Mathias Niepert


2022

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BenchIE: A Framework for Multi-Faceted Fact-Based Open Information Extraction Evaluation
Kiril Gashteovski | Mingying Yu | Bhushan Kotnis | Carolin Lawrence | Mathias Niepert | Goran Glavaš
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Intrinsic evaluations of OIE systems are carried out either manually—with human evaluators judging the correctness of extractions—or automatically, on standardized benchmarks. The latter, while much more cost-effective, is less reliable, primarily because of the incompleteness of the existing OIE benchmarks: the ground truth extractions do not include all acceptable variants of the same fact, leading to unreliable assessment of the models’ performance. Moreover, the existing OIE benchmarks are available for English only. In this work, we introduce BenchIE: a benchmark and evaluation framework for comprehensive evaluation of OIE systems for English, Chinese, and German. In contrast to existing OIE benchmarks, BenchIE is fact-based, i.e., it takes into account informational equivalence of extractions: our gold standard consists of fact synsets, clusters in which we exhaustively list all acceptable surface forms of the same fact. Moreover, having in mind common downstream applications for OIE, we make BenchIE multi-faceted; i.e., we create benchmark variants that focus on different facets of OIE evaluation, e.g., compactness or minimality of extractions. We benchmark several state-of-the-art OIE systems using BenchIE and demonstrate that these systems are significantly less effective than indicated by existing OIE benchmarks. We make BenchIE (data and evaluation code) publicly available.

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MILIE: Modular & Iterative Multilingual Open Information Extraction
Bhushan Kotnis | Kiril Gashteovski | Daniel Rubio | Ammar Shaker | Vanesa Rodriguez-Tembras | Makoto Takamoto | Mathias Niepert | Carolin Lawrence
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is the task of extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples from natural language sentences. Current OpenIE systems extract all triple slots independently. In contrast, we explore the hypothesis that it may be beneficial to extract triple slots iteratively: first extract easy slots, followed by the difficult ones by conditioning on the easy slots, and therefore achieve a better overall extraction. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a neural OpenIE system, MILIE, that operates in an iterative fashion. Due to the iterative nature, the system is also modularit is possible to seamlessly integrate rule based extraction systems with a neural end-to-end system, thereby allowing rule based systems to supply extraction slots which MILIE can leverage for extracting the remaining slots. We confirm our hypothesis empirically: MILIE outperforms SOTA systems on multiple languages ranging from Chinese to Arabic. Additionally, we are the first to provide an OpenIE test dataset for Arabic and Galician.

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AnnIE: An Annotation Platform for Constructing Complete Open Information Extraction Benchmark
Niklas Friedrich | Kiril Gashteovski | Mingying Yu | Bhushan Kotnis | Carolin Lawrence | Mathias Niepert | Goran Glavaš
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting facts from sentences in the form of relations and their corresponding arguments in schema-free manner. Intrinsic performance of OIE systems is difficult to measure due to the incompleteness of existing OIE benchmarks: ground truth extractions do not group all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact that can be extracted from a sentence. To measure performance of OIE systems more realistically, it is necessary to manually annotate complete facts (i.e., clusters of all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact) from input sentences. We propose AnnIE: an interactive annotation platform that facilitates such challenging annotation tasks and supports creation of complete fact-oriented OIE evaluation benchmarks. AnnIE is modular and flexible in order to support different use case scenarios (i.e., benchmarks covering different types of facts) and different languages. We use AnnIE to build two complete OIE benchmarks: one with verb-mediated facts and another with facts encompassing named entities. We evaluate several OIE systems on our complete benchmarks created with AnnIE. We publicly release AnnIE (and all gold datasets generated with it) under non-restrictive license.

