PORTAL: Scalable Tabular Foundation Models via Content-Specific Tokenization

Self-supervised learning on tabular data seeks to apply advances from natural language and image domains to the diverse domain of tables. However, current techniques often struggle with integrating multi-domain data and require data cleaning or specific structural requirements, limiting the scalability of pre-training datasets. We introduce PORTAL (Pretraining One-Row-at-a-Time for All tabLes), a framework that handles various data modalities without the need for cleaning or preprocessing. This simple yet powerful approach can be effectively pre-trained on online-collected datasets and fine-tuned to match state-of-the-art methods on complex classification and regression tasks. This work offers a practical advancement in self-supervised learning for large-scale tabular data.

Large Process Models: Business Process Management in the Age of Generative AI

The continued success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative artificial intelligence approaches highlights the advantages that large information corpora can have over rigidly defined symbolic models, but also serves as a proof-point of the challenges that purely statistics-based approaches have in terms of safety and trustworthiness. As a framework for contextualizing the potential, as well as the limitations of LLMs and other foundation model-based technologies, we propose the concept of a Large Process Model (LPM) that combines the correlation power of LLMs with the analytical precision and reliability of knowledge-based systems and automated reasoning approaches. LPMs are envisioned to directly utilize the wealth of process management experience that experts have accumulated, as well as process performance data of organizations with diverse characteristics, e.g., regarding size, region, or industry. In this vision, the proposed LPM would allow organizations to receive context-specific (tailored) process and other business models, analytical deep-dives, and improvement recommendations. As such, they would allow to substantially decrease the time and effort required for business transformation, while also allowing for deeper, more impactful, and more actionable insights than previously possible. We argue that implementing an LPM is feasible, but also highlight limitations and research challenges that need to be solved to implement particular aspects of the LPM vision.

Can Persistent Homology provide an efficient alternative for Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Completion Methods?

In this paper we present a novel method, $\textit{Knowledge Persistence}$ ($\mathcal{KP}$), for faster evaluation of Knowledge Graph (KG) completion approaches. Current ranking-based evaluation is quadratic in the size of the KG, leading to long evaluation times and consequently a high carbon footprint. $\mathcal{KP}$ addresses this by representing the topology of the KG completion methods through the lens of topological data analysis, concretely using persistent homology. The characteristics of persistent homology allow $\mathcal{KP}$ to evaluate the quality of the KG completion looking only at a fraction of the data. Experimental results on standard datasets show that the proposed metric is highly correlated with ranking metrics (Hits@N, MR, MRR). Performance evaluation shows that $\mathcal{KP}$ is computationally efficient: In some cases, the evaluation time (validation+test) of a KG completion method has been reduced from 18 hours (using Hits@10) to 27 seconds (using $\mathcal{KP}$), and on average (across methods & data) reduces the evaluation time (validation+test) by $\approx$ $\textbf{99.96}\%$.

HopfE: Knowledge Graph Representation Learning using Inverse Hopf Fibrations

Recently, several Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) approaches have been devised to represent entities and relations in dense vector space and employed in downstream tasks such as link prediction. A few KGE techniques address interpretability, i.e., mapping the connectivity patterns of the relations (i.e., symmetric/asymmetric, inverse, and composition) to a geometric interpretation such as rotations. Other approaches model the representations in higher dimensional space such as four-dimensional space (4D) to enhance the ability to infer the connectivity patterns (i.e., expressiveness). However, modeling relation and entity in a 4D space often comes at the cost of interpretability. This paper proposes HopfE, a novel KGE approach aiming to achieve the interpretability of inferred relations in the four-dimensional space. We first model the structural embeddings in 3D Euclidean space and view the relation operator as an SO(3) rotation. Next, we map the entity embedding vector from a 3D space to a 4D hypersphere using the inverse Hopf Fibration, in which we embed the semantic information from the KG ontology. Thus, HopfE considers the structural and semantic properties of the entities without losing expressivity and interpretability. Our empirical results on four well-known benchmarks achieve state-of-the-art performance for the KG completion task.

KGPool: Dynamic Knowledge Graph Context Selection for Relation Extraction

We present a novel method for relation extraction (RE) from a single sentence, mapping the sentence and two given entities to a canonical fact in a knowledge graph (KG). Especially in this presumed sentential RE setting, the context of a single sentence is often sparse. This paper introduces the KGPool method to address this sparsity, dynamically expanding the context with additional facts from the KG. It learns the representation of these facts (entity alias, entity descriptions, etc.) using neural methods, supplementing the sentential context. Unlike existing methods that statically use all expanded facts, KGPool conditions this expansion on the sentence. We study the efficacy of KGPool by evaluating it with different neural models and KGs (Wikidata and NYT Freebase). Our experimental evaluation on standard datasets shows that by feeding the KGPool representation into a Graph Neural Network, the overall method is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.

