Learning Cross-Context Entity Representations from Text

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fill-in-the-blank training method to learn high-quality, context-independent entity representations from text, demonstrating improvements across entity typing, linking, and trivia question answering tasks.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel fill-in-the-blank approach for entity representation learning, achieving state-of-the-art results without relying on external knowledge bases or linking-specific features.

Findings

64% error reduction on TypeNet benchmark

Achieved 89.8% on TAC-KBP 2010 without external resources

Successfully answered trivia questions with fine-grained entity types

Abstract

Language modeling tasks, in which words, or word-pieces, are predicted on the basis of a local context, have been very effective for learning word embeddings and context dependent representations of phrases. Motivated by the observation that efforts to code world knowledge into machine readable knowledge bases or human readable encyclopedias tend to be entity-centric, we investigate the use of a fill-in-the-blank task to learn context independent representations of entities from the text contexts in which those entities were mentioned. We show that large scale training of neural models allows us to learn high quality entity representations, and we demonstrate successful results on four domains: (1) existing entity-level typing benchmarks, including a 64% error reduction over previous work on TypeNet (Murty et al., 2018); (2) a novel few-shot category reconstruction task; (3) existing entity linking benchmarks, where we match the state-of-the-art on CoNLL-Aida without linking-specific features and obtain a score of 89.8% on TAC-KBP 2010 without using any alias table, external knowledge base or in domain training data and (4) answering trivia questions, which uniquely identify entities. Our global entity representations encode fine-grained type categories, such as Scottish footballers, and can answer trivia questions such as: Who was the last inmate of Spandau jail in Berlin?