GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction

GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction

Wasi Ahmad, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21), 2021.

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Abstract

Prevalent approaches in cross-lingual relation and event extraction use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with universal dependency parses to learn language-agnostic representations such that models trained on one language can be applied to other languages. However, GCNs lack in modeling long-range dependencies or disconnected words in the dependency tree. To address this challenge, we propose to utilize the self-attention mechanism where we explicitly fuse structural information to learn the dependencies between words at different syntactic distances. We introduce GATE, a Graph Attention Transformer Encoder, and test its cross-lingual transferability on relation and event extraction tasks. We perform rigorous experiments on the widely used ACE05 dataset that includes three typologically different languages: English, Chinese, and Arabic. The evaluation results show that GATE outperforms three recently proposed methods by a large margin. Our detailed analysis reveals that due to the reliance on syntactic dependencies, GATE produces robust representations that facilitate transfer across languages.

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Bib Entry

@inproceedings{ahmad2021gate,
  author = {Ahmad, Wasi and Peng, Nanyun and Chang, Kai-Wei},
  title = {GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction},
  booktitle = {The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21)},
  year = {2021}
}

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  Wasi Ahmad, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21), 2021.
  Full Text Code Abstract BibTeX Details

  Prevalent approaches in cross-lingual relation and event extraction use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with universal dependency parses to learn language-agnostic representations such that models trained on one language can be applied to other languages. However, GCNs lack in modeling long-range dependencies or disconnected words in the dependency tree. To address this challenge, we propose to utilize the self-attention mechanism where we explicitly fuse structural information to learn the dependencies between words at different syntactic distances. We introduce GATE, a Graph Attention Transformer Encoder, and test its cross-lingual transferability on relation and event extraction tasks. We perform rigorous experiments on the widely used ACE05 dataset that includes three typologically different languages: English, Chinese, and Arabic. The evaluation results show that GATE outperforms three recently proposed methods by a large margin. Our detailed analysis reveals that due to the reliance on syntactic dependencies, GATE produces robust representations that facilitate transfer across languages.

  @inproceedings{ahmad2021gate,
    author = {Ahmad, Wasi and Peng, Nanyun and Chang, Kai-Wei},
    title = {GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction},
    booktitle = {The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21)},
    year = {2021}
  }
  

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  @inproceedings{ahmad2019cross,
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