What do Entity-Centric Models Learn? Insights from Entity Linking in Multi-Party Dialogue

Laura Aina, Carina Silberer, Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, Matthijs Westera, Gemma Boleda


Abstract
Humans use language to refer to entities in the external world. Motivated by this, in recent years several models that incorporate a bias towards learning entity representations have been proposed. Such entity-centric models have shown empirical success, but we still know little about why. In this paper we analyze the behavior of two recently proposed entity-centric models in a referential task, Entity Linking in Multi-party Dialogue (SemEval 2018 Task 4). We show that these models outperform the state of the art on this task, and that they do better on lower frequency entities than a counterpart model that is not entity-centric, with the same model size. We argue that making models entity-centric naturally fosters good architectural decisions. However, we also show that these models do not really build entity representations and that they make poor use of linguistic context. These negative results underscore the need for model analysis, to test whether the motivations for particular architectures are borne out in how models behave when deployed.
Anthology ID:
N19-1378
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3772–3783
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1378
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1378
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Laura Aina, Carina Silberer, Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, Matthijs Westera, and Gemma Boleda. 2019. What do Entity-Centric Models Learn? Insights from Entity Linking in Multi-Party Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3772–3783, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What do Entity-Centric Models Learn? Insights from Entity Linking in Multi-Party Dialogue (Aina et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1378.pdf
Code
 amore-upf/analysis-entity-centric-nns