of scalar implicatures in the context of textual information extraction. We investigate how textual features can be used to predict whether a given text segment mentions all objects standing in a certain relationship with a certain subject. Preliminary results on Wikipedia indicate that this prediction is feasible, and yields informative assessments.

Controversial claims are abundant in online media and discussion forums. A better understanding of such claims requires analyzing them from different perspectives. Stance classification is a necessary step for inferring these perspectives in terms of supporting or opposing the claim. In this work, we present a neural network model for stance classification leveraging BERT representations and augmenting them with a novel consistency constraint. Experiments on the Perspectrum dataset, consisting of claims and users’ perspectives from various debate websites, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over state-of-the-art baselines.

In this work, we discuss the importance of external knowledge for performing Named Entity Recognition (NER). We present a novel modular framework that divides the knowledge into four categories according to the depth of knowledge they convey. Each category consists of a set of features automatically generated from different information sources, such as a knowledge-base, a list of names, or document-specific semantic annotations. Further, we show the effects on performance when incrementally adding deeper knowledge and discuss effectiveness/efficiency trade-offs.

Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) systems perform well on news articles and other texts covering a specific time interval. However, NED quality drops when inputs span long time periods like in archives or historic corpora. This paper presents the first time-aware method for NED that resolves ambiguities even when mention contexts give only few cues. The method is based on computing temporal signatures for entities and comparing these to the temporal contexts of input mentions. Our experiments show superior quality on a newly created diachronic corpus.

Misinformation such as fake news is one of the big challenges of our society. Research on automated fact-checking has proposed methods based on supervised learning, but these approaches do not consider external evidence apart from labeled training instances. Recent approaches counter this deficit by considering external sources related to a claim. However, these methods require substantial feature modeling and rich lexicons. This paper overcomes these limitations of prior work with an end-to-end model for evidence-aware credibility assessment of arbitrary textual claims, without any human intervention. It presents a neural network model that judiciously aggregates signals from external evidence articles, the language of these articles and the trustworthiness of their sources. It also derives informative features for generating user-comprehensible explanations that makes the neural network predictions transparent to the end-user. Experiments with four datasets and ablation studies show the strength of our method.

This work introduces fact salience: The task of generating a machine-readable representation of the most prominent information in a text document as a set of facts. We also present SalIE, the first fact salience system. SalIE is unsupervised and knowledge agnostic, based on open information extraction to detect facts in natural language text, PageRank to determine their relevance, and clustering to promote diversity. We compare SalIE with several baselines (including positional, standard for saliency tasks), and in an extrinsic evaluation, with state-of-the-art automatic text summarizers. SalIE outperforms baselines and text summarizers showing that facts are an effective way to compress information.

This paper investigates the problem of answering compositional factoid questions over knowledge bases (KB) under efficiency constraints. The method, called TIPI, (i) decomposes compositional questions, (ii) predicts answer types for individual sub-questions, (iii) reasons over the compatibility of joint types, and finally, (iv) formulates compositional SPARQL queries respecting type constraints. TIPI’s answer type predictor is trained using distant supervision, and exploits lexical, syntactic and embedding-based features to compute context- and hierarchy-aware candidate answer types for an input question. Experiments on a recent benchmark show that TIPI results in state-of-the-art performance under the real-world assumption that only a single SPARQL query can be executed over the KB, and substantial reduction in the number of queries in the more general case.

We present QUINT, a live system for question answering over knowledge bases. QUINT automatically learns role-aligned utterance-query templates from user questions paired with their answers. When QUINT answers a question, it visualizes the complete derivation sequence from the natural language utterance to the final answer. The derivation provides an explanation of how the syntactic structure of the question was used to derive the structure of a SPARQL query, and how the phrases in the question were used to instantiate different parts of the query. When an answer seems unsatisfactory, the derivation provides valuable insights towards reformulating the question.

