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Qualifying Exam Advancing Knowledge-Intensive Tasks in NLP: Entity Linking and Beyond
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Speaker: Wenzheng Zhang

Bio

Location : CoRE 305

Committee: 

Assistant Professor Karl Stratos

Assistant Professor Hao Wang

Associate Professor Abdeslam Boularias

Professor of Professional Practice James Abello Monedero

Event Type: Qualifying Exam

Abstract: Knowledge-intensive NLP tasks—such as open-domain question answering, fact-checking, and entity linking—rely on large external knowledge sources to handle the complexity of real-world problems. Despite significant progress, existing methods remain suboptimal and leave ample room for improvement. In this talk, I focus on entity linking as a prime example of these challenges. Entity linking involves identifying mention spans within a document and associating each span with the correct entity in a knowledge base. I will introduce our novel approach to entity linking, which not only achieves strong results but also overcomes key shortcomings of previous models. In addition, this method enables synergy with open-domain question answering, highlighting how progress in one knowledge-intensive task can benefit others. Building on this foundation, I will then briefly discuss how we can enhance the core retrieval component underpinning all knowledge-intensive tasks through a unified, multitask-trained model. Finally, I will outline promising directions for future work, with the broader goal of advancing knowledge-intensive NLP in a more general and integrative manner.A list of publications exam will be based on: Understanding hard negatives in noise contrastive estimation. NAACL 2021.EntQA: Entity linking as question answering. ICLR 2022.Seq2seq is all you need for coreference resolution. EMNLP 2023.Improving Multitask Retrieval by Promoting Task Specialization. TACL 2023.Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=zh-CN&user=yWEhrEAAAAAJ

Organization: 

Contact  Assistant Professor Karl Stratos

Zoom Link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/my/wz283?pwd=SkJyUEtaOU1maFo3YXRJTkJEeEZZZz09&omn=97901441248