Zero-Shot Open Entity Typing as Type-Compatible Grounding

Ben Zhou, Daniel Khashabi, Chen-Tse Tsai, Dan Roth


Abstract
The problem of entity-typing has been studied predominantly as a supervised learning problems, mostly with task-specific annotations (for coarse types) and sometimes with distant supervision (for fine types). While such approaches have strong performance within datasets they often lack the flexibility to transfer across text genres and to generalize to new type taxonomies. In this work we propose a zero-shot entity typing approach that requires no annotated data and can flexibly identify newly defined types. Given a type taxonomy, the entries of which we define as Boolean functions of freebase “types,” we ground a given mention to a set of type-compatible Wikipedia entries, and then infer the target mention’s type using an inference algorithm that makes use of the types of these entries. We evaluate our system on a broad range of datasets, including standard fine-grained and coarse-grained entity typing datasets, and on a dataset in the biological domain. Our system is shown to be competitive with state-of-the-art supervised NER systems, and to outperform them on out-of-training datasets. We also show that our system significantly outperforms other zero-shot fine typing systems.
Anthology ID:
D18-1231
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2065–2076
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1231
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1231
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ben Zhou, Daniel Khashabi, Chen-Tse Tsai, and Dan Roth. 2018. Zero-Shot Open Entity Typing as Type-Compatible Grounding. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2065–2076, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot Open Entity Typing as Type-Compatible Grounding (Zhou et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1231.pdf
Attachment:
 D18-1231.Attachment.pdf
Code
 CogComp/zoe
Data
FIGEROpen Entity