DNG: Taxonomy Expansion by Exploring the Intrinsic Directed Structure on Non-gaussian Space

TL;DR

This paper introduces DNG, a novel taxonomy expansion method that explicitly models hierarchical semantics and relation directionality using non-Gaussian constraints, improving accuracy over existing approaches.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new node representation combining inherited and incremental features, and applies non-Gaussian constraints to capture relation directionality in taxonomy expansion.

Findings

DNG outperforms several strong baselines on real-world datasets.

The model effectively captures hierarchical semantics and relation directionality.

Theoretical guarantees ensure the non-Gaussianity of features.

Abstract

Taxonomy expansion is the process of incorporating a large number of additional nodes (i.e., "queries") into an existing taxonomy (i.e., "seed"), with the most important step being the selection of appropriate positions for each query. Enormous efforts have been made by exploring the seed's structure. However, existing approaches are deficient in their mining of structural information in two ways: poor modeling of the hierarchical semantics and failure to capture directionality of is-a relation. This paper seeks to address these issues by explicitly denoting each node as the combination of inherited feature (i.e., structural part) and incremental feature (i.e., supplementary part). Specifically, the inherited feature originates from "parent" nodes and is weighted by an inheritance factor. With this node representation, the hierarchy of semantics in taxonomies (i.e., the inheritance and accumulation of features from "parent" to "child") could be embodied. Additionally, based on this representation, the directionality of is-a relation could be easily translated into the irreversible inheritance of features. Inspired by the Darmois-Skitovich Theorem, we implement this irreversibility by a non-Gaussian constraint on the supplementary feature. A log-likelihood learning objective is further utilized to optimize the proposed model (dubbed DNG), whereby the required non-Gaussianity is also theoretically ensured. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets verify the superiority of DNG relative to several strong baselines.