Improving Low-resource Reading Comprehension via Cross-lingual Transposition Rethinking

Extractive Reading Comprehension (ERC) has made tremendous advances enabled by the availability of large-scale high-quality ERC training data. Despite of such rapid progress and widespread application, the datasets in languages other than high-resource languages such as English remain scarce. To address this issue, we propose a Cross-Lingual Transposition ReThinking (XLTT) model by modelling existing high-quality extractive reading comprehension datasets in a multilingual environment. To be specific, we present multilingual adaptive attention (MAA) to combine intra-attention and inter-attention to learn more general generalizable semantic and lexical knowledge from each pair of language families. Furthermore, to make full use of existing datasets, we adopt a new training framework to train our model by calculating task-level similarities between each existing dataset and target dataset. The experimental results show that our XLTT model surpasses six baselines on two multilingual ERC benchmarks, especially more effective for low-resource languages with 3.9 and 4.1 average improvement in F1 and EM, respectively.

PatentMiner: Patent Vacancy Mining via Context-enhanced and Knowledge-guided Graph Attention

Although there are a small number of work to conduct patent research by building knowledge graph, but without constructing patent knowledge graph using patent documents and combining latest natural language processing methods to mine hidden rich semantic relationships in existing patents and predict new possible patents. In this paper, we propose a new patent vacancy prediction approach named PatentMiner to mine rich semantic knowledge and predict new potential patents based on knowledge graph (KG) and graph attention mechanism. Firstly, patent knowledge graph over time (e.g. year) is constructed by carrying out named entity recognition and relation extrac-tion from patent documents. Secondly, Common Neighbor Method (CNM), Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Context-enhanced Graph Attention Networks (CGAT) are proposed to perform link prediction in the constructed knowledge graph to dig out the potential triples. Finally, patents are defined on the knowledge graph by means of co-occurrence relationship, that is, each patent is represented as a fully connected subgraph containing all its entities and co-occurrence relationships of the patent in the knowledge graph; Furthermore, we propose a new patent prediction task which predicts a fully connected subgraph with newly added prediction links as a new pa-tent. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed patent predic-tion approach can correctly predict new patents and Context-enhanced Graph Attention Networks is much better than the baseline. Meanwhile, our proposed patent vacancy prediction task still has significant room to im-prove.

DiaKG: an Annotated Diabetes Dataset for Medical Knowledge Graph Construction

Knowledge Graph has been proven effective in modeling structured information and conceptual knowledge, especially in the medical domain. However, the lack of high-quality annotated corpora remains a crucial problem for advancing the research and applications on this task. In order to accelerate the research for domain-specific knowledge graphs in the medical domain, we introduce DiaKG, a high-quality Chinese dataset for Diabetes knowledge graph, which contains 22,050 entities and 6,890 relations in total. We implement recent typical methods for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction as a benchmark to evaluate the proposed dataset thoroughly. Empirical results show that the DiaKG is challenging for most existing methods and further analysis is conducted to discuss future research direction for improvements. We hope the release of this dataset can assist the construction of diabetes knowledge graphs and facilitate AI-based applications.

A Multilingual Modeling Method for Span-Extraction Reading Comprehension

Span-extraction reading comprehension models have made tremendous advances enabled by the availability of large-scale, high-quality training datasets. Despite such rapid progress and widespread application, extractive reading comprehension datasets in languages other than English remain scarce, and creating such a sufficient amount of training data for each language is costly and even impossible. An alternative to creating large-scale high-quality monolingual span-extraction training datasets is to develop multilingual modeling approaches and systems which can transfer to the target language without requiring training data in that language. In this paper, in order to solve the scarce availability of extractive reading comprehension training data in the target language, we propose a multilingual extractive reading comprehension approach called XLRC by simultaneously modeling the existing extractive reading comprehension training data in a multilingual environment using self-adaptive attention and multilingual attention. Specifically, we firstly construct multilingual parallel corpora by translating the existing extractive reading comprehension datasets (i.e., CMRC 2018) from the target language (i.e., Chinese) into different language families (i.e., English). Secondly, to enhance the final target representation, we adopt self-adaptive attention (SAA) to combine self-attention and inter-attention to extract the semantic relations from each pair of the target and source languages. Furthermore, we propose multilingual attention (MLA) to learn the rich knowledge from various language families. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline (i.e., RoBERTa_Large) on the CMRC 2018 task, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed multi-lingual modeling approach and show the potentials in multilingual NLP tasks.