Unlike traditional unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised clustering allows users to provide meaningful structure to the data, which helps the clustering algorithm to match the user’s intent. Existing approaches to semi-supervised clustering require a significant amount of feedback from an expert to improve the clusters. In this paper, we ask whether a large language model (LLM) can amplify an expert’s guidance to enable query-efficient, few-shot semi-supervised text clustering. We show that LLMs are surprisingly effective at improving clustering. We explore three stages where LLMs can be incorporated into clustering: before clustering (improving input features), during clustering (by providing constraints to the clusterer), and after clustering (using LLMs post-correction). We find that incorporating LLMs in the first two stages routinely provides significant improvements in cluster quality, and that LLMs enable a user to make trade-offs between cost and accuracy to produce desired clusters. We release our code and LLM prompts for the public to use.1

Unlike traditional unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised clustering allows users to provide meaningful structure to the data, which helps the clustering algorithm to match the user’s intent. Existing approaches to semi-supervised clustering require a significant amount of feedback from an expert to improve the clusters. In this paper, we ask whether a large language model (LLM) can amplify an expert’s guidance to enable query-efficient, few-shot semi-supervised text clustering. We show that LLMs are surprisingly effective at improving clustering. We explore three stages where LLMs can be incorporated into clustering: before clustering (improving input features), during clustering (by providing constraints to the clusterer), and after clustering (using LLMs post-correction). We find that incorporating LLMs in the first two stages routinely provides significant improvements in cluster quality, and that LLMs enable a user to make trade-offs between cost and accuracy to produce desired clusters. We release our code and LLM prompts for the public to use.1

Event detection is a crucial information extraction task in many domains, such as Wikipedia or news. The task typically relies on trigger detection (TD) – identifying token spans in the text that evoke specific events. While the notion of triggers should ideally be universal across domains, domain transfer for TD from high- to low-resource domains results in significant performance drops. We address the problem of negative transfer in TD by coupling triggers between domains using subject-object relations obtained from a rule-based open information extraction (OIE) system. We demonstrate that OIE relations injected through multi-task training can act as mediators between triggers in different domains, enhancing zero- and few-shot TD domain transfer and reducing performance drops, in particular when transferring from a high-resource source domain (Wikipedia) to a low(er)-resource target domain (news). Additionally, we combine this improved transfer with masked language modeling on the target domain, observing further TD transfer gains. Finally, we demonstrate that the gains are robust to the choice of the OIE system.

Downstream applications often require text classification models to be accurate and robust. While the accuracy of state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs) approximates human performance, they often exhibit a drop in performance on real-world noisy data. This lack of robustness can be concerning, as even small perturbations in text, irrelevant to the target task, can cause classifiers to incorrectly change their predictions. A potential solution can be the family of Prototype-Based Networks (PBNs) that classifies examples based on their similarity to prototypical examples of a class (prototypes) and has been shown to be robust to noise for computer vision tasks. In this paper, we study whether the robustness properties of PBNs transfer to text classification tasks under both targeted and static adversarial attack settings. Our results show that PBNs, as a mere architectural variation of vanilla LMs, offer more robustness compared to vanilla LMs under both targeted and static settings. We showcase how PBNs’ interpretability can help us understand PBNs’ robustness properties. Finally, our ablation studies reveal the sensitivity of PBNs’ robustness to the strictness of clustering and the number of prototypes in the training phase, as tighter clustering and a low number of prototypes result in less robust PBNs.

The advances made by Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the pursuit of LLM agents that can solve intricate, multi-step reasoning tasks. As with any research pursuit, benchmarking and evaluation are key corner stones to efficient and reliable progress. However, existing benchmarks are often narrow and simply compute overall task success. To face these issues, we propose AgentQuest – a framework where (i) both benchmarks and metrics are modular and easily extensible through well documented and easy-to-use APIs; (ii) we offer two new evaluation metrics that can reliably track LLM agent progress while solving a task. We exemplify the utility of the metrics on two use cases wherein we identify common failure points and refine the agent architecture to obtain a significant performance increase. Together with the research community, we hope to extend AgentQuest further and therefore we make it available under https://github.com/nec-research/agentquest.

