Khalid Benabdeslem
2026
ATOM: AdapTive and OptiMized dynamic temporal knowledge graph construction using LLMs
Yassir Lairgi | Ludovic Moncla | Khalid Benabdeslem | Rémy Cazabet | Pierre Cléau
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Yassir Lairgi | Ludovic Moncla | Khalid Benabdeslem | Rémy Cazabet | Pierre Cléau
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
In today’s rapidly expanding data landscape, knowledge extraction from unstructured text is vital for real-time analytics, temporal inference, and dynamic memory frameworks. However, traditional static knowledge graph (KG) construction often overlooks the dynamic and time-sensitive nature of real-world data, limiting adaptability to continuous changes. Moreover, recent zero- or few-shot approaches that avoid domain-specific fine-tuning or reliance on prebuilt ontologies often suffer from instability across multiple runs, as well as incomplete coverage of key facts. To address these challenges, we introduce ATOM (AdapTive and OptiMized), a few-shot and scalable approach that builds and continuously updates Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) from unstructured texts. ATOM splits input documents into minimal, self-contained “atomic” facts, improving extraction exhaustivity and stability. Then, it constructs atomic TKGs from these facts, employing a dual-time modeling that distinguishes between when information is observed and when it is valid. The resulting atomic TKGs are subsequently merged in parallel. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that ATOM achieves 18% higher exhaustivity, 33% better stability, and over 90% latency reduction compared to baseline methods, demonstrating a strong scalability potential for dynamic TKG construction.
2022
Debiasing Pretrained Text Encoders by Paying Attention to Paying Attention
Yacine Gaci | Boualem Benatallah | Fabio Casati | Khalid Benabdeslem
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yacine Gaci | Boualem Benatallah | Fabio Casati | Khalid Benabdeslem
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are found to exhibit discriminatory stereotypes across many social constructs, e.g. gender and race. In comparison to the progress made in reducing bias from static word embeddings, fairness in sentence-level text encoders received little consideration despite their wider applicability in contemporary NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose a debiasing method for pre-trained text encoders that both reduces social stereotypes, and inflicts next to no semantic damage. Unlike previous studies that directly manipulate the embeddings, we suggest to dive deeper into the operation of these encoders, and pay more attention to the way they pay attention to different social groups. We find that stereotypes are also encoded in the attention layer. Then, we work on model debiasing by redistributing the attention scores of a text encoder such that it forgets any preference to historically advantaged groups, and attends to all social classes with the same intensity. Our experiments confirm that reducing bias from attention effectively mitigates it from the model’s text representations.
Conceptual Similarity for Subjective Tags
Yacine Gaci | Boualem Benatallah | Fabio Casati | Khalid Benabdeslem
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022
Yacine Gaci | Boualem Benatallah | Fabio Casati | Khalid Benabdeslem
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022
Tagging in the context of online resources is a fundamental addition to search systems. Tags assist with the indexing, management, and retrieval of online products and services to answer complex user queries. Traditional methods of matching user queries with tags either rely on cosine similarity, or employ semantic similarity models that fail to recognize conceptual connections between tags, e.g. ambiance and music. In this work, we focus on subjective tags which characterize subjective aspects of a product or service. We propose conceptual similarity to leverage conceptual awareness when assessing similarity between tags. We also provide a simple cost-effective pipeline to automatically generate data in order to train the conceptual similarity model. We show that our pipeline generates high-quality datasets, and evaluate the similarity model both systematically and on a downstream application. Experiments show that conceptual similarity outperforms existing work when using subjective tags.