William Hogan


2023

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Open-world Semi-supervised Generalized Relation Discovery Aligned in a Real-world Setting
William Hogan | Jiacheng Li | Jingbo Shang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Open-world Relation Extraction (OpenRE) has recently garnered significant attention. However, existing approaches tend to oversimplify the problem by assuming that all instances of unlabeled data belong to novel classes, thereby limiting the practicality of these methods. We argue that the OpenRE setting should be more aligned with the characteristics of real-world data. Specifically, we propose two key improvements: (a) unlabeled data should encompass known and novel classes, including negative instances; and (b) the set of novel classes should represent long-tail relation types. Furthermore, we observe that popular relations can often be implicitly inferred through specific patterns, while long-tail relations tend to be explicitly expressed. Motivated by these insights, we present a method called KNoRD (Known and Novel Relation Discovery), which effectively classifies explicitly and implicitly expressed relations from known and novel classes within unlabeled data. Experimental evaluations on several Open-world RE benchmarks demonstrate that KNoRD consistently outperforms other existing methods, achieving significant performance gains.

2022

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Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Relation Extraction
William Hogan | Jiacheng Li | Jingbo Shang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent relation extraction (RE) works have shown encouraging improvements by conducting contrastive learning on silver labels generated by distant supervision before fine-tuning on gold labels. Existing methods typically assume all these silver labels are accurate and treat them equally; however, distant supervision is inevitably noisy–some silver labels are more reliable than others. In this paper, we propose fine-grained contrastive learning (FineCL) for RE, which leverages fine-grained information about which silver labels are and are not noisy to improve the quality of learned relationship representations for RE. We first assess the quality of silver labels via a simple and automatic approach we call “learning order denoising,” where we train a language model to learn these relations and record the order of learned training instances. We show that learning order largely corresponds to label accuracy–early-learned silver labels have, on average, more accurate labels than later-learned silver labels. Then, during pre-training, we increase the weights of accurate labels within a novel contrastive learning objective. Experiments on several RE benchmarks show that FineCL makes consistent and significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods.

2021

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BLAR: Biomedical Local Acronym Resolver
William Hogan | Yoshiki Vazquez Baeza | Yannis Katsis | Tyler Baldwin | Ho-Cheol Kim | Chun-Nan Hsu
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

NLP has emerged as an essential tool to extract knowledge from the exponentially increasing volumes of biomedical texts. Many NLP tasks, such as named entity recognition and named entity normalization, are especially challenging in the biomedical domain partly because of the prolific use of acronyms. Long names for diseases, bacteria, and chemicals are often replaced by acronyms. We propose Biomedical Local Acronym Resolver (BLAR), a high-performing acronym resolver that leverages state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained language models to accurately resolve local acronyms in biomedical texts. We test BLAR on the Ab3P corpus and achieve state-of-the-art results compared to the current best-performing local acronym resolution algorithms and models.