Daily Papers

Joint entity and relation extraction plays a pivotal role in various applications, notably in the construction of knowledge graphs. Despite recent progress, existing approaches often fall short in two key aspects: richness of representation and coherence in output structure. These models often rely on handcrafted heuristics for computing entity and relation representations, potentially leading to loss of crucial information. Furthermore, they disregard task and/or dataset-specific constraints, resulting in output structures that lack coherence. In our work, we introduce EnriCo, which mitigates these shortcomings. Firstly, to foster rich and expressive representation, our model leverage attention mechanisms that allow both entities and relations to dynamically determine the pertinent information required for accurate extraction. Secondly, we introduce a series of decoding algorithms designed to infer the highest scoring solutions while adhering to task and dataset-specific constraints, thus promoting structured and coherent outputs. Our model demonstrates competitive performance compared to baselines when evaluated on Joint IE datasets.

Recent entity and relation extraction works focus on investigating how to obtain a better span representation from the pre-trained encoder. However, a major limitation of existing works is that they ignore the interrelation between spans (pairs). In this work, we propose a novel span representation approach, named Packed Levitated Markers (PL-Marker), to consider the interrelation between the spans (pairs) by strategically packing the markers in the encoder. In particular, we propose a neighborhood-oriented packing strategy, which considers the neighbor spans integrally to better model the entity boundary information. Furthermore, for those more complicated span pair classification tasks, we design a subject-oriented packing strategy, which packs each subject and all its objects to model the interrelation between the same-subject span pairs. The experimental results show that, with the enhanced marker feature, our model advances baselines on six NER benchmarks, and obtains a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models on ACE04 and ACE05.

End-to-end relation extraction aims to identify named entities and extract relations between them. Most recent work models these two subtasks jointly, either by casting them in one structured prediction framework, or performing multi-task learning through shared representations. In this work, we present a simple pipelined approach for entity and relation extraction, and establish the new state-of-the-art on standard benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05 and SciERC), obtaining a 1.7%-2.8% absolute improvement in relation F1 over previous joint models with the same pre-trained encoders. Our approach essentially builds on two independent encoders and merely uses the entity model to construct the input for the relation model. Through a series of careful examinations, we validate the importance of learning distinct contextual representations for entities and relations, fusing entity information early in the relation model, and incorporating global context. Finally, we also present an efficient approximation to our approach which requires only one pass of both entity and relation encoders at inference time, achieving an 8-16times speedup with a slight reduction in accuracy.

We introduce SpERT, an attention model for span-based joint entity and relation extraction. Our key contribution is a light-weight reasoning on BERT embeddings, which features entity recognition and filtering, as well as relation classification with a localized, marker-free context representation. The model is trained using strong within-sentence negative samples, which are efficiently extracted in a single BERT pass. These aspects facilitate a search over all spans in the sentence. In ablation studies, we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training, strong negative sampling and localized context. Our model outperforms prior work by up to 2.6% F1 score on several datasets for joint entity and relation extraction.

Standard English and Malaysian English exhibit notable differences, posing challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks on Malaysian English. Unfortunately, most of the existing datasets are mainly based on standard English and therefore inadequate for improving NLP tasks in Malaysian English. An experiment using state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) solutions on Malaysian English news articles highlights that they cannot handle morphosyntactic variations in Malaysian English. To the best of our knowledge, there is no annotated dataset available to improvise the model. To address these issues, we constructed a Malaysian English News (MEN) dataset, which contains 200 news articles that are manually annotated with entities and relations. We then fine-tuned the spaCy NER tool and validated that having a dataset tailor-made for Malaysian English could improve the performance of NER in Malaysian English significantly. This paper presents our effort in the data acquisition, annotation methodology, and thorough analysis of the annotated dataset. To validate the quality of the annotation, inter-annotator agreement was used, followed by adjudication of disagreements by a subject matter expert. Upon completion of these tasks, we managed to develop a dataset with 6,061 entities and 3,268 relation instances. Finally, we discuss on spaCy fine-tuning setup and analysis on the NER performance. This unique dataset will contribute significantly to the advancement of NLP research in Malaysian English, allowing researchers to accelerate their progress, particularly in NER and relation extraction. The dataset and annotation guideline has been published on Github.

Information extraction (IE) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involving the extraction of named entities and their relationships from unstructured text. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to this task by formulating it as graph structure learning (GSL). By formulating IE as GSL, we enhance the model's ability to dynamically refine and optimize the graph structure during the extraction process. This formulation allows for better interaction and structure-informed decisions for entity and relation prediction, in contrast to previous models that have separate or untied predictions for these tasks. When compared against state-of-the-art baselines on joint entity and relation extraction benchmarks, our model, GraphER, achieves competitive results.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for joint entity and relation extraction from unstructured text by framing it as a conditional sequence generation problem. In contrast to conventional generative information extraction models that are left-to-right token-level generators, our approach is span-based. It generates a linearized graph where nodes represent text spans and edges represent relation triplets. Our method employs a transformer encoder-decoder architecture with pointing mechanism on a dynamic vocabulary of spans and relation types. Our model can capture the structural characteristics and boundaries of entities and relations through span representations while simultaneously grounding the generated output in the original text thanks to the pointing mechanism. Evaluation on benchmark datasets validates the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating competitive results. Code is available at https://github.com/urchade/ATG.

Information Extraction (IE) is a transformative process that converts unstructured text data into a structured format by employing entity and relation extraction (RE) methodologies. The identification of the relation between a pair of entities plays a crucial role within this framework. Despite the existence of various techniques for relation extraction, their efficacy heavily relies on access to labeled data and substantial computational resources. In addressing these challenges, Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge as promising solutions; however, they might return hallucinating responses due to their own training data. To overcome these limitations, Retrieved-Augmented Generation-based Relation Extraction (RAG4RE) in this work is proposed, offering a pathway to enhance the performance of relation extraction tasks. This work evaluated the effectiveness of our RAG4RE approach utilizing different LLMs. Through the utilization of established benchmarks, such as TACRED, TACREV, Re-TACRED, and SemEval RE datasets, our aim is to comprehensively evaluate the efficacy of our RAG4RE approach. In particularly, we leverage prominent LLMs including Flan T5, Llama2, and Mistral in our investigation. The results of our study demonstrate that our RAG4RE approach surpasses performance of traditional RE approaches based solely on LLMs, particularly evident in the TACRED dataset and its variations. Furthermore, our approach exhibits remarkable performance compared to previous RE methodologies across both TACRED and TACREV datasets, underscoring its efficacy and potential for advancing RE tasks in natural language processing.

The rise of chronic diseases and pandemics like COVID-19 has emphasized the need for effective patient data processing while ensuring privacy through anonymization and de-identification of protected health information (PHI). Anonymized data facilitates research without compromising patient confidentiality. This paper introduces expert small AI models developed using the LLM-in-the-loop methodology to meet the demand for domain-specific de-identification NER models. These models overcome the privacy risks associated with large language models (LLMs) used via APIs by eliminating the need to transmit or store sensitive data. More importantly, they consistently outperform LLMs in de-identification tasks, offering superior performance and reliability. Our de-identification NER models, developed in eight languages (English, German, Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic) achieved f1-micro score averages of 0.966, 0.975, 0.976, 0.970, 0.964, 0.974, 0.978, and 0.953 respectively. These results establish them as the most accurate healthcare anonymization solutions, surpassing existing small models and even general-purpose LLMs such as GPT-4o. While Part-1 of this series introduced the LLM-in-the-loop methodology for bio-medical document translation, this second paper showcases its success in developing cost-effective expert small NER models in de-identification tasks. Our findings lay the groundwork for future healthcare AI innovations, including biomedical entity and relation extraction, demonstrating the value of specialized models for domain-specific challenges.

There have been many recent investigations into prompt-based training of transformer language models for new text genres in low-resource settings. The prompt-based training approach has been found to be effective in generalizing pre-trained or fine-tuned models for transfer to resource-scarce settings. This work, for the first time, reports results on adopting prompt-based training of transformers for scholarly knowledge graph object prediction. The work is unique in the following two main aspects. 1) It deviates from the other works proposing entity and relation extraction pipelines for predicting objects of a scholarly knowledge graph. 2) While other works have tested the method on text genera relatively close to the general knowledge domain, we test the method for a significantly different domain, i.e. scholarly knowledge, in turn testing the linguistic, probabilistic, and factual generalizability of these large-scale transformer models. We find that (i) per expectations, transformer models when tested out-of-the-box underperform on a new domain of data, (ii) prompt-based training of the models achieve performance boosts of up to 40\% in a relaxed evaluation setting, and (iii) testing the models on a starkly different domain even with a clever training objective in a low resource setting makes evident the domain knowledge capture gap offering an empirically-verified incentive for investing more attention and resources to the scholarly domain in the context of transformer models.

The output structure of database-like tables, consisting of values structured in horizontal rows and vertical columns identifiable by name, can cover a wide range of NLP tasks. Following this constatation, we propose a framework for text-to-table neural models applicable to problems such as extraction of line items, joint entity and relation extraction, or knowledge base population. The permutation-based decoder of our proposal is a generalized sequential method that comprehends information from all cells in the table. The training maximizes the expected log-likelihood for a table's content across all random permutations of the factorization order. During the content inference, we exploit the model's ability to generate cells in any order by searching over possible orderings to maximize the model's confidence and avoid substantial error accumulation, which other sequential models are prone to. Experiments demonstrate a high practical value of the framework, which establishes state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets, outperforming previous solutions by up to 15%.

Entity Linking (EL) and Relation Extraction (RE) are fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing, serving as critical components in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose ReLiK, a Retriever-Reader architecture for both EL and RE, where, given an input text, the Retriever module undertakes the identification of candidate entities or relations that could potentially appear within the text. Subsequently, the Reader module is tasked to discern the pertinent retrieved entities or relations and establish their alignment with the corresponding textual spans. Notably, we put forward an innovative input representation that incorporates the candidate entities or relations alongside the text, making it possible to link entities or extract relations in a single forward pass and to fully leverage pre-trained language models contextualization capabilities, in contrast with previous Retriever-Reader-based methods, which require a forward pass for each candidate. Our formulation of EL and RE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks while using academic budget training and with up to 40x inference speed compared to competitors. Finally, we show how our architecture can be used seamlessly for Information Extraction (cIE), i.e. EL + RE, and setting a new state of the art by employing a shared Reader that simultaneously extracts entities and relations.

The Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) task pertains to the identification of entities or relations in texts that were not seen during training. ZSL has emerged as a critical research area due to the scarcity of labeled data in specific domains, and its applications have grown significantly in recent years. With the advent of large pretrained language models, several novel methods have been proposed, resulting in substantial improvements in ZSL performance. There is a growing demand, both in the research community and industry, for a comprehensive ZSL framework that facilitates the development and accessibility of the latest methods and pretrained models.In this study, we propose a novel ZSL framework called Zshot that aims to address the aforementioned challenges. Our primary objective is to provide a platform that allows researchers to compare different state-of-the-art ZSL methods with standard benchmark datasets. Additionally, we have designed our framework to support the industry with readily available APIs for production under the standard SpaCy NLP pipeline. Our API is extendible and evaluable, moreover, we include numerous enhancements such as boosting the accuracy with pipeline ensembling and visualization utilities available as a SpaCy extension.

The process of cyber mapping gives insights in relationships among financial entities and service providers. Centered around the outsourcing practices of companies within fund prospectuses in Germany, we introduce a dataset specifically designed for named entity recognition and relation extraction tasks. The labeling process on 948 sentences was carried out by three experts which yields to 5,969 annotations for four entity types (Outsourcing, Company, Location and Software) and 4,102 relation annotations (Outsourcing-Company, Company-Location). State-of-the-art deep learning models were trained to recognize entities and extract relations showing first promising results. An anonymized version of the dataset, along with guidelines and the code used for model training, are publicly available at https://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/cybermapping/data/CO-Fun-1.0-anonymized.zip.

Document pair extraction aims to identify key and value entities as well as their relationships from visually-rich documents. Most existing methods divide it into two separate tasks: semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE). However, simply concatenating SER and RE serially can lead to severe error propagation, and it fails to handle cases like multi-line entities in real scenarios. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel framework, PEneo (Pair Extraction new decoder option), which performs document pair extraction in a unified pipeline, incorporating three concurrent sub-tasks: line extraction, line grouping, and entity linking. This approach alleviates the error accumulation problem and can handle the case of multi-line entities. Furthermore, to better evaluate the model's performance and to facilitate future research on pair extraction, we introduce RFUND, a re-annotated version of the commonly used FUNSD and XFUND datasets, to make them more accurate and cover realistic situations. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate PEneo's superiority over previous pipelines, boosting the performance by a large margin (e.g., 19.89%-22.91% F1 score on RFUND-EN) when combined with various backbones like LiLT and LayoutLMv3, showing its effectiveness and generality. Codes and the new annotations will be open to the public.

Scientific information extraction (SciIE), which aims to automatically extract information from scientific literature, is becoming more important than ever. However, there are no existing SciIE datasets for polymer materials, which is an important class of materials used ubiquitously in our daily lives. To bridge this gap, we introduce POLYIE, a new SciIE dataset for polymer materials. POLYIE is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles, which are annotated with different named entities (i.e., materials, properties, values, conditions) as well as their N-ary relations by domain experts. POLYIE presents several unique challenges due to diverse lexical formats of entities, ambiguity between entities, and variable-length relations. We evaluate state-of-the-art named entity extraction and relation extraction models on POLYIE, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and highlight some difficult cases for these models. To the best of our knowledge, POLYIE is the first SciIE benchmark for polymer materials, and we hope it will lead to more research efforts from the community on this challenging task. Our code and data are available on: https://github.com/jerry3027/PolyIE.

Information Extraction (IE) from text refers to the task of extracting structured knowledge from unstructured text. The task typically consists of a series of sub-tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction. Sourcing entity and relation type specific training data is a major bottleneck in domains with limited resources such as biomedicine. In this work we present a slot filling approach to the task of biomedical IE, effectively replacing the need for entity and relation-specific training data, allowing us to deal with zero-shot settings. We follow the recently proposed paradigm of coupling a Tranformer-based bi-encoder, Dense Passage Retrieval, with a Transformer-based reading comprehension model to extract relations from biomedical text. We assemble a biomedical slot filling dataset for both retrieval and reading comprehension and conduct a series of experiments demonstrating that our approach outperforms a number of simpler baselines. We also evaluate our approach end-to-end for standard as well as zero-shot settings. Our work provides a fresh perspective on how to solve biomedical IE tasks, in the absence of relevant training data. Our code, models and datasets are available at https://github.com/ypapanik/biomedical-slot-filling.

Intelligently extracting and linking complex scientific information from unstructured text is a challenging endeavor particularly for those inexperienced with natural language processing. Here, we present a simple sequence-to-sequence approach to joint named entity recognition and relation extraction for complex hierarchical information in scientific text. The approach leverages a pre-trained large language model (LLM), GPT-3, that is fine-tuned on approximately 500 pairs of prompts (inputs) and completions (outputs). Information is extracted either from single sentences or across sentences in abstracts/passages, and the output can be returned as simple English sentences or a more structured format, such as a list of JSON objects. We demonstrate that LLMs trained in this way are capable of accurately extracting useful records of complex scientific knowledge for three representative tasks in materials chemistry: linking dopants with their host materials, cataloging metal-organic frameworks, and general chemistry/phase/morphology/application information extraction. This approach represents a simple, accessible, and highly-flexible route to obtaining large databases of structured knowledge extracted from unstructured text. An online demo is available at http://www.matscholar.com/info-extraction.

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) within the healthcare sector has sparked both enthusiasm and apprehension. These models exhibit the remarkable capability to provide proficient responses to free-text queries, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of professional medical knowledge. This comprehensive survey delves into the functionalities of existing LLMs designed for healthcare applications, elucidating the trajectory of their development, starting from traditional Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to the present state of LLMs in healthcare sector. First, we explore the potential of LLMs to amplify the efficiency and effectiveness of diverse healthcare applications, particularly focusing on clinical language understanding tasks. These tasks encompass a wide spectrum, ranging from named entity recognition and relation extraction to natural language inference, multi-modal medical applications, document classification, and question-answering. Additionally, we conduct an extensive comparison of the most recent state-of-the-art LLMs in the healthcare domain, while also assessing the utilization of various open-source LLMs and highlighting their significance in healthcare applications. Furthermore, we present the essential performance metrics employed to evaluate LLMs in the biomedical domain, shedding light on their effectiveness and limitations. Finally, we summarize the prominent challenges and constraints faced by large language models in the healthcare sector, offering a holistic perspective on their potential benefits and shortcomings. This review provides a comprehensive exploration of the current landscape of LLMs in healthcare, addressing their role in transforming medical applications and the areas that warrant further research and development.

Electronic health records contain an enormous amount of valuable information, but many are recorded in free text. Information extraction is the strategy to transform the sequence of characters into structured data, which can be employed for secondary analysis. However, the traditional information extraction components, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, require annotated data to optimize the model parameters, which has become one of the major bottlenecks in building information extraction systems. With the large language models achieving good performances on various downstream NLP tasks without parameter tuning, it becomes possible to use large language models for zero-shot information extraction. In this study, we aim to explore whether the most popular large language model, ChatGPT, can extract useful information from the radiological reports. We first design the prompt template for the interested information in the CT reports. Then, we generate the prompts by combining the prompt template with the CT reports as the inputs of ChatGPT to obtain the responses. A post-processing module is developed to transform the responses into structured extraction results. We conducted the experiments with 847 CT reports collected from Peking University Cancer Hospital. The experimental results indicate that ChatGPT can achieve competitive performances for some extraction tasks compared with the baseline information extraction system, but some limitations need to be further improved.

In this paper, we present NEREL, a Russian dataset for named entity recognition and relation extraction. NEREL is significantly larger than existing Russian datasets: to date it contains 56K annotated named entities and 39K annotated relations. Its important difference from previous datasets is annotation of nested named entities, as well as relations within nested entities and at the discourse level. NEREL can facilitate development of novel models that can extract relations between nested named entities, as well as relations on both sentence and document levels. NEREL also contains the annotation of events involving named entities and their roles in the events. The NEREL collection is available via https://github.com/nerel-ds/NEREL.

Automatic Compliance Checking (ACC) within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector necessitates automating the interpretation of building regulations to achieve its full potential. However, extracting information from textual rules to convert them to a machine-readable format has been a challenge due to the complexities associated with natural language and the limited resources that can support advanced machine-learning techniques. To address this challenge, we introduce CODE-ACCORD, a unique dataset compiled under the EU Horizon ACCORD project. CODE-ACCORD comprises 862 self-contained sentences extracted from the building regulations of England and Finland. Aligned with our core objective of facilitating information extraction from text for machine-readable rule generation, each sentence was annotated with entities and relations. Entities represent specific components such as "window" and "smoke detectors", while relations denote semantic associations between these entities, collectively capturing the conveyed ideas in natural language. We manually annotated all the sentences using a group of 12 annotators. Each sentence underwent annotations by multiple annotators and subsequently careful data curation to finalise annotations, ensuring their accuracy and reliability, thereby establishing the dataset as a solid ground truth. CODE-ACCORD offers a rich resource for diverse machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) related tasks in ACC, including text classification, entity recognition and relation extraction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first entity and relation-annotated dataset in compliance checking, which is also publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on massive corpora have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning ability on many NLP tasks. A common practice is to recast the task into a text-to-text format such that generative LLMs of natural language (NL-LLMs) like GPT-3 can be prompted to solve it. However, it is nontrivial to perform information extraction (IE) tasks with NL-LLMs since the output of the IE task is usually structured and therefore is hard to be converted into plain text. In this paper, we propose to recast the structured output in the form of code instead of natural language and utilize generative LLMs of code (Code-LLMs) such as Codex to perform IE tasks, in particular, named entity recognition and relation extraction. In contrast to NL-LLMs, we show that Code-LLMs can be well-aligned with these IE tasks by designing code-style prompts and formulating these IE tasks as code generation tasks. Experiment results on seven benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuning moderate-size pre-trained models specially designed for IE tasks (e.g., UIE) and prompting NL-LLMs under few-shot settings. We further conduct a series of in-depth analyses to demonstrate the merits of leveraging Code-LLMs for IE tasks.

Natural language processing (NLP) practitioners are leveraging large language models (LLM) to create structured datasets from semi-structured and unstructured data sources such as patents, papers, and theses, without having domain-specific knowledge. At the same time, ecological experts are searching for a variety of means to preserve biodiversity. To contribute to these efforts, we focused on endangered species and through in-context learning, we distilled knowledge from GPT-4. In effect, we created datasets for both named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) via a two-stage process: 1) we generated synthetic data from GPT-4 of four classes of endangered species, 2) humans verified the factual accuracy of the synthetic data, resulting in gold data. Eventually, our novel dataset contains a total of 3.6K sentences, evenly divided between 1.8K NER and 1.8K RE sentences. The constructed dataset was then used to fine-tune both general BERT and domain-specific BERT variants, completing the knowledge distillation process from GPT-4 to BERT, because GPT-4 is resource intensive. Experiments show that our knowledge transfer approach is effective at creating a NER model suitable for detecting endangered species from texts.

