MGAD: Learning Descriptional Representation Distilled from Distributional Semantics for Unseen Entities

MGAD: Learning Descriptional Representation Distilled from Distributional Semantics for Unseen Entities

Yuanzheng Wang, Xueqi Cheng, Yixing Fan, Xiaofei Zhu, Huasheng Liang, Qiang Yan, Jiafeng Guo

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4404-4410. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/611

Entity representation plays a central role in building effective entity retrieval models. Recent works propose to learn entity representations based on entity-centric contexts, which achieve SOTA performances on many tasks. However, these methods lead to poor representations for unseen entities since they rely on a multitude of occurrences for each entity to enable accurate representations. To address this issue, we propose to learn enhanced descriptional representations for unseen entities by distilling knowledge from distributional semantics into descriptional embeddings. Specifically, we infer enhanced embeddings for unseen entities based on descriptions by aligning the descriptional embedding space to the distributional embedding space with different granularities, i.e., element-level, batch-level and space-level alignment. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets show that our approach improves the performance over all baseline methods. In particular, our approach can achieve the effectiveness of the teacher model on almost all entities, and maintain such high performance on unseen entities.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Named Entities
Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Natural Language Processing: Coreference Resolution
Natural Language Processing: Embeddings
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Semantics