Automated Mining of Structured Knowledge from Text in the Era of Large Language Models

Massive amount of unstructured text data are generated daily, ranging from news articles to scientific papers. How to mine structured knowledge from the text data remains a crucial research question. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shed light on the text mining field with their superior text understanding and instruction-following ability. There are typically two ways of utilizing LLMs: fine-tune the LLMs with human-annotated training data, which is labor intensive and hard to scale; prompt the LLMs in a zero-shot or few-shot way, which cannot take advantage of the useful information in the massive text data. Therefore, it remains a challenge on automated mining of structured knowledge from massive text data in the era of large language models. In this tutorial, we cover the recent advancements in mining structured knowledge using language models with very weak supervision. We will introduce the following topics in this tutorial: (1) introduction to large language models, which serves as the foundation for recent text mining tasks, (2) ontology construction, which automatically enriches an ontology from a massive corpus, (3) weakly-supervised text classification in flat and hierarchical label space, (4) weakly-supervised information extraction, which extracts entity and relation structures.