Much effort has been devoted to evaluate whether multi-task learning can be leveraged to learn rich representations that can be used in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) down-stream applications. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the settings in which multi-task learning has a significant effect. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical model trained in a multi-task learning setup on a set of carefully selected semantic tasks. The model is trained in a hierarchical fashion to introduce an inductive bias by supervising a set of low level tasks at the bottom layers of the model and more complex tasks at the top layers of the model. This model achieves state-of-the-art results on a number of tasks, namely Named Entity Recognition, Entity Mention Detection and Relation Extraction without hand-engineered features or external NLP tools like syntactic parsers. The hierarchical training supervision induces a set of shared semantic representations at lower layers of the model. We show that as we move from the bottom to the top layers of the model, the hidden states of the layers tend to represent more complex semantic information.

Clinical texts, represented in electronic medical records (EMRs), contain rich medical information and are essential for disease prediction, personalised information recommendation, clinical decision support, and medication pattern mining and measurement. Relation extractions between medication mentions and temporal information can further help clinicians better understand the patients' treatment history. To evaluate the performances of deep learning (DL) and large language models (LLMs) in medication extraction and temporal relations classification, we carry out an empirical investigation of MedTem project using several advanced learning structures including BiLSTM-CRF and CNN-BiLSTM for a clinical domain named entity recognition (NER), and BERT-CNN for temporal relation extraction (RE), in addition to the exploration of different word embedding techniques. Furthermore, we also designed a set of post-processing roles to generate structured output on medications and the temporal relation. Our experiments show that CNN-BiLSTM slightly wins the BiLSTM-CRF model on the i2b2-2009 clinical NER task yielding 75.67, 77.83, and 78.17 for precision, recall, and F1 scores using Macro Average. BERT-CNN model also produced reasonable evaluation scores 64.48, 67.17, and 65.03 for P/R/F1 using Macro Avg on the temporal relation extraction test set from i2b2-2012 challenges. Code and Tools from MedTem will be hosted at https://github.com/HECTA-UoM/MedTem

Automated relation extraction (RE) from biomedical literature is critical for many downstream text mining applications in both research and real-world settings. However, most existing benchmarking datasets for bio-medical RE only focus on relations of a single type (e.g., protein-protein interactions) at the sentence level, greatly limiting the development of RE systems in biomedicine. In this work, we first review commonly used named entity recognition (NER) and RE datasets. Then we present BioRED, a first-of-its-kind biomedical RE corpus with multiple entity types (e.g., gene/protein, disease, chemical) and relation pairs (e.g., gene-disease; chemical-chemical) at the document level, on a set of 600 PubMed abstracts. Further, we label each relation as describing either a novel finding or previously known background knowledge, enabling automated algorithms to differentiate between novel and background information. We assess the utility of BioRED by benchmarking several existing state-of-the-art methods, including BERT-based models, on the NER and RE tasks. Our results show that while existing approaches can reach high performance on the NER task (F-score of 89.3%), there is much room for improvement for the RE task, especially when extracting novel relations (F-score of 47.7%). Our experiments also demonstrate that such a rich dataset can successfully facilitate the development of more accurate, efficient, and robust RE systems for biomedicine. The BioRED dataset and annotation guideline are freely available at https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/lu/BioRED/.

Semantic matching is a mainstream paradigm of zero-shot relation extraction, which matches a given input with a corresponding label description. The entities in the input should exactly match their hypernyms in the description, while the irrelevant contexts should be ignored when matching. However, general matching methods lack explicit modeling of the above matching pattern. In this work, we propose a fine-grained semantic matching method tailored for zero-shot relation extraction. Following the above matching pattern, we decompose the sentence-level similarity score into entity and context matching scores. Due to the lack of explicit annotations of the redundant components, we design a feature distillation module to adaptively identify the relation-irrelevant features and reduce their negative impact on context matching. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher matching F_1 score and has an inference speed 10 times faster, when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a range of natural language understanding and generation tasks. Yet, their ability to generate counterfactuals, which can be used for areas like data augmentation, remains under-explored. This study aims to investigate the counterfactual generation capabilities of LLMs and analysis factors that influence this ability. First, we evaluate how effective are LLMs in counterfactual generation through data augmentation experiments for small language models (SLMs) across four tasks: sentiment analysis, natural language inference, named entity recognition, and relation extraction. While LLMs show promising enhancements in various settings, they struggle in complex tasks due to their self-limitations and the lack of logical guidance to produce counterfactuals that align with commonsense. Second, our analysis reveals the pivotal role of providing accurate task definitions and detailed step-by-step instructions to LLMs in generating counterfactuals. Interestingly, we also find that LLMs can generate reasonable counterfactuals even with unreasonable demonstrations, which illustrates that demonstrations are primarily to regulate the output format.This study provides the first comprehensive insight into counterfactual generation abilities of LLMs, and offers a novel perspective on utilizing LLMs for data augmentation to enhance SLMs.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are crucial in the field of artificial intelligence and are widely applied in downstream tasks, such as enhancing Question Answering (QA) systems. The construction of KGs typically requires significant effort from domain experts. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for knowledge graph construction (KGC), however, most existing approaches focus on a local perspective, extracting knowledge triplets from individual sentences or documents. In this work, we introduce Graphusion, a zero-shot KGC framework from free text. The core fusion module provides a global view of triplets, incorporating entity merging, conflict resolution, and novel triplet discovery. We showcase how Graphusion could be applied to the natural language processing (NLP) domain and validate it in the educational scenario. Specifically, we introduce TutorQA, a new expert-verified benchmark for graph reasoning and QA, comprising six tasks and a total of 1,200 QA pairs. Our evaluation demonstrates that Graphusion surpasses supervised baselines by up to 10% in accuracy on link prediction. Additionally, it achieves average scores of 2.92 and 2.37 out of 3 in human evaluations for concept entity extraction and relation recognition, respectively.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are crucial in the field of artificial intelligence and are widely used in downstream tasks, such as question-answering (QA). The construction of KGs typically requires significant effort from domain experts. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been used for Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC). However, most existing approaches focus on a local perspective, extracting knowledge triplets from individual sentences or documents, missing a fusion process to combine the knowledge in a global KG. This work introduces Graphusion, a zero-shot KGC framework from free text. It contains three steps: in Step 1, we extract a list of seed entities using topic modeling to guide the final KG includes the most relevant entities; in Step 2, we conduct candidate triplet extraction using LLMs; in Step 3, we design the novel fusion module that provides a global view of the extracted knowledge, incorporating entity merging, conflict resolution, and novel triplet discovery. Results show that Graphusion achieves scores of 2.92 and 2.37 out of 3 for entity extraction and relation recognition, respectively. Moreover, we showcase how Graphusion could be applied to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain and validate it in an educational scenario. Specifically, we introduce TutorQA, a new expert-verified benchmark for QA, comprising six tasks and a total of 1,200 QA pairs. Using the Graphusion-constructed KG, we achieve a significant improvement on the benchmark, for example, a 9.2% accuracy improvement on sub-graph completion.

Motivation: The gut microbiota has recently emerged as a key factor that underpins certain connections between diet and human health. A tremendous amount of knowledge has been amassed from experimental studies on diet, human metabolism and microbiome. However, this evidence remains mostly buried in scientific publications, and biomedical literature mining in this domain remains scarce. We developed DiMB-RE, a comprehensive corpus annotated with 15 entity types (e.g., Nutrient, Microorganism) and 13 relation types (e.g., increases, improves) capturing diet-microbiome associations. We also trained and evaluated state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models for named entity, trigger, and relation extraction as well as factuality detection using DiMB-RE. Results: DiMB-RE consists of 14,450 entities and 4,206 relationships from 165 articles. While NLP models performed reasonably well for named entity recognition (0.760 F_{1}), end-to-end relation extraction performance was modest (0.356 F_{1}), partly due to missed entities and triggers as well as cross-sentence relations. Conclusions: To our knowledge, DiMB-RE is largest and most diverse dataset focusing on diet-microbiome interactions. It can serve as a benchmark corpus for biomedical literature mining. Availability: DiMB-RE and the NLP models are available at https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/DiMB-RE.

Relation extraction is the problem of classifying the relationship between two entities in a given sentence. Distant Supervision (DS) is a popular technique for developing relation extractors starting with limited supervision. We note that most of the sentences in the distant supervision relation extraction setting are very long and may benefit from word attention for better sentence representation. Our contributions in this paper are threefold. Firstly, we propose two novel word attention models for distantly- supervised relation extraction: (1) a Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) based word attention model (BGWA), (2) an entity-centric attention model (EA), and (3) a combination model which combines multiple complementary models using weighted voting method for improved relation extraction. Secondly, we introduce GDS, a new distant supervision dataset for relation extraction. GDS removes test data noise present in all previous distant- supervision benchmark datasets, making credible automatic evaluation possible. Thirdly, through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Relation Extraction (RE) is a task that identifies relationships between entities in a text, enabling the acquisition of relational facts and bridging the gap between natural language and structured knowledge. However, current RE models often rely on small datasets with low coverage of relation types, particularly when working with languages other than English. In this paper, we address the above issue and provide two new resources that enable the training and evaluation of multilingual RE systems. First, we present SRED^{rm FM}, an automatically annotated dataset covering 18 languages, 400 relation types, 13 entity types, totaling more than 40 million triplet instances. Second, we propose RED^{rm FM}, a smaller, human-revised dataset for seven languages that allows for the evaluation of multilingual RE systems. To demonstrate the utility of these novel datasets, we experiment with the first end-to-end multilingual RE model, mREBEL, that extracts triplets, including entity types, in multiple languages. We release our resources and model checkpoints at https://www.github.com/babelscape/rebel

Relation extraction aims to classify the relationships between two entities into pre-defined categories. While previous research has mainly focused on sentence-level relation extraction, recent studies have expanded the scope to document-level relation extraction. Traditional relation extraction methods heavily rely on human-annotated training data, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To mitigate the need for manual annotation, recent weakly-supervised approaches have been developed for sentence-level relation extraction while limited work has been done on document-level relation extraction. Weakly-supervised document-level relation extraction faces significant challenges due to an imbalanced number "no relation" instances and the failure of directly probing pretrained large language models for document relation extraction. To address these challenges, we propose PromptRE, a novel weakly-supervised document-level relation extraction method that combines prompting-based techniques with data programming. Furthermore, PromptRE incorporates the label distribution and entity types as prior knowledge to improve the performance. By leveraging the strengths of both prompting and data programming, PromptRE achieves improved performance in relation classification and effectively handles the "no relation" problem. Experimental results on ReDocRED, a benchmark dataset for document-level relation extraction, demonstrate the superiority of PromptRE over baseline approaches.

