Explore and Exploit. Dictionary Expansion with Human-in-the-Loop

Abstract

Many Knowledge Extraction systems rely on semantic resources - dictionaries, ontologies, lexical resources - to extract information from unstructured text. A key for successful information extraction is to consider such resources as evolving artifacts and keep them up-to-date. In this paper, we tackle the problem of dictionary expansion and we propose a human-in-the-loop approach: we couple neural language models with tight human supervision to assist the user in building and maintaining domain-specific dictionaries. The approach works on any given input text corpus and is based on the explore and exploit paradigm: starting from a few seeds (or an existing dictionary) it effectively discovers new instances (explore) from the text corpus as well as predicts new potential instances which are not in the corpus, i.e. “unseen”, using the current dictionary entries (exploit). We evaluate our approach on five real-world dictionaries, achieving high accuracy with a rapid expansion rate.