Explanations for AI are expected to help human users understand AI-driven predictions. Evaluating plausibility, the helpfulness of the explanations, is therefore essential for developing eXplainable AI (XAI) that can really aid human users. Here we propose a human-centric evaluation platform to measure plausibility of explanations in the context of eXplainable Knowledge Graph Completion (XKGC). The target audience of the platform are researchers and practitioners who want to 1) investigate real needs and interests of their target users in XKGC, 2) evaluate the plausibility of the XKGC methods. We showcase these two use cases in an experimental setting to illustrate what results can be achieved with our system.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract facts from natural language text in the form of (“subject”; “relation”; “object”) triples. These facts are, however, merely surface forms, the ambiguity of which impedes their downstream usage; e.g., the surface phrase “Michael Jordan” may refer to either the former basketball player or the university professor. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the other hand, contain facts in a canonical (i.e., unambiguous) form, but their coverage is limited by a static schema (i.e., a fixed set of entities and predicates). To bridge this gap, we need the best of both worlds: (i) high coverage of free-text OIEs, and (ii) semantic precision (i.e., monosemy) of KGs. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a new benchmark with novel evaluation protocols that can, for example, measure fact linking performance on a granular triple slot level, while also measuring if a system has the ability to recognize that a surface form has no match in the existing KG. Our extensive evaluation of several baselines show that detection of out-of-KG entities and predicates is more difficult than accurate linking to existing ones, thus calling for more research efforts on this difficult task. We publicly release all resources (data, benchmark and code) on https://github.com/nec-research/fact-linking.

Intrinsic evaluations of OIE systems are carried out either manually—with human evaluators judging the correctness of extractions—or automatically, on standardized benchmarks. The latter, while much more cost-effective, is less reliable, primarily because of the incompleteness of the existing OIE benchmarks: the ground truth extractions do not include all acceptable variants of the same fact, leading to unreliable assessment of the models’ performance. Moreover, the existing OIE benchmarks are available for English only. In this work, we introduce BenchIE: a benchmark and evaluation framework for comprehensive evaluation of OIE systems for English, Chinese, and German. In contrast to existing OIE benchmarks, BenchIE is fact-based, i.e., it takes into account informational equivalence of extractions: our gold standard consists of fact synsets, clusters in which we exhaustively list all acceptable surface forms of the same fact. Moreover, having in mind common downstream applications for OIE, we make BenchIE multi-faceted; i.e., we create benchmark variants that focus on different facets of OIE evaluation, e.g., compactness or minimality of extractions. We benchmark several state-of-the-art OIE systems using BenchIE and demonstrate that these systems are significantly less effective than indicated by existing OIE benchmarks. We make BenchIE (data and evaluation code) publicly available.