Distant supervision (DS) is a well established technique for creating large-scale datasets for relation extraction (RE) without using human annotations. However, research in DS-RE has been mostly limited to the English language. Constraining RE to a single language inhibits utilization of large amounts of data in other languages which could allow extraction of more diverse facts. Very recently, a dataset for multilingual DS-RE has been released. However, our analysis reveals that the proposed dataset exhibits unrealistic characteristics such as 1) lack of sentences that do not express any relation, and 2) all sentences for a given entity pair expressing exactly one relation. We show that these characteristics lead to a gross overestimation of the model performance. In response, we propose a new dataset, DiS-ReX, which alleviates these issues. Our dataset has more than 1.5 million sentences, spanning across 4 languages with 36 relation classes + 1 no relation (NA) class. We also modify the widely used bag attention models by encoding sentences using mBERT and provide the first benchmark results on multilingual DS-RE. Unlike the competing dataset, we show that our dataset is challenging and leaves enough room for future research to take place in this field.

Knowledge graphs have shown promise for several cybersecurity tasks, such as vulnerability assessment and threat analysis. In this work, we present a new method for constructing a vulnerability knowledge graph from information in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Our approach combines named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction (RE), and entity prediction using a combination of neural models, heuristic rules, and knowledge graph embeddings. We demonstrate how our method helps to fix missing entities in knowledge graphs used for cybersecurity and evaluate the performance.

Driven by the demand for cross-sentence and large-scale relation extraction, document-level relation extraction (DocRE) has attracted increasing research interest. Despite the continuous improvement in performance, we find that existing DocRE models which initially perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names. To this end, we systematically investigate the robustness of DocRE models to entity name variations in this work. We first propose a principled pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. By applying the pipeline to DocRED and Re-DocRED datasets, we construct two novel benchmarks named Env-DocRED and Env-Re-DocRED for robustness evaluation. Experimental results show that both three representative DocRE models and two in-context learned large language models consistently lack sufficient robustness to entity name variations, particularly on cross-sentence relation instances and documents with more entities. Finally, we propose an entity variation robust training method which not only improves the robustness of DocRE models but also enhances their understanding and reasoning capabilities. We further verify that the basic idea of this method can be effectively transferred to in-context learning for DocRE as well.

This paper presents DWIE, the 'Deutsche Welle corpus for Information Extraction', a newly created multi-task dataset that combines four main Information Extraction (IE) annotation subtasks: (i) Named Entity Recognition (NER), (ii) Coreference Resolution, (iii) Relation Extraction (RE), and (iv) Entity Linking. DWIE is conceived as an entity-centric dataset that describes interactions and properties of conceptual entities on the level of the complete document. This contrasts with currently dominant mention-driven approaches that start from the detection and classification of named entity mentions in individual sentences. Further, DWIE presented two main challenges when building and evaluating IE models for it. First, the use of traditional mention-level evaluation metrics for NER and RE tasks on entity-centric DWIE dataset can result in measurements dominated by predictions on more frequently mentioned entities. We tackle this issue by proposing a new entity-driven metric that takes into account the number of mentions that compose each of the predicted and ground truth entities. Second, the document-level multi-task annotations require the models to transfer information between entity mentions located in different parts of the document, as well as between different tasks, in a joint learning setting. To realize this, we propose to use graph-based neural message passing techniques between document-level mention spans. Our experiments show an improvement of up to 5.5 F1 percentage points when incorporating neural graph propagation into our joint model. This demonstrates DWIE's potential to stimulate further research in graph neural networks for representation learning in multi-task IE. We make DWIE publicly available at https://github.com/klimzaporojets/DWIE.

Named entity recognition (NER), which focuses on the extraction of semantically meaningful named entities and their semantic classes from text, serves as an indispensable component for several down-stream natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as relation extraction and event extraction. Dependency trees, on the other hand, also convey crucial semantic-level information. It has been shown previously that such information can be used to improve the performance of NER (Sasano and Kurohashi 2008, Ling and Weld 2012). In this work, we investigate on how to better utilize the structured information conveyed by dependency trees to improve the performance of NER. Specifically, unlike existing approaches which only exploit dependency information for designing local features, we show that certain global structured information of the dependency trees can be exploited when building NER models where such information can provide guided learning and inference. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed novel dependency-guided NER model performs competitively with models based on conventional semi-Markov conditional random fields, while requiring significantly less running time.

We present an open-source and extensible knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE, supporting complicated low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. DeepKE implements various information extraction tasks, including named entity recognition, relation extraction and attribute extraction. With a unified framework, DeepKE allows developers and researchers to customize datasets and models to extract information from unstructured data according to their requirements. Specifically, DeepKE not only provides various functional modules and model implementation for different tasks and scenarios but also organizes all components by consistent frameworks to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility. We release the source code at GitHub in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documents for beginners. Besides, we present an online system in http://deepke.openkg.cn/EN/re_doc_show.html for real-time extraction of various tasks, and a demo video.

We investigate how large language models perform latent multi-hop reasoning in prompts like "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's mother's spouse is". To analyze this process, we introduce logit flow, an interpretability method that traces how logits propagate across layers and positions toward the final prediction. Using logit flow, we identify four distinct stages in single-hop knowledge prediction: (A) entity subject enrichment, (B) entity attribute extraction, (C) relation subject enrichment, and (D) relation attribute extraction. Extending this analysis to multi-hop reasoning, we find that failures often stem from the relation attribute extraction stage, where conflicting logits reduce prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose back attention, a novel mechanism that enables lower layers to leverage higher-layer hidden states from different positions during attention computation. With back attention, a 1-layer transformer achieves the performance of a 2-layer transformer. Applied to four LLMs, back attention improves accuracy on five reasoning datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing latent multi-hop reasoning ability.

This study is dedicated to assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Turbo in extracting structured information from scientific documents in materials science. To this end, we primarily focus on two critical tasks of information extraction: (i) a named entity recognition (NER) of studied materials and physical properties and (ii) a relation extraction (RE) between these entities. Due to the evident lack of datasets within Materials Informatics (MI), we evaluated using SuperMat, based on superconductor research, and MeasEval, a generic measurement evaluation corpus. The performance of LLMs in executing these tasks is benchmarked against traditional models based on the BERT architecture and rule-based approaches (baseline). We introduce a novel methodology for the comparative analysis of intricate material expressions, emphasising the standardisation of chemical formulas to tackle the complexities inherent in materials science information assessment. For NER, LLMs fail to outperform the baseline with zero-shot prompting and exhibit only limited improvement with few-shot prompting. However, a GPT-3.5-Turbo fine-tuned with the appropriate strategy for RE outperforms all models, including the baseline. Without any fine-tuning, GPT-4 and GPT-4-Turbo display remarkable reasoning and relationship extraction capabilities after being provided with merely a couple of examples, surpassing the baseline. Overall, the results suggest that although LLMs demonstrate relevant reasoning skills in connecting concepts, specialised models are currently a better choice for tasks requiring extracting complex domain-specific entities like materials. These insights provide initial guidance applicable to other materials science sub-domains in future work.

Humans subconsciously engage in geospatial reasoning when reading articles. We recognize place names and their spatial relations in text and mentally associate them with their physical locations on Earth. Although pretrained language models can mimic this cognitive process using linguistic context, they do not utilize valuable geospatial information in large, widely available geographical databases, e.g., OpenStreetMap. This paper introduces GeoLM, a geospatially grounded language model that enhances the understanding of geo-entities in natural language. GeoLM leverages geo-entity mentions as anchors to connect linguistic information in text corpora with geospatial information extracted from geographical databases. GeoLM connects the two types of context through contrastive learning and masked language modeling. It also incorporates a spatial coordinate embedding mechanism to encode distance and direction relations to capture geospatial context. In the experiment, we demonstrate that GeoLM exhibits promising capabilities in supporting toponym recognition, toponym linking, relation extraction, and geo-entity typing, which bridge the gap between natural language processing and geospatial sciences. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/geolm.

Incremental Learning (IL) has been a long-standing problem in both vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. In recent years, as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP downstream tasks, utilizing PLMs as backbones has become a common practice in recent research of IL in NLP. Most assume that catastrophic forgetting is the biggest obstacle to achieving superior IL performance and propose various techniques to overcome this issue. However, we find that this assumption is problematic. Specifically, we revisit more than 20 methods on four classification tasks (Text Classification, Intent Classification, Relation Extraction, and Named Entity Recognition) under the two most popular IL settings (Class-Incremental and Task-Incremental) and reveal that most of them severely underestimate the inherent anti-forgetting ability of PLMs. Based on the observation, we propose a frustratingly easy method called SEQ* for IL with PLMs. The results show that SEQ* has competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) IL methods and requires considerably less trainable parameters and training time. These findings urge us to revisit the IL with PLMs and encourage future studies to have a fundamental understanding of the catastrophic forgetting in PLMs. The data, code and scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/zzz47zzz/codebase-for-incremental-learning-with-llm.

The current state of adoption of well-structured electronic health records and integration of digital methods for storing medical patient data in structured formats can often considered as inferior compared to the use of traditional, unstructured text based patient data documentation. Data mining in the field of medical data analysis often needs to rely solely on processing of unstructured data to retrieve relevant data. In natural language processing (NLP), statistical models have been shown successful in various tasks like part-of-speech tagging, relation extraction (RE) and named entity recognition (NER). In this work, we present GERNERMED, the first open, neural NLP model for NER tasks dedicated to detect medical entity types in German text data. Here, we avoid the conflicting goals of protection of sensitive patient data from training data extraction and the publication of the statistical model weights by training our model on a custom dataset that was translated from publicly available datasets in foreign language by a pretrained neural machine translation model. The sample code and the statistical model is available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GERNERMED

Many datasets have been developed to train and evaluate document-level relation extraction (RE) models. Most of these are constructed using real-world data. It has been shown that RE models trained on real-world data suffer from factual biases. To evaluate and address this issue, we present CovEReD, a counterfactual data generation approach for document-level relation extraction datasets using entity replacement. We first demonstrate that models trained on factual data exhibit inconsistent behavior: while they accurately extract triples from factual data, they fail to extract the same triples after counterfactual modification. This inconsistency suggests that models trained on factual data rely on spurious signals such as specific entities and external knowledge x2013 rather than on the input context x2013 to extract triples. We show that by generating document-level counterfactual data with CovEReD and training models on them, consistency is maintained with minimal impact on RE performance. We release our CovEReD pipeline as well as Re-DocRED-CF, a dataset of counterfactual RE documents, to assist in evaluating and addressing inconsistency in document-level RE.

