Few-Shot Fine-Grained Entity Typing with Automatic Label Interpretation and Instance Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel few-shot fine-grained entity typing framework that automatically interprets label semantics and generates additional training instances, significantly improving performance on benchmark datasets.

Contribution

The work proposes an automatic label interpretation module and a type-based instance generator, addressing key limitations of existing prompt-based few-shot entity typing methods.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on three benchmark datasets

Automatically interprets label semantics considering hierarchy and context

Generates additional training instances to enhance generalization

Abstract

We study the problem of few-shot Fine-grained Entity Typing (FET), where only a few annotated entity mentions with contexts are given for each entity type. Recently, prompt-based tuning has demonstrated superior performance to standard fine-tuning in few-shot scenarios by formulating the entity type classification task as a ''fill-in-the-blank'' problem. This allows effective utilization of the strong language modeling capability of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Despite the success of current prompt-based tuning approaches, two major challenges remain: (1) the verbalizer in prompts is either manually designed or constructed from external knowledge bases, without considering the target corpus and label hierarchy information, and (2) current approaches mainly utilize the representation power of PLMs, but have not explored their generation power acquired through extensive general-domain pre-training. In this work, we propose a novel framework for few-shot FET consisting of two modules: (1) an entity type label interpretation module automatically learns to relate type labels to the vocabulary by jointly leveraging few-shot instances and the label hierarchy, and (2) a type-based contextualized instance generator produces new instances based on given instances to enlarge the training set for better generalization. On three benchmark datasets, our model outperforms existing methods by significant margins. Code can be found at https://github.com/teapot123/Fine-Grained-Entity-Typing.