Information extraction (IE) from text has largely focused on relations between individual entities, such as who has won which award. However, some facts are never fully mentioned, and no IE method has perfect recall. Thus, it is beneficial to also tap contents about the cardinalities of these relations, for example, how many awards someone has won. We introduce this novel problem of extracting cardinalities and discusses the specific challenges that set it apart from standard IE. We present a distant supervision method using conditional random fields. A preliminary evaluation results in precision between 3% and 55%, depending on the difficulty of relations.

Methods for Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) perform NER and NED in two separate stages. Therefore, NED may be penalized with respect to precision by NER false positives, and suffers in recall from NER false negatives. Conversely, NED does not fully exploit information computed by NER such as types of mentions. This paper presents J-NERD, a new approach to perform NER and NED jointly, by means of a probabilistic graphical model that captures mention spans, mention types, and the mapping of mentions to entities in a knowledge base. We present experiments with different kinds of texts from the CoNLL’03, ACE’05, and ClueWeb’09-FACC1 corpora. J-NERD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in end-to-end NERD precision, recall, and F1.

Identifying and linking named entities across information sources is the basis of knowledge acquisition and at the heart of Web search, recommendations, and analytics. An important problem in this context is cross-document co-reference resolution (CCR): computing equivalence classes of textual mentions denoting the same entity, within and across documents. Prior methods employ ranking, clustering, or probabilistic graphical models using syntactic features and distant features from knowledge bases. However, these methods exhibit limitations regarding run-time and robustness. This paper presents the CROCS framework for unsupervised CCR, improving the state of the art in two ways. First, we extend the way knowledge bases are harnessed, by constructing a notion of semantic summaries for intra-document co-reference chains using co-occurring entity mentions belonging to different chains. Second, we reduce the computational cost by a new algorithm that embeds sample-based bisection, using spectral clustering or graph partitioning, in a hierarchical clustering process. This allows scaling up CCR to large corpora. Experiments with three datasets show significant gains in output quality, compared to the best prior methods, and the run-time efficiency of CROCS.

Extracting instances of sentiment-oriented relations from user-generated web documents is important for online marketing analysis. Unlike previous work, we formulate this extraction task as a structured prediction problem and design the corresponding inference as an integer linear program. Our latent structural SVM based model can learn from training corpora that do not contain explicit annotations of sentiment-bearing expressions, and it can simultaneously recognize instances of both binary (polarity) and ternary (comparative) relations with regard to entity mentions of interest. The empirical evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems across domains (cameras and movies) and across genres (reviews and forum posts). The gold standard corpus that we built will also be a valuable resource for the community.

Language users are increasingly turning to electronic resources to address their lexical information needs, due to their convenience and their ability to simultaneously capture different facets of lexical knowledge in a single interface. In this paper, we discuss techniques to respond to a user's lexical queries by providing multilingual and multimodal information, and facilitating navigating along different types of links. To this end, structured information from sources like WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, as well as Web services is linked and integrated to provide a multi-faceted yet consistent response to user queries. The meanings of words in many different languages are characterized by mapping them to appropriate WordNet sense identifiers and adding multilingual gloss descriptions as well as example sentences. Relationships are derived from WordNet and Wiktionary to allow users to discover semantically related words, etymologically related words, alternative spellings, as well as misspellings. Last but not least, images, audio recordings, and geographical maps extracted from Wikipedia and Wiktionary allow for a multimodal experience.

Roget’s Thesaurus and WordNet are very widely used lexical reference works. We describe an automatic mapping procedure that effectively produces French translations of the terms in these two resources. Our approach to the challenging task of disambiguation is based on structural statistics as well as measures of semantic relatedness that are utilized to learn a classification model for associations between entries in the thesaurus and French terms taken from bilingual dictionaries. By building and applying such models, we have produced French versions of Roget’s Thesaurus and WordNet with a considerable level of accuracy, which can be used for a variety of different purposes, by humans as well as in computational applications.