Community - Amii Event - Technical - Partner Event

AI Seminar – Saeed Najafi

When
Sept. 23, 2022 - Sept. 23, 2022
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM MST
Where

Online

Presenter: Saeed Najafi, University of Alberta

Title: Weakly-Supervised Questions for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

Abstract: Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (ZRE) is the task of Relation Extraction where the training and test sets have no shared relation types. This very challenging domain is a good test of a model's ability to generalize. Previous approaches to ZRE reframed relation extraction as Question Answering (QA), allowing for the use of pre-trained QA models. However, this method required manually creating gold question templates for each new relation. Here, we do away with these gold templates and instead learn a model that can generate questions for unseen relations. Our technique can successfully translate relation descriptions into relevant questions, which are then leveraged to generate the correct tail entity. On tail entity extraction, we outperform the previous state-of-the-art by more than 16 F1 points without using gold question templates. On the RE-QA dataset where no previous baseline for relation extraction exists, our proposed algorithm comes within 1.5 F1 points of a system that uses gold question templates. Our model also approaches the state-of-the-art ZRE performance on the FewRel dataset, showing that QA models no longer need template questions to match the performance of models specifically tailored to the ZRE task.

Bio: Saeed Najafi is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta advised by Dr. Alona Fyshe. He has a keen interest in modelling language through machine learning and studies Question-Answering methods during his Ph.D. research.


The University of Alberta Artificial Intelligence (AI) Seminar is a weekly meeting where researchers (including students, developers, and professors) interested in AI can share their current research. Presenters include local speakers from the University of Alberta and industry as well as other institutions. The seminars discuss a wide range of topics related in any way to Artificial Intelligence, from foundational theoretical work to innovative applications of AI techniques to new fields and problems of interest. Learn more at the AI Seminar website and by subscribing to the mailing list!

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