# SynSetExpan: An Iterative Framework for Joint Entity Set Expansion and Synonym Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13827 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13827/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Entities for Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07789/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Euphemism Detection and Identification for Content Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16808/) (2021)
- [Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08087/) (2022)
- [Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Type Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03322/) (2021)
- [Open Relation and Event Type Discovery with Type Abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00178/) (2022)
- [A Unified Taxonomy-Guided Instruction Tuning Framework for Entity Set Expansion and Taxonomy Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13405/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Key Event Detection from Massive Text Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04153/) (2022)
- [From Retrieval to Generation: Efficient and Effective Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03531/) (2023)
- [What do Deck Chairs and Sun Hats Have in Common? Uncovering Shared Properties in Large Concept Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14793/) (2023)
- [Sem4SAP: Synonymous Expression Mining From Open Knowledge Graph For Language Model Synonym-Aware Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14425/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Entity set expansion and synonym discovery are two critical NLP tasks. Previous studies accomplish them separately, without exploring their interdependencies. In this work, we hypothesize that these two tasks are tightly coupled because two synonymous entities tend to have similar likelihoods of belonging to various semantic classes. This motivates us to design SynSetExpan, a novel framework that enables two tasks to mutually enhance each other. SynSetExpan uses a synonym discovery model to include popular entities' infrequent synonyms into the set, which boosts the set expansion recall. Meanwhile, the set expansion model, being able to determine whether an entity belongs to a semantic class, can generate pseudo training data to fine-tune the synonym discovery model towards better accuracy. To facilitate the research on studying the interplays of these two tasks, we create the first large-scale Synonym-Enhanced Set Expansion (SE2) dataset via crowdsourcing. Extensive experiments on the SE2 dataset and previous benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SynSetExpan for both entity set expansion and synonym discovery tasks.