Rasha Obeidat


2019

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Description-Based Zero-shot Fine-Grained Entity Typing
Rasha Obeidat | Xiaoli Fern | Hamed Shahbazi | Prasad Tadepalli
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Fine-grained Entity typing (FGET) is the task of assigning a fine-grained type from a hierarchy to entity mentions in the text. As the taxonomy of types evolves continuously, it is desirable for an entity typing system to be able to recognize novel types without additional training. This work proposes a zero-shot entity typing approach that utilizes the type description available from Wikipedia to build a distributed semantic representation of the types. During training, our system learns to align the entity mentions and their corresponding type representations on the known types. At test time, any new type can be incorporated into the system given its Wikipedia descriptions. We evaluate our approach on FIGER, a public benchmark entity tying dataset. Because the existing test set of FIGER covers only a small portion of the fine-grained types, we create a new test set by manually annotating a portion of the noisy training data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in recognizing novel types that are not present in the training data.