We introduce GLiREL (Generalist Lightweight model for zero-shot Relation Extraction), an efficient architecture and training paradigm for zero-shot relation classification. Inspired by recent advancements in zero-shot named entity recognition, this work presents an approach to efficiently and accurately predict zero-shot relationship labels between multiple entities in a single forward pass. Experiments using the FewRel and WikiZSL benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the zero-shot relation classification task. In addition, we contribute a protocol for synthetically-generating datasets with diverse relation labels.

Multiple entities in a document generally exhibit complex inter-sentence relations, and cannot be well handled by existing relation extraction (RE) methods that typically focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entity pairs. In order to accelerate the research on document-level RE, we introduce DocRED, a new dataset constructed from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features: (1) DocRED annotates both named entities and relations, and is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text; (2) DocRED requires reading multiple sentences in a document to extract entities and infer their relations by synthesizing all information of the document; (3) along with the human-annotated data, we also offer large-scale distantly supervised data, which enables DocRED to be adopted for both supervised and weakly supervised scenarios. In order to verify the challenges of document-level RE, we implement recent state-of-the-art methods for RE and conduct a thorough evaluation of these methods on DocRED. Empirical results show that DocRED is challenging for existing RE methods, which indicates that document-level RE remains an open problem and requires further efforts. Based on the detailed analysis on the experiments, we discuss multiple promising directions for future research.

Relation extraction (RE) is a fundamental task in information extraction, whose extension to multilingual settings has been hindered by the lack of supervised resources comparable in size to large English datasets such as TACRED (Zhang et al., 2017). To address this gap, we introduce the MultiTACRED dataset, covering 12 typologically diverse languages from 9 language families, which is created by machine-translating TACRED instances and automatically projecting their entity annotations. We analyze translation and annotation projection quality, identify error categories, and experimentally evaluate fine-tuned pretrained mono- and multilingual language models in common transfer learning scenarios. Our analyses show that machine translation is a viable strategy to transfer RE instances, with native speakers judging more than 83% of the translated instances to be linguistically and semantically acceptable. We find monolingual RE model performance to be comparable to the English original for many of the target languages, and that multilingual models trained on a combination of English and target language data can outperform their monolingual counterparts. However, we also observe a variety of translation and annotation projection errors, both due to the MT systems and linguistic features of the target languages, such as pronoun-dropping, compounding and inflection, that degrade dataset quality and RE model performance.

This paper presents an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Knowledge Graph (KG) construction and reasoning. We employ eight distinct datasets that encompass aspects including entity, relation and event extraction, link prediction, and question answering. Empirically, our findings suggest that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT in the majority of tasks and even surpasses fine-tuned models in certain reasoning and question-answering datasets. Moreover, our investigation extends to the potential generalization ability of LLMs for information extraction, which culminates in the presentation of the Virtual Knowledge Extraction task and the development of the VINE dataset. Drawing on these empirical findings, we further propose AutoKG, a multi-agent-based approach employing LLMs for KG construction and reasoning, which aims to chart the future of this field and offer exciting opportunities for advancement. We anticipate that our research can provide invaluable insights for future undertakings of KG\footnote{Code and datasets will be available in https://github.com/zjunlp/AutoKG.

Information Extraction (IE) stands as a cornerstone in natural language processing, traditionally segmented into distinct sub-tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) heralds a paradigm shift, suggesting the feasibility of a singular model addressing multiple IE subtasks. In this vein, we introduce the General Information Extraction Large Language Model (GIELLM), which integrates text Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, and Event Extraction using a uniform input-output schema. This innovation marks the first instance of a model simultaneously handling such a diverse array of IE subtasks. Notably, the GIELLM leverages the Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE), enhancing performance in integrated tasks compared to their isolated counterparts. Our experiments demonstrate State-of-the-Art (SOTA) results in five out of six Japanese mixed datasets, significantly surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo. Further, an independent evaluation using the novel Text Classification Relation and Event Extraction(TCREE) dataset corroborates the synergistic advantages of MRE in text and word classification. This breakthrough paves the way for most IE subtasks to be subsumed under a singular LLM framework. Specialized fine-tune task-specific models are no longer needed.

This paper introduces a deep learning model tailored for document information analysis, emphasizing document classification, entity relation extraction, and document visual question answering. The proposed model leverages transformer-based models to encode all the information present in a document image, including textual, visual, and layout information. The model is pre-trained and subsequently fine-tuned for various document image analysis tasks. The proposed model incorporates three additional tasks during the pre-training phase, including reading order identification of different layout segments in a document image, layout segments categorization as per PubLayNet, and generation of the text sequence within a given layout segment (text block). The model also incorporates a collective pre-training scheme where losses of all the tasks under consideration, including pre-training and fine-tuning tasks with all datasets, are considered. Additional encoder and decoder blocks are added to the RoBERTa network to generate results for all tasks. The proposed model achieved impressive results across all tasks, with an accuracy of 95.87% on the RVL-CDIP dataset for document classification, F1 scores of 0.9306, 0.9804, 0.9794, and 0.8742 on the FUNSD, CORD, SROIE, and Kleister-NDA datasets respectively for entity relation extraction, and an ANLS score of 0.8468 on the DocVQA dataset for visual question answering. The results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed model in understanding and interpreting complex document layouts and content, making it a promising tool for document analysis tasks.

Maintaining comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge graphs (KGs) is critical for modern AI systems, but manual curation struggles to scale with the rapid growth of scientific literature. This paper presents KARMA, a novel framework employing multi-agent large language models (LLMs) to automate KG enrichment through structured analysis of unstructured text. Our approach employs nine collaborative agents, spanning entity discovery, relation extraction, schema alignment, and conflict resolution that iteratively parse documents, verify extracted knowledge, and integrate it into existing graph structures while adhering to domain-specific schema. Experiments on 1,200 PubMed articles from three different domains demonstrate the effectiveness of KARMA in knowledge graph enrichment, with the identification of up to 38,230 new entities while achieving 83.1\% LLM-verified correctness and reducing conflict edges by 18.6\% through multi-layer assessments.

Specialised pre-trained language models are becoming more frequent in NLP since they can potentially outperform models trained on generic texts. BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT are two examples of such models that have shown promise in medical NLP tasks. Many of these models are overparametrised and resource-intensive, but thanks to techniques like Knowledge Distillation (KD), it is possible to create smaller versions that perform almost as well as their larger counterparts. In this work, we specifically focus on development of compact language models for processing clinical texts (i.e. progress notes, discharge summaries etc). We developed a number of efficient lightweight clinical transformers using knowledge distillation and continual learning, with the number of parameters ranging from 15 million to 65 million. These models performed comparably to larger models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBioBERT and significantly outperformed other compact models trained on general or biomedical data. Our extensive evaluation was done across several standard datasets and covered a wide range of clinical text-mining tasks, including Natural Language Inference, Relation Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, and Sequence Classification. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study specifically focused on creating efficient and compact transformers for clinical NLP tasks. The models and code used in this study can be found on our Huggingface profile at https://huggingface.co/nlpie and Github page at https://github.com/nlpie-research/Lightweight-Clinical-Transformers, respectively, promoting reproducibility of our results.

In this report, we introduce SciFive, a domain-specific T5 model that has been pre-trained on large biomedical corpora. Our model outperforms the current SOTA methods (i.e. BERT, BioBERT, Base T5) on tasks in named entity relation, relation extraction, natural language inference, and question-answering. We show that text-generation methods have significant potential in a broad array of biomedical NLP tasks, particularly those requiring longer, more complex outputs. Our results support the exploration of more difficult text generation tasks and the development of new methods in this area

There has been an influx of biomedical domain-specific language models, showing language models pre-trained on biomedical text perform better on biomedical domain benchmarks than those trained on general domain text corpora such as Wikipedia and Books. Yet, most works do not study the factors affecting each domain language application deeply. Additionally, the study of model size on domain-specific models has been mostly missing. We empirically study and evaluate several factors that can affect performance on domain language applications, such as the sub-word vocabulary set, model size, pre-training corpus, and domain transfer. We show consistent improvements on benchmarks with our larger BioMegatron model trained on a larger domain corpus, contributing to our understanding of domain language model applications. We demonstrate noticeable improvements over the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) on standard biomedical NLP benchmarks of named entity recognition, relation extraction, and question answering. Model checkpoints and code are available at [https://ngc.nvidia.com] and [https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo].

Pretrained language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, BERT has been adapted to the biomedical domain. Despite the effectiveness, these models have hundreds of millions of parameters and are computationally expensive when applied to large-scale NLP applications. We hypothesized that the number of parameters of the original BERT can be dramatically reduced with minor impact on performance. In this study, we present Bioformer, a compact BERT model for biomedical text mining. We pretrained two Bioformer models (named Bioformer8L and Bioformer16L) which reduced the model size by 60% compared to BERTBase. Bioformer uses a biomedical vocabulary and was pre-trained from scratch on PubMed abstracts and PubMed Central full-text articles. We thoroughly evaluated the performance of Bioformer as well as existing biomedical BERT models including BioBERT and PubMedBERT on 15 benchmark datasets of four different biomedical NLP tasks: named entity recognition, relation extraction, question answering and document classification. The results show that with 60% fewer parameters, Bioformer16L is only 0.1% less accurate than PubMedBERT while Bioformer8L is 0.9% less accurate than PubMedBERT. Both Bioformer16L and Bioformer8L outperformed BioBERTBase-v1.1. In addition, Bioformer16L and Bioformer8L are 2-3 fold as fast as PubMedBERT/BioBERTBase-v1.1. Bioformer has been successfully deployed to PubTator Central providing gene annotations over 35 million PubMed abstracts and 5 million PubMed Central full-text articles. We make Bioformer publicly available via https://github.com/WGLab/bioformer, including pre-trained models, datasets, and instructions for downstream use.

In this work, we explore how to train task-specific language models aimed towards learning rich representation of keyphrases from text documents. We experiment with different masking strategies for pre-training transformer language models (LMs) in discriminative as well as generative settings. In the discriminative setting, we introduce a new pre-training objective - Keyphrase Boundary Infilling with Replacement (KBIR), showing large gains in performance (upto 8.16 points in F1) over SOTA, when the LM pre-trained using KBIR is fine-tuned for the task of keyphrase extraction. In the generative setting, we introduce a new pre-training setup for BART - KeyBART, that reproduces the keyphrases related to the input text in the CatSeq format, instead of the denoised original input. This also led to gains in performance (upto 4.33 points in F1@M) over SOTA for keyphrase generation. Additionally, we also fine-tune the pre-trained language models on named entity recognition (NER), question answering (QA), relation extraction (RE), abstractive summarization and achieve comparable performance with that of the SOTA, showing that learning rich representation of keyphrases is indeed beneficial for many other fundamental NLP tasks.

