State-of-the-art methods for metonymy resolution (MR) consider the sentential context by modeling the entire sentence. However, entity representation, or syntactic structure that are informative may be beneficial for identifying metonymy. Other approaches only using deep neural network fail to capture such information. To leverage both entity and syntax constraints, this paper proposes a robust model EBAGCN for metonymy resolution. First, this work extracts syntactic dependency relations under the guidance of syntactic knowledge. Then the work constructs a neural network to incorporate both entity representation and syntactic structure into better resolution representations. In this way, the proposed model alleviates the impact of noisy information from entire sentences and breaks the limit of performance on the complicated texts. Experiments on the SemEval and ReLocaR dataset show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method BERT by more than 4%. Ablation tests demonstrate that leveraging these two types of constraints benefits fine pre-trained language models in the MR task.

Relation classification is one of the most fundamental upstream tasks in natural language processing and information extraction. State-of-the-art approaches make use of various deep neural networks (DNNs) to extract higher-level features directly. They can easily access to accurate classification results by taking advantage of both local entity features and global sentential features. Recent works on relation classification devote efforts to modify these neural networks, but less attention has been paid to the feature design concerning syntax. However, from a linguistic perspective, syntactic features are essential for relation classification. In this article, we present a novel linguistically motivated approach that enhances relation classification by imposing additional syntactic constraints. We investigate to leverage syntactic skeletons along with the sentential contexts to identify hidden relation types. The syntactic skeletons are extracted under the guidance of prior syntax knowledge. During extraction, the input sentences are recursively decomposed into syntactically shorter and simpler chunks. Experimental results on the SemEval-2010 Task 8 benchmark show that incorporating syntactic skeletons into current DNN models enhances the task of relation classification. Our systems significantly surpass two strong baseline systems. One of the substantial advantages of our proposal is that this framework is extensible for most current DNN models.

Metonymy resolution (MR) is a challenging task in the field of natural language processing. The task of MR aims to identify the metonymic usage of a word that employs an entity name to refer to another target entity. Recent BERT-based methods yield state-of-the-art performances. However, they neither make full use of the entity information nor explicitly consider syntactic structure. In contrast, in this paper, we argue that the metonymic process should be completed in a collaborative manner, relying on both lexical semantics and syntactic structure (syntax). This paper proposes a novel approach to enhancing BERT-based MR models with hard and soft syntactic constraints by using different types of convolutional neural networks to model dependency parse trees. Experimental results on benchmark datasets (e.g., ReLocaR, SemEval 2007 and WiMCor) confirm that leveraging syntactic information into fine pre-trained language models benefits MR tasks.