We explore few-shot learning (FSL) for relation classification (RC). Focusing on the realistic scenario of FSL, in which a test instance might not belong to any of the target categories (none-of-the-above, [NOTA]), we first revisit the recent popular dataset structure for FSL, pointing out its unrealistic data distribution. To remedy this, we propose a novel methodology for deriving more realistic few-shot test data from available datasets for supervised RC, and apply it to the TACRED dataset. This yields a new challenging benchmark for FSL-RC, on which state of the art models show poor performance. Next, we analyze classification schemes within the popular embedding-based nearest-neighbor approach for FSL, with respect to constraints they impose on the embedding space. Triggered by this analysis, we propose a novel classification scheme in which the NOTA category is represented as learned vectors, shown empirically to be an appealing option for FSL.

Building meaningful phrase representations is challenging because phrase meanings are not simply the sum of their constituent meanings. Lexical composition can shift the meanings of the constituent words and introduce implicit information. We tested a broad range of textual representations for their capacity to address these issues. We found that, as expected, contextualized word representations perform better than static word embeddings, more so on detecting meaning shift than in recovering implicit information, in which their performance is still far from that of humans. Our evaluation suite, consisting of six tasks related to lexical composition effects, can serve future research aiming to improve representations.

Recent trends suggest that neural-network-inspired word embedding models outperform traditional count-based distributional models on word similarity and analogy detection tasks. We reveal that much of the performance gains of word embeddings are due to certain system design choices and hyperparameter optimizations, rather than the embedding algorithms themselves. Furthermore, we show that these modifications can be transferred to traditional distributional models, yielding similar gains. In contrast to prior reports, we observe mostly local or insignificant performance differences between the methods, with no global advantage to any single approach over the others.