Biomedical text mining is becoming increasingly important as the number of biomedical documents rapidly grows. With the progress in natural language processing (NLP), extracting valuable information from biomedical literature has gained popularity among researchers, and deep learning has boosted the development of effective biomedical text mining models. However, directly applying the advancements in NLP to biomedical text mining often yields unsatisfactory results due to a word distribution shift from general domain corpora to biomedical corpora. In this article, we investigate how the recently introduced pre-trained language model BERT can be adapted for biomedical corpora. We introduce BioBERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Text Mining), which is a domain-specific language representation model pre-trained on large-scale biomedical corpora. With almost the same architecture across tasks, BioBERT largely outperforms BERT and previous state-of-the-art models in a variety of biomedical text mining tasks when pre-trained on biomedical corpora. While BERT obtains performance comparable to that of previous state-of-the-art models, BioBERT significantly outperforms them on the following three representative biomedical text mining tasks: biomedical named entity recognition (0.62% F1 score improvement), biomedical relation extraction (2.80% F1 score improvement) and biomedical question answering (12.24% MRR improvement). Our analysis results show that pre-training BERT on biomedical corpora helps it to understand complex biomedical texts. We make the pre-trained weights of BioBERT freely available at https://github.com/naver/biobert-pretrained, and the source code for fine-tuning BioBERT available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/biobert.

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly those similar to ChatGPT, have significantly influenced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While these models excel in general language tasks, their performance in domain-specific downstream tasks such as biomedical and clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Medical Natural Language Inference (NLI) is still evolving. In this context, our study investigates the potential of instruction tuning for biomedical language processing, applying this technique to two general LLMs of substantial scale. We present a comprehensive, instruction-based model trained on a dataset that consists of approximately 200,000 instruction-focused samples. This dataset represents a carefully curated compilation of existing data, meticulously adapted and reformatted to align with the specific requirements of our instruction-based tasks. This initiative represents an important step in utilising such models to achieve results on par with specialised encoder-only models like BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT for various classical biomedical NLP tasks. Our work includes an analysis of the dataset's composition and its impact on model performance, providing insights into the intricacies of instruction tuning. By sharing our codes, models, and the distinctively assembled instruction-based dataset, we seek to encourage ongoing research and development in this area.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in NLP towards using pretrained language models ({PLM}) for a wide range of tasks. However, there are many difficult design decisions to represent structures (e.g. tagged text, coreference chains) in a way such that they can be captured by PLMs. Prior work on structured prediction with PLMs typically flattens the structured output into a sequence, which limits the quality of structural information being learned and leads to inferior performance compared to classic discriminative models. In this work, we describe an approach to model structures as sequences of actions in an autoregressive manner with PLMs, allowing in-structure dependencies to be learned without any loss. Our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art on all the structured prediction tasks we looked at, namely, named entity recognition, end-to-end relation extraction, and coreference resolution.

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of 8 Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, SemanticTextual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We build all of the tasks from scratch from diverse source corpora while respecting copyrights, to ensure accessibility for anyone without any restrictions. With ethical considerations in mind, we carefully design annotation protocols. Along with the benchmark tasks and data, we provide suitable evaluation metrics and fine-tuning recipes for pretrained language models for each task. We furthermore release the pretrained language models (PLM), KLUE-BERT and KLUE-RoBERTa, to help reproducing baseline models on KLUE and thereby facilitate future research. We make a few interesting observations from the preliminary experiments using the proposed KLUE benchmark suite, already demonstrating the usefulness of this new benchmark suite. First, we find KLUE-RoBERTa-large outperforms other baselines, including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. Second, we see minimal degradation in performance even when we replace personally identifiable information from the pretraining corpus, suggesting that privacy and NLU capability are not at odds with each other. Lastly, we find that using BPE tokenization in combination with morpheme-level pre-tokenization is effective in tasks involving morpheme-level tagging, detection and generation. In addition to accelerating Korean NLP research, our comprehensive documentation on creating KLUE will facilitate creating similar resources for other languages in the future. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com.

Extracting entities and relations from unstructured text has attracted increasing attention in recent years but remains challenging, due to the intrinsic difficulty in identifying overlapping relations with shared entities. Prior works show that joint learning can result in a noticeable performance gain. However, they usually involve sequential interrelated steps and suffer from the problem of exposure bias. At training time, they predict with the ground truth conditions while at inference it has to make extraction from scratch. This discrepancy leads to error accumulation. To mitigate the issue, we propose in this paper a one-stage joint extraction model, namely, TPLinker, which is capable of discovering overlapping relations sharing one or both entities while immune from the exposure bias. TPLinker formulates joint extraction as a token pair linking problem and introduces a novel handshaking tagging scheme that aligns the boundary tokens of entity pairs under each relation type. Experiment results show that TPLinker performs significantly better on overlapping and multiple relation extraction, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets.

Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. In this paper, we propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. Specifically, UIE uniformly encodes different extraction structures via a structured extraction language, adaptively generates target extractions via a schema-based prompt mechanism - structural schema instructor, and captures the common IE abilities via a large-scale pre-trained text-to-structure model. Experiments show that UIE achieved the state-of-the-art performance on 4 IE tasks, 13 datasets, and on all supervised, low-resource, and few-shot settings for a wide range of entity, relation, event and sentiment extraction tasks and their unification. These results verified the effectiveness, universality, and transferability of UIE.

Background: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is widely used to extract clinical insights from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, the lack of annotated data, automated tools, and other challenges hinder the full utilisation of NLP for EHRs. Various Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and NLP techniques are studied and compared to understand the limitations and opportunities in this space comprehensively. Methodology: After screening 261 articles from 11 databases, we included 127 papers for full-text review covering seven categories of articles: 1) medical note classification, 2) clinical entity recognition, 3) text summarisation, 4) deep learning (DL) and transfer learning architecture, 5) information extraction, 6) Medical language translation and 7) other NLP applications. This study follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Result and Discussion: EHR was the most commonly used data type among the selected articles, and the datasets were primarily unstructured. Various ML and DL methods were used, with prediction or classification being the most common application of ML or DL. The most common use cases were: the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) classification, clinical note analysis, and named entity recognition (NER) for clinical descriptions and research on psychiatric disorders. Conclusion: We find that the adopted ML models were not adequately assessed. In addition, the data imbalance problem is quite important, yet we must find techniques to address this underlining problem. Future studies should address key limitations in studies, primarily identifying Lupus Nephritis, Suicide Attempts, perinatal self-harmed and ICD-9 classification.

Event extraction is a classic task in natural language processing with wide use in handling large amount of yet rapidly growing financial, legal, medical, and government documents which often contain multiple events with their elements scattered and mixed across the documents, making the problem much more difficult. Though the underlying relations between event elements to be extracted provide helpful contextual information, they are somehow overlooked in prior studies. We showcase the enhancement to this task brought by utilizing the knowledge graph that captures entity relations and their attributes. We propose a first event extraction framework that embeds a knowledge graph through a Graph Neural Network and integrates the embedding with regular features, all at document-level. Specifically, for extracting events from Chinese financial announcements, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 5.3% in F1-score.

Joint extraction of entities and relations aims to detect entity pairs along with their relations using a single model. Prior work typically solves this task in the extract-then-classify or unified labeling manner. However, these methods either suffer from the redundant entity pairs, or ignore the important inner structure in the process of extracting entities and relations. To address these limitations, in this paper, we first decompose the joint extraction task into two interrelated subtasks, namely HE extraction and TER extraction. The former subtask is to distinguish all head-entities that may be involved with target relations, and the latter is to identify corresponding tail-entities and relations for each extracted head-entity. Next, these two subtasks are further deconstructed into several sequence labeling problems based on our proposed span-based tagging scheme, which are conveniently solved by a hierarchical boundary tagger and a multi-span decoding algorithm. Owing to the reasonable decomposition strategy, our model can fully capture the semantic interdependency between different steps, as well as reduce noise from irrelevant entity pairs. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous work by 5.2%, 5.9% and 21.5% (F1 score), achieving a new state-of-the-art on three public datasets

Document-level Event Argument Extraction (DEAE) aims to identify arguments and their specific roles from an unstructured document. The advanced approaches on DEAE utilize prompt-based methods to guide pre-trained language models (PLMs) in extracting arguments from input documents. They mainly concentrate on establishing relations between triggers and entity mentions within documents, leaving two unresolved problems: a) independent modeling of entity mentions; b) document-prompt isolation. To this end, we propose a semantic mention Graph Augmented Model (GAM) to address these two problems in this paper. Firstly, GAM constructs a semantic mention graph that captures relations within and between documents and prompts, encompassing co-existence, co-reference and co-type relations. Furthermore, we introduce an ensembled graph transformer module to address mentions and their three semantic relations effectively. Later, the graph-augmented encoder-decoder module incorporates the relation-specific graph into the input embedding of PLMs and optimizes the encoder section with topology information, enhancing the relations comprehensively. Extensive experiments on the RAMS and WikiEvents datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing baseline methods and achieving a new state-of-the-art performance.

Relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation classes, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. Further, these approaches and models are largely inaccessible to users who don't have direct access to large language models (LLMs) and/or infrastructure for supervised training or fine-tuning. Rule-based systems also struggle with implicit expressions. Apart from this, Real world financial documents such as various 10-X reports (including 10-K, 10-Q, etc.) of publicly traded companies pose another challenge to rule-based systems in terms of longer and complex sentences. In this paper, we introduce a simple approach that consults training relations at test time through a nearest-neighbor search over dense vectors of lexico-syntactic patterns and provides a simple yet effective means to tackle the above issues. We evaluate our approach on REFinD and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. We further show that it can provide a good start for human in the loop setup when a small number of annotations are available and it is also beneficial when domain experts can provide high quality patterns.

Transforming a sentence into a two-dimensional (2D) representation (e.g., the table filling) has the ability to unfold a semantic plane, where an element of the plane is a word-pair representation of a sentence which may denote a possible relation representation composed of two named entities. The 2D representation is effective in resolving overlapped relation instances. However, in related works, the representation is directly transformed from a raw input. It is weak to utilize prior knowledge, which is important to support the relation extraction task. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional feature engineering method in the 2D sentence representation for relation extraction. Our proposed method is evaluated on three public datasets (ACE05 Chinese, ACE05 English, and SanWen) and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The results indicate that two-dimensional feature engineering can take advantage of a two-dimensional sentence representation and make full use of prior knowledge in traditional feature engineering. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Wang-ck123/A-Two-Dimensional-Feature-Engineering-Method-for-Entity-Relation-Extraction

Relation extraction (RE) models have been challenged by their reliance on training data with expensive annotations. Considering that summarization tasks aim at acquiring concise expressions of synoptical information from the longer context, these tasks naturally align with the objective of RE, i.e., extracting a kind of synoptical information that describes the relation of entity mentions. We present SuRE, which converts RE into a summarization formulation. SuRE leads to more precise and resource-efficient RE based on indirect supervision from summarization tasks. To achieve this goal, we develop sentence and relation conversion techniques that essentially bridge the formulation of summarization and RE tasks. We also incorporate constraint decoding techniques with Trie scoring to further enhance summarization-based RE with robust inference. Experiments on three RE datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SuRE in both full-dataset and low-resource settings, showing that summarization is a promising source of indirect supervision to improve RE models.