CHOLAN: A Modular Approach for Neural Entity Linking on Wikipedia and Wikidata

In this paper, we propose CHOLAN, a modular approach to target end-to-end entity linking (EL) over knowledge bases. CHOLAN consists of a pipeline of two transformer-based models integrated sequentially to accomplish the EL task. The first transformer model identifies surface forms (entity mentions) in a given text. For each mention, a second transformer model is employed to classify the target entity among a predefined candidates list. The latter transformer is fed by an enriched context captured from the sentence (i.e. local context), and entity description gained from Wikipedia. Such external contexts have not been used in the state of the art EL approaches. Our empirical study was conducted on two well-known knowledge bases (i.e., Wikidata and Wikipedia). The empirical results suggest that CHOLAN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on standard datasets such as CoNLL-AIDA, MSNBC, AQUAINT, ACE2004, and T-REx.

RECON: Relation Extraction using Knowledge Graph Context in a Graph Neural Network

In this paper, we present a novel method named RECON, that automatically identifies relations in a sentence (sentential relation extraction) and aligns to a knowledge graph (KG). RECON uses a graph neural network to learn representations of both the sentence as well as facts stored in a KG, improving the overall extraction quality. These facts, including entity attributes (label, alias, description, instance-of) and factual triples, have not been collectively used in the state of the art methods. We evaluate the effect of various forms of representing the KG context on the performance of RECON. The empirical evaluation on two standard relation extraction datasets shows that RECON significantly outperforms all state of the art methods on NYT Freebase and Wikidata datasets. RECON reports 87.23 F1 score (Vs 82.29 baseline) on Wikidata dataset whereas on NYT Freebase, reported values are 87.5(P@10) and 74.1(P@30) compared to the previous baseline scores of 81.3(P@10) and 63.1(P@30).

Evaluating the Impact of Knowledge Graph Context on Entity Disambiguation Models

Pretrained Transformer models have emerged as state-of-the-art approaches that learn contextual information from text to improve the performance of several NLP tasks. These models, albeit powerful, still require specialized knowledge in specific scenarios. In this paper, we argue that context derived from a knowledge graph (in our case: Wikidata) provides enough signals to inform pretrained transformer models and improve their performance for named entity disambiguation (NED) on Wikidata KG. We further hypothesize that our proposed KG context can be standardized for Wikipedia, and we evaluate the impact of KG context on state-of-the-art NED model for the Wikipedia knowledge base. Our empirical results validate that the proposed KG context can be generalized (for Wikipedia), and providing KG context in transformer architectures considerably outperforms the existing baselines, including the vanilla transformer models.

Unsupervised Extraction of Market Moving Events with Neural Attention

We present a method to identify relevant events associated with stock price movements without manually labeled data. We train an attention-based neural network, which given a set of news headlines for a given time frame, predicts the price movement of a given stock index (i.e., DOWN, STAY, UP). An attention layer acts as an input selector; it computes a normalized weight for each headline embedding. The weighted average of the embeddings is used to predict the price movement. We present an analysis to understand if, after the network has been trained, the attention layer is capable of generating a global ranking of news events through its unnormalized weights. The ranking should be able to rank relevant financial events higher. In this initial study we use news categories as a proxy for relevance: news belonging to more relevant categories should be ranked higher. Our experiments on four indices suggest that there is an indication that the weights indeed skew the global set of events towards those categories that are more relevant to explain the price change; this effect reflects the performance of the network on stock prediction.

KnowNER: Incremental Multilingual Knowledge in Named Entity Recognition

KnowNER is a multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) system that leverages different degrees of external knowledge. A novel modular framework divides the knowledge into four categories according to the depth of knowledge they convey. Each category consists of a set of features automatically generated from different information sources (such as a knowledge-base, a list of names or document-specific semantic annotations) and is used to train a conditional random field (CRF). Since those information sources are usually multilingual, KnowNER can be easily trained for a wide range of languages. In this paper, we show that the incorporation of deeper knowledge systematically boosts accuracy and compare KnowNER with state-of-the-art NER approaches across three languages (i.e., English, German and Spanish) performing amongst state-of-the art systems in all of them.