Matt Pauk

Mreedul Gupta, Advait Deshmukh, Ashwin Umadi et al.

Ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) assigns highly specific types to entity mentions, but current approaches struggle with types in the long tail. We hypothesize that a key limitation is the reliance on sentence-level context, since disambiguating evidence is often spread across multiple sentences. Testing this has been difficult because all existing UFET resources are sentence-level. We present Narrative-UFET, a controlled extension of UFET in which each entity mention is paired with an automatically generated short, coherent narrative. Synthesizing narratives lets us isolate the effect of specific discourse properties. We experiment with two paired variants: one in which the entity's type is held constant across the narrative (Maintain) and one in which it shifts (Change). We show that narrative context yields consistent improvements on long-tail types over sentence-level baselines, with the Change variant providing the stronger signal. A comparison against naturally occurring contexts shows that synthetic narratives yield stronger gains, indicating that controlled discourse construction can surface signals that real text leaves implicit. Substantial room for improvement remains, suggesting open directions in both discourse modeling and narrative construction.

Matt Pauk, Maria Leonor Pacheco

LLMs have been shown to be useful for a variety of language tasks, without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. However, these models often struggle with hallucinations and complex reasoning problems due to their autoregressive nature. We propose to address some of these issues, specifically in the area of structured prediction, by combining LLMs with combinatorial inference in an attempt to marry the predictive power of LLMs with the structural consistency provided by inference methods. We perform exhaustive experiments in an effort to understand which prompting strategies can effectively estimate LLM confidence values for use with symbolic inference, and show that, regardless of the prompting strategy, the addition of symbolic inference on top of prompting alone leads to more consistent and accurate predictions. Additionally, we show that calibration and fine-tuning using structured prediction objectives leads to increased performance for challenging tasks, showing that structured learning is still valuable in the era of LLMs.