Local models have recently attained astounding performances in Entity Disambiguation (ED), with generative and extractive formulations being the most promising research directions. However, previous works limited their studies to using, as the textual representation of each candidate, only its Wikipedia title. Although certainly effective, this strategy presents a few critical issues, especially when titles are not sufficiently informative or distinguishable from one another. In this paper, we address this limitation and investigate to what extent more expressive textual representations can mitigate it. We thoroughly evaluate our approach against standard benchmarks in ED and find extractive formulations to be particularly well-suited to these representations: we report a new state of the art on 2 out of 6 benchmarks we consider and strongly improve the generalization capability over unseen patterns. We release our code, data and model checkpoints at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/extend.

Relation Extraction is a way of obtaining the semantic relationship between entities in text. The state-of-the-art methods use linguistic tools to build a graph for the text in which the entities appear and then a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is employed to encode the pre-built graphs. Although their performance is promising, the reliance on linguistic tools results in a non end-to-end process. In this work, we propose a novel model, the Self-determined Graph Convolutional Network (SGCN), which determines a weighted graph using a self-attention mechanism, rather using any linguistic tool. Then, the self-determined graph is encoded using a GCN. We test our model on the TACRED dataset and achieve the state-of-the-art result. Our experiments show that SGCN outperforms the traditional GCN, which uses dependency parsing tools to build the graph.

This paper proposes a novel named entity recognition (NER) technique specifically tailored for the open-source software systems. Our approach aims to address the scarcity of annotated software data by employing a comprehensive two-step distantly supervised annotation process. This process strategically leverages language heuristics, unique lookup tables, external knowledge sources, and an active learning approach. By harnessing these powerful techniques, we not only enhance model performance but also effectively mitigate the limitations associated with cost and the scarcity of expert annotators. It is noteworthy that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art LLMs by a substantial margin. We also show the effectiveness of NER in the downstream task of relation extraction.

The relation extraction (RE) in complex scenarios faces challenges such as diverse relation types and ambiguous relations between entities within a single sentence, leading to the poor performance of pure "text-in, text-out" language models (LMs). To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an agent-based RE framework, namely AgentRE, which fully leverages the potential of large language models (LLMs) including memory, retrieval and reflection, to achieve RE in complex scenarios. Specifically, three major modules are built in AgentRE serving as the tools to help the agent acquire and process various useful information, thereby obtaining improved RE performance. Our extensive experimental results upon two datasets in English and Chinese demonstrate our AgentRE's superior performance, especially in low-resource scenarios. Additionally, the trajectories generated by AgentRE can be refined to construct a high-quality training dataset incorporating different reasoning methods, which can be used to fine-tune smaller models. Code is available at https://github.com/Lightblues/AgentRE.

Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) is a more challenging task than sentence RE as it often requires reasoning over multiple sentences. Yet, human annotators usually use a small number of sentences to identify the relationship between a given entity pair. In this paper, we present an embarrassingly simple but effective method to heuristically select evidence sentences for document-level RE, which can be easily combined with BiLSTM to achieve good performance on benchmark datasets, even better than fancy graph neural network based methods. We have released our code at https://github.com/AndrewZhe/Three-Sentences-Are-All-You-Need.

Recognizing entities in texts is a central need in many information-seeking scenarios, and indeed, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is arguably one of the most successful examples of a widely adopted NLP task and corresponding NLP technology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) appear to provide effective solutions (also) for NER tasks that were traditionally handled with dedicated models, often matching or surpassing the abilities of the dedicated models. Should NER be considered a solved problem? We argue to the contrary: the capabilities provided by LLMs are not the end of NER research, but rather an exciting beginning. They allow taking NER to the next level, tackling increasingly more useful, and increasingly more challenging, variants. We present three variants of the NER task, together with a dataset to support them. The first is a move towards more fine-grained -- and intersectional -- entity types. The second is a move towards zero-shot recognition and extraction of these fine-grained types based on entity-type labels. The third, and most challenging, is the move from the recognition setup to a novel retrieval setup, where the query is a zero-shot entity type, and the expected result is all the sentences from a large, pre-indexed corpus that contain entities of these types, and their corresponding spans. We show that all of these are far from being solved. We provide a large, silver-annotated corpus of 4 million paragraphs covering 500 entity types, to facilitate research towards all of these three goals.

Information Extraction (IE) is crucial for converting unstructured data into structured formats like Knowledge Graphs (KGs). A key task within IE is Relation Extraction (RE), which identifies relationships between entities in text. Various RE methods exist, including supervised, unsupervised, weakly supervised, and rule-based approaches. Recent studies leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown significant success in this area. In the current era dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning these models can overcome limitations associated with zero-shot LLM prompting-based RE methods, especially regarding domain adaptation challenges and identifying implicit relations between entities in sentences. These implicit relations, which cannot be easily extracted from a sentence's dependency tree, require logical inference for accurate identification. This work explores the performance of fine-tuned LLMs and their integration into the Retrieval Augmented-based (RAG) RE approach to address the challenges of identifying implicit relations at the sentence level, particularly when LLMs act as generators within the RAG framework. Empirical evaluations on the TACRED, TACRED-Revisited (TACREV), Re-TACRED, and SemEVAL datasets show significant performance improvements with fine-tuned LLMs, including Llama2-7B, Mistral-7B, and T5 (Large). Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains on SemEVAL, where implicit relations are common, surpassing previous results on this dataset. Additionally, our method outperforms previous works on TACRED, TACREV, and Re-TACRED, demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse evaluation scenarios.

Relation extraction systems require large amounts of labeled examples which are costly to annotate. In this work we reformulate relation extraction as an entailment task, with simple, hand-made, verbalizations of relations produced in less than 15 min per relation. The system relies on a pretrained textual entailment engine which is run as-is (no training examples, zero-shot) or further fine-tuned on labeled examples (few-shot or fully trained). In our experiments on TACRED we attain 63% F1 zero-shot, 69% with 16 examples per relation (17% points better than the best supervised system on the same conditions), and only 4 points short to the state-of-the-art (which uses 20 times more training data). We also show that the performance can be improved significantly with larger entailment models, up to 12 points in zero-shot, allowing to report the best results to date on TACRED when fully trained. The analysis shows that our few-shot systems are specially effective when discriminating between relations, and that the performance difference in low data regimes comes mainly from identifying no-relation cases.

We present a new formulation for structured information extraction (SIE) from visually rich documents. It aims to address the limitations of existing IOB tagging or graph-based formulations, which are either overly reliant on the correct ordering of input text or struggle with decoding a complex graph. Instead, motivated by anchor-based object detectors in vision, we represent an entity as an anchor word and a bounding box, and represent entity linking as the association between anchor words. This is more robust to text ordering, and maintains a compact graph for entity linking. The formulation motivates us to introduce 1) a DOCument TRansformer (DocTr) that aims at detecting and associating entity bounding boxes in visually rich documents, and 2) a simple pre-training strategy that helps learn entity detection in the context of language. Evaluations on three SIE benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed formulation, and the overall approach outperforms existing solutions.

Entity representations are useful in natural language tasks involving entities. In this paper, we propose new pretrained contextualized representations of words and entities based on the bidirectional transformer. The proposed model treats words and entities in a given text as independent tokens, and outputs contextualized representations of them. Our model is trained using a new pretraining task based on the masked language model of BERT. The task involves predicting randomly masked words and entities in a large entity-annotated corpus retrieved from Wikipedia. We also propose an entity-aware self-attention mechanism that is an extension of the self-attention mechanism of the transformer, and considers the types of tokens (words or entities) when computing attention scores. The proposed model achieves impressive empirical performance on a wide range of entity-related tasks. In particular, it obtains state-of-the-art results on five well-known datasets: Open Entity (entity typing), TACRED (relation classification), CoNLL-2003 (named entity recognition), ReCoRD (cloze-style question answering), and SQuAD 1.1 (extractive question answering). Our source code and pretrained representations are available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/luke.

Relation triple extraction, which outputs a set of triples from long sentences, plays a vital role in knowledge acquisition. Large language models can accurately extract triples from simple sentences through few-shot learning or fine-tuning when given appropriate instructions. However, they often miss out when extracting from complex sentences. In this paper, we design an evaluation-filtering framework that integrates large language models with small models for relational triple extraction tasks. The framework includes an evaluation model that can extract related entity pairs with high precision. We propose a simple labeling principle and a deep neural network to build the model, embedding the outputs as prompts into the extraction process of the large model. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the proposed method can assist large language models in obtaining more accurate extraction results, especially from complex sentences containing multiple relational triples. Our evaluation model can also be embedded into traditional extraction models to enhance their extraction precision from complex sentences.

The current workflow for Information Extraction (IE) analysts involves the definition of the entities/relations of interest and a training corpus with annotated examples. In this demonstration we introduce a new workflow where the analyst directly verbalizes the entities/relations, which are then used by a Textual Entailment model to perform zero-shot IE. We present the design and implementation of a toolkit with a user interface, as well as experiments on four IE tasks that show that the system achieves very good performance at zero-shot learning using only 5--15 minutes per type of a user's effort. Our demonstration system is open-sourced at https://github.com/BBN-E/ZS4IE . A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/676138340 .

Over 50 million scholarly articles have been published: they constitute a unique repository of knowledge. In particular, one may infer from them relations between scientific concepts, such as synonyms and hyponyms. Artificial neural networks have been recently explored for relation extraction. In this work, we continue this line of work and present a system based on a convolutional neural network to extract relations. Our model ranked first in the SemEval-2017 task 10 (ScienceIE) for relation extraction in scientific articles (subtask C).

Information extraction (IE) aims to extract structural knowledge (such as entities, relations, and events) from plain natural language texts. Recently, generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation, allowing for generalization across various domains and tasks. As a result, numerous works have been proposed to harness abilities of LLMs and offer viable solutions for IE tasks based on a generative paradigm. To conduct a comprehensive systematic review and exploration of LLM efforts for IE tasks, in this study, we survey the most recent advancements in this field. We first present an extensive overview by categorizing these works in terms of various IE subtasks and learning paradigms, then we empirically analyze the most advanced methods and discover the emerging trend of IE tasks with LLMs. Based on thorough review conducted, we identify several insights in technique and promising research directions that deserve further exploration in future studies. We maintain a public repository and consistently update related resources at: https://github.com/quqxui/Awesome-LLM4IE-Papers.

