Time-Sensitive Question Answering (TSQA) is to answer questions qualified for a certain timestamp based on the given document. It is split into easy and hard modes depending on whether the document contain time qualifiers mentioned in the question. While existing models have performed well on easy mode, their performance is significant reduced for answering hard time-sensitive questions, whose time qualifiers are implicit in the document. An intuitive idea is to match temporal events in the given document by treating time-sensitive question as a temporal event of missing objects. However, not all temporal events extracted from the document have explicit time qualifiers. In this paper, we propose an Event-AL framework, in which a graph pruning model is designed to locate the timespan of implicit temporal events by capturing temporal relation between events. Moreover, we present an abductive reasoning module to determine proper objects while providing explanations. Besides, as the same relation may be scattered throughout the document in diverse expressions, a relation-based prompt is introduced to instructs LLMs in extracting candidate temporal events. We conduct extensive experiment and results show that Event-AL outperforms strong baselines for hard time-sensitive questions, with a 12.7% improvement in EM scores. In addition, it also exhibits great superiority for multi-answer and beyond hard time-sensitive questions.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is to answer questions based on a given passage, which has made great achievements using pre-trained Language Models (LMs). We study the robustness of MRC models to names which is flexible and repeatability. MRC models based on LMs may overuse the name information to make predictions, which causes the representation of names to be non-interchangeable, called name bias. In this paper, we propose a novel Causal Interventional paradigm for MRC (CI4MRC) to mitigate name bias. Specifically, we uncover that the pre-trained knowledge concerning names is indeed a confounder by analyzing the causalities among the pre-trained knowledge, context representation and answers based on a Structural Causal Model (SCM). We develop effective CI4MRC algorithmic implementations to constrain the confounder based on the neuron-wise and token-wise adjustments. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed CI4MRC effectively mitigates the name bias and achieves competitive performance on the original SQuAD. Moreover, our method is general to various pre-trained LMs and performs robustly on the adversarial datasets.

Multilingual pre-trained models are able to zero-shot transfer knowledge from rich-resource to low-resource languages in machine reading comprehension (MRC). However, inherent linguistic discrepancies in different languages could make answer spans predicted by zero-shot transfer violate syntactic constraints of the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual MRC framework equipped with a Siamese Semantic Disentanglement Model (S2DM) to disassociate semantics from syntax in representations learned by multilingual pre-trained models. To explicitly transfer only semantic knowledge to the target language, we propose two groups of losses tailored for semantic and syntactic encoding and disentanglement. Experimental results on three multilingual MRC datasets (i.e., XQuAD, MLQA, and TyDi QA) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over models based on mBERT and XLM-100.

Difficult samples of the minority class in imbalanced text classification are usually hard to be classified as they are embedded into an overlapping semantic region with the majority class. In this paper, we propose a Mutual Information constrained Semantically Oversampling framework (MISO) that can generate anchor instances to help the backbone network determine the re-embedding position of a non-overlapping representation for each difficult sample. MISO consists of (1) a semantic fusion module that learns entangled semantics among difficult and majority samples with an adaptive multi-head attention mechanism, (2) a mutual information loss that forces our model to learn new representations of entangled semantics in the non-overlapping region of the minority class, and (3) a coupled adversarial encoder-decoder that fine-tunes disentangled semantic representations to remain their correlations with the minority class, and then using these disentangled semantic representations to generate anchor instances for each difficult sample. Experiments on a variety of imbalanced text classification tasks demonstrate that anchor instances help classifiers achieve significant improvements over strong baselines.