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Joint Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion and Alignment
Vinh Tong | Dat Quoc Nguyen | Trung Thanh Huynh | Tam Thanh Nguyen | Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen | Mathias Niepert
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Knowledge graph (KG) alignment and completion are usually treated as two independent tasks. While recent work has leveraged entity and relation alignments from multiple KGs, such as alignments between multilingual KGs with common entities and relations, a deeper understanding of the ways in which multilingual KG completion (MKGC) can aid the creation of multilingual KG alignments (MKGA) is still limited. Motivated by the observation that structural inconsistencies – the main challenge for MKGA models – can be mitigated through KG completion methods, we propose a novel model for jointly completing and aligning knowledge graphs. The proposed model combines two components that jointly accomplish KG completion and alignment. These two components employ relation-aware graph neural networks that we propose to encode multi-hop neighborhood structures into entity and relation representations. Moreover, we also propose (i) a structural inconsistency reduction mechanism to incorporate information from the completion into the alignment component, and (ii) an alignment seed enlargement and triple transferring mechanism to enlarge alignment seeds and transfer triples during KGs alignment. Extensive experiments on a public multilingual benchmark show that our proposed model outperforms existing competitive baselines, obtaining new state-of-the-art results on both MKGC and MKGA tasks.

2019

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Attending to Future Tokens for Bidirectional Sequence Generation
Carolin Lawrence | Bhushan Kotnis | Mathias Niepert
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Neural sequence generation is typically performed token-by-token and left-to-right. Whenever a token is generated only previously produced tokens are taken into consideration. In contrast, for problems such as sequence classification, bidirectional attention, which takes both past and future tokens into consideration, has been shown to perform much better. We propose to make the sequence generation process bidirectional by employing special placeholder tokens. Treated as a node in a fully connected graph, a placeholder token can take past and future tokens into consideration when generating the actual output token. We verify the effectiveness of our approach experimentally on two conversational tasks where the proposed bidirectional model outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin.

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Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction using Lower-Arity Universal Schemas
Kosuke Akimoto | Takuya Hiraoka | Kunihiko Sadamasa | Mathias Niepert
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Most existing relation extraction approaches exclusively target binary relations, and n-ary relation extraction is relatively unexplored. Current state-of-the-art n-ary relation extraction method is based on a supervised learning approach and, therefore, may suffer from the lack of sufficient relation labels. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to cross-sentence n-ary relation extraction based on universal schemas. To alleviate the sparsity problem and to leverage inherent decomposability of n-ary relations, we propose to learn relation representations of lower-arity facts that result from decomposing higher-arity facts. The proposed method computes a score of a new n-ary fact by aggregating scores of its decomposed lower-arity facts. We conduct experiments with datasets for ternary relation extraction and empirically show that our method improves the n-ary relation extraction performance compared to previous methods.

2018

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LRMM: Learning to Recommend with Missing Modalities
Cheng Wang | Mathias Niepert | Hui Li
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multimodal learning has shown promising performance in content-based recommendation due to the auxiliary user and item information of multiple modalities such as text and images. However, the problem of incomplete and missing modality is rarely explored and most existing methods fail in learning a recommendation model with missing or corrupted modalities. In this paper, we propose LRMM, a novel framework that mitigates not only the problem of missing modalities but also more generally the cold-start problem of recommender systems. We propose modality dropout (m-drop) and a multimodal sequential autoencoder (m-auto) to learn multimodal representations for complementing and imputing missing modalities. Extensive experiments on real-world Amazon data show that LRMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on rating prediction tasks. More importantly, LRMM is more robust to previous methods in alleviating data-sparsity and the cold-start problem.

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Learning Sequence Encoders for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Alberto García-Durán | Sebastijan Dumančić | Mathias Niepert
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Research on link prediction in knowledge graphs has mainly focused on static multi-relational data. In this work we consider temporal knowledge graphs where relations between entities may only hold for a time interval or a specific point in time. In line with previous work on static knowledge graphs, we propose to address this problem by learning latent entity and relation type representations. To incorporate temporal information, we utilize recurrent neural networks to learn time-aware representations of relation types which can be used in conjunction with existing latent factorization methods. The proposed approach is shown to be robust to common challenges in real-world KGs: the sparsity and heterogeneity of temporal expressions. Experiments show the benefits of our approach on four temporal KGs. The data sets are available under a permissive BSD-3 license.

2012

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Towards Distributed MCMC Inference in Probabilistic Knowledge Bases
Mathias Niepert | Christian Meilicke | Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction and Web-scale Knowledge Extraction (AKBC-WEKEX)

2011

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Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis with Structural Features
Cäcilia Zirn | Mathias Niepert | Heiner Stuckenschmidt | Michael Strube
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing