Few-shot multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) aims to detect user’s multiple intents and key slots using a tiny amount of annotated data. Prevailing multi-intent SLU models typically rely on abundant data for effective training, enabling them to capture corresponding relationships between intents and slots. However, in few-shot scenarios, establishing these connections becomes challenging, especially in situations involving multiple intents, which may result in confused relationships between intents and slots. To overcome the challenge, we propose decomposing the multi-label intent detection task into several single-label tasks, which reduces the complexity of model training while preserving the constraint relationships between intents and their related slots. We design description templates for each intent and respectively predict the correlation between the utterance and each intent description while completing the slot filling task under the corresponding intent. Therefore, each intent can independently guide the slot filling process, mitigating potentially confused relationships between multiple intents and slots. Experimental results on public datasets indicate that the performance of our model is better than ChatGPT and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) has garnered massive research interest recently, and most existing methods are designed following a transductive setting where all entities are observed during training. Despite the great progress on the transductive KGC, these methods struggle to conduct reasoning on emerging KGs involving unseen entities. Thus, inductive KGC, which aims to deduce missing links among unseen entities, has become a new trend. Many existing studies transform inductive KGC as a graph classification problem by extracting enclosing subgraphs surrounding each candidate triple. Unfortunately, they still face certain challenges, such as the expensive time consumption caused by the repeat extraction of enclosing subgraphs, and the deficiency of entity-independent feature learning. To address these issues, we propose a global-local anchor representation (GLAR) learning method for inductive KGC. Unlike previous methods that utilize enclosing subgraphs, we extract a shared opening subgraph for all candidates and perform reasoning on it, enabling the model to perform reasoning more efficiently. Moreover, we design some transferable global and local anchors to learn rich entity-independent features for emerging entities. Finally, a global-local graph reasoning model is applied on the opening subgraph to rank all candidates. Extensive experiments show that our GLAR outperforms most existing state-of-the-art methods.

Ancient Chinese poetry (ACP) is a vital component of Chinese traditional culture. Enhancing the performance of related downstream tasks demands the development of high-quality pre-trained language models (PLMs) dedicated to ACP. Notably, the semantics of ACP significantly differ from modern Chinese. Existing PLMs have limited knowledge of ACP and are inadequately aligned with the semantic space of modern Chinese, which constrains the utility for tasks related to ACP. In this paper, we propose a fine-tuning strategy to establish a precise alignment between ACP and modern Chinese semantics on sentence level. This strategy involves the inclusion of corresponding modern Chinese translations alongside original ancient poems, creating a hybrid corpus. This corpus facilitates a more effective transfer of knowledge from existing PLMs to the domain of ACP. Furthermore, we employ a training strategy based on a glyph-based foundational PLM, enabling meticulous fine-tuning. Consequently, we develop a specialized PLM named CP-ChineseBERT. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies, we conducted experiments on two real-world datasets, focusing on tasks related to ACP sentiment classification and ACP title prediction. The experimental results demonstrate the significant improvements in performance achieved through our innovative approaches.

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims to obtain all emotion-cause pairs consisting of the emotion clause and the corresponding cause clause in a document. Many existing works for ECPE utilize BERT to obtain representation on each clause in the document, and then perform the classification of Cartesian product among all clause representations or the clause-level sequence tagging. In this paper, we propose to redefine ECPE as the emotion-cause relationship between clauses prediction (ECRP). ECRP fits well with the form of the next sentence prediction task in BERT, which effectively unifies the BERT’s pre-training and the ECPE-specific fi ne-tuning process. According to the task form of ECRP, we reconstruct the original ECPE dataset from the document format to the clause-pair format. The scale of data is effectively expanded, and the imbalance of data is alleviated to a certain extent because some redundant data is filtered out based o n t he r elative distance between clauses. Experiments demonstrate that our ECRP-BERT model outperforms many competitive baselines. Especially in the case of low resources, the ECRP-BERT model still achieves a good performance.

Pseudo‐relevance feedback is a well‐studied query expansion technique in which it is assumed that the top‐ranked documents in an initial set of retrieval results are relevant and expansion terms are then extracted from those documents. When selecting expansion terms, most traditional models do not simultaneously consider term frequency and the co‐occurrence relationships between candidate terms and query terms. Intuitively, however, a term that has a higher co‐occurrence with a query term is more likely to be related to the query topic. In this article, we propose a kernel co‐occurrence‐based framework to enhance retrieval performance by integrating term co‐occurrence information into the Rocchio model and a relevance language model (RM3). Specifically, a kernel co‐occurrence‐based Rocchio method (KRoc) and a kernel co‐occurrence‐based RM3 method (KRM3) are proposed. In our framework, co‐occurrence information is incorporated into both the factor of the term discrimination power and the factor of the within‐document term weight to boost retrieval performance. The results of a series of experiments show that our proposed methods significantly outperform the corresponding strong baselines over all data sets in terms of the mean average precision and over most data sets in terms of P@10. A direct comparison of standard Text Retrieval Conference data sets indicates that our proposed methods are at least comparable to state‐of‐the‐art approaches.

At present, spoken language understanding (SLU) in multi-turn dialogue is a research hotspot, which mainly includes intent detection and slot filling. SLU models trained by large-scale corpus can learn good superficial semantic and grammatical information. But they lack the ability for modeling the knowledge needed to understand language. In order to further understand the deep semantic information of the dialogue, external knowledge needs to be modeled and incorporated into the SLU model. In addition, utilizing the correlation between history dialogue and current utterance is able to understand dialogue in multi-turn SLU. Thus, this paper proposes a joint model of intent detection and slot filling based on history context and external knowledge. This model constructs history dialogue encoder to obtain history context. Meanwhile, it constructs knowledge attention over context module. This module selects external knowledge according to the context information in current utterance and obtains knowledge representation. Finally, the history context and external knowledge representation are incorporated into the intent detection and slot filling joint model. The result of experiments on the common dataset demonstrate that with the help of external knowledge and history context, the performance of our model has a significant improvement.

Open source softwares play an important role in information retrieval research. Most of the existing open source information retrieval systems are implemented in Java or C++ programming language. In this paper, we propose Parrot1, a Python-based interactive platform for information retrieval research. The proposed platform has mainly three advantages in comparison with the existing retrieval systems: (1) It is integrated with Jupyter Notebook, an interactive programming platform which has proved to be effective for data scientists to tackle big data and AI problems. As a result, users can interactively visualize and diagnose a retrieval model; (2) As an application written in Python, it can be easily used in combination with the popular deep learning frameworks such as Tersorflow and Pytorch; (3) It is designed especially for researchers. Less code is needed to create a new retrieval model or to modify an existing one. Our efforts have focused on three functionalists: good usability, interactive programming, and good interoperability with the popular deep learning frameworks. To confirm the performance of the proposed system, we conduct comparative experiments on a number of standard test collections. The experimental results show that the proposed system is both efficient and effective, providing a practical framework for researchers in information retrieval.

Most of the existing information retrieval models assume that the terms of a text document are independent of each other. These retrieval models integrate three major variables to determine the degree of importance of a term for a document: within document term frequency, document length and the specificity of the term in the collection. Intuitively, the importance of a term for a document is not only dependent on the three aspects mentioned above, but also dependent on the degree of semantic coherence between the term and the document. In this paper, we propose a heuristic approach, in which the degree of semantic coherence of the query terms with a document is adopted to improve the information retrieval performance. Experimental results on standard TREC collections show the proposed models consistently outperform the state-of-the-art models.

Incorporating semantic information into document representation is effective and potentially significant to improve retrieval performance. Recently, log-bilinear language model (LBL), as a form of neural language model, has been proved to be an effective way to learn semantic word representations, but its feasibility and effectiveness in information retrieval is mostly unknown. In this paper, we study how to efficiently use LBL to improve as-hoc retrieval. We propose a log-bilinear document language model (LB-DM) within the language modeling framework. The key idea is to learn semantically oriented representations for words, and estimate document language models based on these representations. Noise-constrictive estimation is employed to perform fast training on large document collections. Experiment results on standard TREC collections show that LB-DM performs better than translation language model and LDA-based retrieval model.

A main challenge in applying translation language models to information retrieval is how to estimate the 'true' probability that a query could be generated as a translation of a document. The state-of-art methods rely on document-based word co-occurrences to estimate word-word translation probabilities. However, these methods do not take into account the proximity of co-occurrences. Intuitively, the proximity of co-occurrences can be exploited to estimate more accurate translation probabilities, since two words occur closer are more likely to be related. In this paper, we study how to explicitly incorporate proximity information into the existing translation language model, and propose a proximity-based translation language model, called TM-P, with three variants. In our TM-P models, a new concept (proximity-based word co-occurrence frequency) is introduced to model the proximity of word co-occurrences, which is then used to estimate translation probabilities. Experimental results on standard TREC collections show that our TM-P models achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art translation models.

This paper presents a tag-topic model with Dirichlet Forest prior (TTM-DF) for semantic knowledge acquisition from blog. The TTM-DF model extends the tag-topic model (TTM) by replacing the Dirichlet prior with the Dirichlet Forest prior over the topic-word multinomial. The correlation between words are calculated to generate a set of Must-Links and Cannot-Links, then the structures of Dirichlet trees are obtained though encoding the constraints of Must-Links and Cannot-Links. Words under the same subtrees are expected to be more correlated than words under different subtrees. We conduct experiments on a synthetic and a blog dataset. Both of the experimental results show that the TTM-DF model performs much better than the TTM model. It can improve the coherence of the underlying topics and the tag-topic distributions, and capture semantic knowledge effectively.

This paper proposes a novel topic model, Author-Conference Topic-Connection (ACTC) Model for academic network search. The ACTC Model extends the author-conference-topic (ACT) model by adding subject of the conference and the latent mapping information between subjects and topics. It simultaneously models topical aspects of papers, authors and conferences with two latent topic layers: a subject layer corresponding to conference topic, and a topic layer corresponding to the word topic. Each author would be associated with a multinomial distribution over subjects of conference (eg., KM, DB, IR for CIKM 2012), the conference(CIKM 2012), and the topics are respectively generated from a sampled subject. Then the words are generated from the sampled topics. We conduct experiments on a data set with 8,523 authors, 22,487 papers and 1,243 conferences from the well-known Arnetminer website, and train the model with different number of subjects and topics. For a qualitative evaluation, we compare ACTC with three others models LDA, Author-Topic (AT) and ACT in academic search services. Experiments show that ACTC can effectively capture the semantic connection between different types of information in academic network and perform well in expert searching and conference searching.