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is the task of extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples from natural language sentences. Current OpenIE systems extract all triple slots independently. In contrast, we explore the hypothesis that it may be beneficial to extract triple slots iteratively: first extract easy slots, followed by the difficult ones by conditioning on the easy slots, and therefore achieve a better overall extraction. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a neural OpenIE system, MILIE, that operates in an iterative fashion. Due to the iterative nature, the system is also modularit is possible to seamlessly integrate rule based extraction systems with a neural end-to-end system, thereby allowing rule based systems to supply extraction slots which MILIE can leverage for extracting the remaining slots. We confirm our hypothesis empirically: MILIE outperforms SOTA systems on multiple languages ranging from Chinese to Arabic. Additionally, we are the first to provide an OpenIE test dataset for Arabic and Galician.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting facts from sentences in the form of relations and their corresponding arguments in schema-free manner. Intrinsic performance of OIE systems is difficult to measure due to the incompleteness of existing OIE benchmarks: ground truth extractions do not group all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact that can be extracted from a sentence. To measure performance of OIE systems more realistically, it is necessary to manually annotate complete facts (i.e., clusters of all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact) from input sentences. We propose AnnIE: an interactive annotation platform that facilitates such challenging annotation tasks and supports creation of complete fact-oriented OIE evaluation benchmarks. AnnIE is modular and flexible in order to support different use case scenarios (i.e., benchmarks covering different types of facts) and different languages. We use AnnIE to build two complete OIE benchmarks: one with verb-mediated facts and another with facts encompassing named entities. We evaluate several OIE systems on our complete benchmarks created with AnnIE. We publicly release AnnIE (and all gold datasets generated with it) under non-restrictive license.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store information in the form of (head, predicate, tail)-triples. To augment KGs with new knowledge, researchers proposed models for KG Completion (KGC) tasks such as link prediction; i.e., answering (h; p; ?) or (?; p; t) queries. Such models are usually evaluated with averaged metrics on a held-out test set. While useful for tracking progress, averaged single-score metrics cannotreveal what exactly a model has learned — or failed to learn. To address this issue, we propose KGxBoard: an interactive framework for performing fine-grained evaluation on meaningful subsets of the data, each of which tests individual and interpretable capabilities of a KGC model. In our experiments, we highlight the findings that we discovered with the use of KGxBoard, which would have been impossible to detect with standard averaged single-score metrics.

Open Information Extraction systems extract (“subject text”, “relation text”, “object text”) triples from raw text. Some triples are textual versions of facts, i.e., non-canonicalized mentions of entities and relations. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to infer new facts directly from the open knowledge graph without any canonicalization or any supervision from curated knowledge. For this purpose, we propose the open link prediction task,i.e., predicting test facts by completing (“subject text”, “relation text”, ?) questions. An evaluation in such a setup raises the question if a correct prediction is actually a new fact that was induced by reasoning over the open knowledge graph or if it can be trivially explained. For example, facts can appear in different paraphrased textual variants, which can lead to test leakage. To this end, we propose an evaluation protocol and a methodology for creating the open link prediction benchmark OlpBench. We performed experiments with a prototypical knowledge graph embedding model for openlink prediction. While the task is very challenging, our results suggests that it is possible to predict genuinely new facts, which can not be trivially explained.

Open information extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting relations and their corresponding arguments from a natural language text in un- supervised manner. Outputs of such systems are used for downstream tasks such as ques- tion answering and automatic knowledge base (KB) construction. Many of these downstream tasks rely on aligning OIE triples with refer- ence KBs. Such alignments are usually eval- uated w.r.t. a specific downstream task and, to date, no direct manual evaluation of such alignments has been performed. In this paper, we directly evaluate how OIE triples from the OPIEC corpus are related to the DBpedia KB w.r.t. information content. First, we investigate OPIEC triples and DBpedia facts having the same arguments by comparing the information on the OIE surface relation with the KB rela- tion. Second, we evaluate the expressibility of general OPIEC triples in DBpedia. We in- vestigate whether—and, if so, how—a given OIE triple can be mapped to a single KB fact. We found that such mappings are not always possible because the information in the OIE triples tends to be more specific. Our evalua- tion suggests, however, that significant part of OIE triples can be expressed by means of KB formulas instead of individual facts.

The goal of Open Information Extraction (OIE) is to extract surface relations and their arguments from natural-language text in an unsupervised, domain-independent manner. In this paper, we propose MinIE, an OIE system that aims to provide useful, compact extractions with high precision and recall. MinIE approaches these goals by (1) representing information about polarity, modality, attribution, and quantities with semantic annotations instead of in the actual extraction, and (2) identifying and removing parts that are considered overly specific. We conducted an experimental study with several real-world datasets and found that MinIE achieves competitive or higher precision and recall than most prior systems, while at the same time producing shorter, semantically enriched extractions.