Back to results

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Empower entity set expansion via language model probing

Abstract

dc:description

Entity set expansion, aiming at expanding a small seed entity set with new entities belonging to the same semantic class, is a critical task that benefits many downstream NLP and IR applications, such as question answering, query understanding, and taxonomy construction. Existing set expansion methods bootstrap the seed entity set by adaptively selecting context features and extracting new entities. A key challenge for entity set expansion is to avoid selecting ambiguous context features which will shift the class semantics and lead to accumulative errors in later iterations. In this study, we propose a novel iterative set expansion framework that leverages automatically generated class names to address the semantic drift issue. In each iteration, we select one positive and several negative class names by probing a pre-trained language model, and further score each candidate entity based on selected class names. Experiments on two datasets show that our framework generates high-quality class names and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods significantly.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
M.S.
Level thesis:degree_level
Thesis
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science
Grantor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Year dc:date
2022

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Zhang, Yunyi
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Han, Jiawei

Subjects

dc:subject × 2

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • Copyright 2021 Yunyi Zhang
Language dc:language
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113067
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113067

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Base URL
www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Zhang, Yunyi. Empower entity set expansion via language model probing. Thesis thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113067