Zhigang Kan

Yifu Gao, Linbo Qiao, Zhigang Kan et al.

Temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA) poses a significant challenge task, due to the temporal constraints hidden in questions and the answers sought from dynamic structured knowledge. Although large language models (LLMs) have made considerable progress in their reasoning ability over structured data, their application to the TKGQA task is a relatively unexplored area. This paper first proposes a novel generative temporal knowledge graph question answering framework, GenTKGQA, which guides LLMs to answer temporal questions through two phases: Subgraph Retrieval and Answer Generation. First, we exploit LLM's intrinsic knowledge to mine temporal constraints and structural links in the questions without extra training, thus narrowing down the subgraph search space in both temporal and structural dimensions. Next, we design virtual knowledge indicators to fuse the graph neural network signals of the subgraph and the text representations of the LLM in a non-shallow way, which helps the open-source LLM deeply understand the temporal order and structural dependencies among the retrieved facts through instruction tuning. Experimental results on two widely used datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model.

Yu Tang, Zhigang Kan, Dequan Sun et al.

It is hard to train Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with stable convergence and avoid gradient vanishing and exploding problems, as the weights in the recurrent unit are repeated from iteration to iteration. Moreover, RNN is sensitive to the initialization of weights and bias, which brings difficulties in training. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has become a promising algorithm to train neural networks beyond traditional stochastic gradient algorithms with the gradient-free features and immunity to unsatisfactory conditions. However, ADMM could not be applied to train RNN directly since the state in the recurrent unit is repetitively updated over timesteps. Therefore, this work builds a new framework named ADMMiRNN upon the unfolded form of RNN to address the above challenges simultaneously. We also provide novel update rules and theoretical convergence analysis. We explicitly specify essential update rules in the iterations of ADMMiRNN with constructed approximation techniques and solutions to each sub-problem instead of vanilla ADMM. Numerical experiments are conducted on MNIST, IMDb, and text classification tasks. ADMMiRNN achieves convergent results and outperforms the compared baselines. Furthermore, ADMMiRNN trains RNN more stably without gradient vanishing or exploding than stochastic gradient algorithms. We also provide a distributed paralleled algorithm regarding ADMMiRNN, named P-ADMMiRNN, including Synchronous Parallel ADMMiRNN (SP-ADMMiRNN) and Asynchronous Parallel ADMMiRNN (AP-ADMMiRNN), which is the first to train RNN with ADMM in an asynchronous parallel manner. The source code is publicly available.

Zhigang Kan, Linbo Qiao, Sen Yang et al.

Event Extraction plays an important role in information-extraction to understand the world. Event extraction could be split into two subtasks: one is event trigger extraction, the other is event arguments extraction. However, the F-Score of event arguments extraction is much lower than that of event trigger extraction, i.e. in the most recent work, event trigger extraction achieves 80.7%, while event arguments extraction achieves only 58%. In pipelined structures, the difficulty of event arguments extraction lies in its lack of classification feature, and the much higher computation consumption. In this work, we proposed a novel Event Extraction approach based on multi-layer Dilate Gated Convolutional Neural Network (EE-DGCNN) which has fewer parameters. In addition, enhanced local information is incorporated into word features, to assign event arguments roles for triggers predicted by the first subtask. The numerical experiments demonstrated significant performance improvement beyond state-of-art event extraction approaches on real-world datasets. Further analysis of extraction procedure is presented, as well as experiments are conducted to analyze impact factors related to the performance improvement.