Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set Expansion
This work addresses the problem of reducing annotation dependence for NLP and IR practitioners, representing a novel paradigm shift rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the bottleneck in Entity Set Expansion (ESE) caused by reliance on annotated corpora by introducing a corpus-independent paradigm that uses autoregressive language models to generate context patterns automatically, achieving effective results on three widely used datasets.
Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a valuable task that aims to find entities of the target semantic class described by given seed entities. Various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) downstream applications have benefited from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although existing corpus-based ESE methods have achieved great progress, they still rely on corpora with high-quality entity information annotated, because most of them need to obtain the context patterns through the position of the entity in a sentence. Therefore, the quality of the given corpora and their entity annotation has become the bottleneck that limits the performance of such methods. To overcome this dilemma and make the ESE models free from the dependence on entity annotation, our work aims to explore a new ESE paradigm, namely corpus-independent ESE. Specifically, we devise a context pattern generation module that utilizes autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-2) to automatically generate high-quality context patterns for entities. In addition, we propose the GAPA, a novel ESE framework that leverages the aforementioned GenerAted PAtterns to expand target entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. All the codes of our experiments are available at https://github.com/geekjuruo/GAPA.