Entity linking aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. One of the key challenges comes from insufficient labeled data for specific domains. Although dense retrievers have achieved excellent performance on several benchmarks, their performance decreases significantly when only a limited amount of in-domain labeled data is available. In such few-shot setting, we revisit the sparse retrieval method, and propose an ELECTRA-based keyword extractor to denoise the mention context and construct a better query expression. For training the extractor, we propose a distant supervision method to automatically generate training data based on overlapping tokens between mention contexts and entity descriptions. Experimental results on the ZESHEL dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin across all test domains, showing the effectiveness of keyword-enhanced sparse retrieval.

This paper presents an empirical study to build relation extraction systems in low-resource settings. Based upon recent pre-trained language models, we comprehensively investigate three schemes to evaluate the performance in low-resource settings: (i) different types of prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data; (ii) diverse balancing methods to address the long-tailed distribution issue; (iii) data augmentation technologies and self-training to generate more labeled in-domain data. We create a benchmark with 8 relation extraction (RE) datasets covering different languages, domains and contexts and perform extensive comparisons over the proposed schemes with combinations. Our experiments illustrate: (i) Though prompt-based tuning is beneficial in low-resource RE, there is still much potential for improvement, especially in extracting relations from cross-sentence contexts with multiple relational triples; (ii) Balancing methods are not always helpful for RE with long-tailed distribution; (iii) Data augmentation complements existing baselines and can bring much performance gain, while self-training may not consistently achieve advancement to low-resource RE. Code and datasets are in https://github.com/zjunlp/LREBench.

Entities are at the center of how we represent and aggregate knowledge. For instance, Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are structured by entities (e.g., one per Wikipedia article). The ability to retrieve such entities given a query is fundamental for knowledge-intensive tasks such as entity linking and open-domain question answering. Current approaches can be understood as classifiers among atomic labels, one for each entity. Their weight vectors are dense entity representations produced by encoding entity meta information such as their descriptions. This approach has several shortcomings: (i) context and entity affinity is mainly captured through a vector dot product, potentially missing fine-grained interactions; (ii) a large memory footprint is needed to store dense representations when considering large entity sets; (iii) an appropriately hard set of negative data has to be subsampled at training time. In this work, we propose GENRE, the first system that retrieves entities by generating their unique names, left to right, token-by-token in an autoregressive fashion. This mitigates the aforementioned technical issues since: (i) the autoregressive formulation directly captures relations between context and entity name, effectively cross encoding both; (ii) the memory footprint is greatly reduced because the parameters of our encoder-decoder architecture scale with vocabulary size, not entity count; (iii) the softmax loss is computed without subsampling negative data. We experiment with more than 20 datasets on entity disambiguation, end-to-end entity linking and document retrieval tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art or very competitive results while using a tiny fraction of the memory footprint of competing systems. Finally, we demonstrate that new entities can be added by simply specifying their names. Code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/facebookresearch/GENRE.

Relation extraction has the potential for large-scale knowledge graph construction, but current methods do not consider the qualifier attributes for each relation triplet, such as time, quantity or location. The qualifiers form hyper-relational facts which better capture the rich and complex knowledge graph structure. For example, the relation triplet (Leonard Parker, Educated At, Harvard University) can be factually enriched by including the qualifier (End Time, 1967). Hence, we propose the task of hyper-relational extraction to extract more specific and complete facts from text. To support the task, we construct HyperRED, a large-scale and general-purpose dataset. Existing models cannot perform hyper-relational extraction as it requires a model to consider the interaction between three entities. Hence, we propose CubeRE, a cube-filling model inspired by table-filling approaches and explicitly considers the interaction between relation triplets and qualifiers. To improve model scalability and reduce negative class imbalance, we further propose a cube-pruning method. Our experiments show that CubeRE outperforms strong baselines and reveal possible directions for future research. Our code and data are available at github.com/declare-lab/HyperRED.

Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.

Relation extraction is the task of extracting semantic relations between entities in a sentence. It is an essential part of some natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, knowledge extraction, and knowledge base population. The main motivations of this research stem from a lack of a dataset for relation extraction in the Persian language as well as the necessity of extracting knowledge from the growing big-data in the Persian language for different applications. In this paper, we present "PERLEX" as the first Persian dataset for relation extraction, which is an expert-translated version of the "Semeval-2010-Task-8" dataset. Moreover, this paper addresses Persian relation extraction utilizing state-of-the-art language-agnostic algorithms. We employ six different models for relation extraction on the proposed bilingual dataset, including a non-neural model (as the baseline), three neural models, and two deep learning models fed by multilingual-BERT contextual word representations. The experiments result in the maximum f-score 77.66% (provided by BERTEM-MTB method) as the state-of-the-art of relation extraction in the Persian language.

We introduce CORE, a dataset for few-shot relation classification (RC) focused on company relations and business entities. CORE includes 4,708 instances of 12 relation types with corresponding textual evidence extracted from company Wikipedia pages. Company names and business entities pose a challenge for few-shot RC models due to the rich and diverse information associated with them. For example, a company name may represent the legal entity, products, people, or business divisions depending on the context. Therefore, deriving the relation type between entities is highly dependent on textual context. To evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art RC models on the CORE dataset, we conduct experiments in the few-shot domain adaptation setting. Our results reveal substantial performance gaps, confirming that models trained on different domains struggle to adapt to CORE. Interestingly, we find that models trained on CORE showcase improved out-of-domain performance, which highlights the importance of high-quality data for robust domain adaptation. Specifically, the information richness embedded in business entities allows models to focus on contextual nuances, reducing their reliance on superficial clues such as relation-specific verbs. In addition to the dataset, we provide relevant code snippets to facilitate reproducibility and encourage further research in the field.

What would it take for a natural language model to understand a novel, such as The Lord of the Rings? Among other things, such a model must be able to: (a) identify and record new characters (entities) and their attributes as they are introduced in the text, and (b) identify subsequent references to the characters previously introduced and update their attributes. This problem of entity tracking is essential for language understanding, and thus, useful for a wide array of downstream applications in NLP such as question-answering, summarization. In this thesis, we focus on two key problems in relation to facilitating the use of entity tracking models: (i) scaling entity tracking models to long documents, such as a novel, and (ii) integrating entity tracking into language models. Applying language technologies to long documents has garnered interest recently, but computational constraints are a significant bottleneck in scaling up current methods. In this thesis, we argue that computationally efficient entity tracking models can be developed by representing entities with rich, fixed-dimensional vector representations derived from pretrained language models, and by exploiting the ephemeral nature of entities. We also argue for the integration of entity tracking into language models as it will allow for: (i) wider application given the current ubiquitous use of pretrained language models in NLP applications, and (ii) easier adoption since it is much easier to swap in a new pretrained language model than to integrate a separate standalone entity tracking model.

Inter-personal relationship is the basis of human society. In order to automatically identify the relations between persons from texts, we need annotated data for training systems. However, there is a lack of a massive amount of such data so far. To address this situation, we introduce IPRE, a new dataset for inter-personal relationship extraction which aims to facilitate information extraction and knowledge graph construction research. In total, IPRE has over 41,000 labeled sentences for 34 types of relations, including about 9,000 sentences annotated by workers. Our data is the first dataset for inter-personal relationship extraction. Additionally, we define three evaluation tasks based on IPRE and provide the baseline systems for further comparison in future work.

Relation Extraction (RE) has attracted increasing attention, but current RE evaluation is limited to in-domain evaluation setups. Little is known on how well a RE system fares in challenging, but realistic out-of-distribution evaluation setups. To address this gap, we propose CrossRE, a new, freely-available cross-domain benchmark for RE, which comprises six distinct text domains and includes multi-label annotations. An additional innovation is that we release meta-data collected during annotation, to include explanations and flags of difficult instances. We provide an empirical evaluation with a state-of-the-art model for relation classification. As the meta-data enables us to shed new light on the state-of-the-art model, we provide a comprehensive analysis on the impact of difficult cases and find correlations between model and human annotations. Overall, our empirical investigation highlights the difficulty of cross-domain RE. We release our dataset, to spur more research in this direction.

Fine-grained few-shot entity extraction in the chemical domain faces two unique challenges. First, compared with entity extraction tasks in the general domain, sentences from chemical papers usually contain more entities. Moreover, entity extraction models usually have difficulty extracting entities of long-tailed types. In this paper, we propose Chem-FINESE, a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based few-shot entity extraction approach, to address these two challenges. Our Chem-FINESE has two components: a seq2seq entity extractor to extract named entities from the input sentence and a seq2seq self-validation module to reconstruct the original input sentence from extracted entities. Inspired by the fact that a good entity extraction system needs to extract entities faithfully, our new self-validation module leverages entity extraction results to reconstruct the original input sentence. Besides, we design a new contrastive loss to reduce excessive copying during the extraction process. Finally, we release ChemNER+, a new fine-grained chemical entity extraction dataset that is annotated by domain experts with the ChemNER schema. Experiments in few-shot settings with both ChemNER+ and CHEMET datasets show that our newly proposed framework has contributed up to 8.26% and 6.84% absolute F1-score gains respectively.

Relations such as "is influenced by", "is known for" or "is a competitor of" are inherently graded: we can rank entity pairs based on how well they satisfy these relations, but it is hard to draw a line between those pairs that satisfy them and those that do not. Such graded relations play a central role in many applications, yet they are typically not covered by existing Knowledge Graphs. In this paper, we consider the possibility of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill this gap. To this end, we introduce a new benchmark, in which entity pairs have to be ranked according to how much they satisfy a given graded relation. The task is formulated as a few-shot ranking problem, where models only have access to a description of the relation and five prototypical instances. We use the proposed benchmark to evaluate state-of-the-art relation embedding strategies as well as several recent LLMs, covering both publicly available LLMs and closed models such as GPT-4. Overall, we find a strong correlation between model size and performance, with smaller Language Models struggling to outperform a naive baseline. The results of the largest Flan-T5 and OPT models are remarkably strong, although a clear gap with human performance remains.

Information extraction (IE) systems aim to automatically extract structured information, such as named entities, relations between entities, and events, from unstructured texts. While most existing work addresses a particular IE task, universally modeling various IE tasks with one model has achieved great success recently. Despite their success, they employ a one-stage learning strategy, i.e., directly learning to extract the target structure given the input text, which contradicts the human learning process. In this paper, we propose a unified easy-to-hard learning framework consisting of three stages, i.e., the easy stage, the hard stage, and the main stage, for IE by mimicking the human learning process. By breaking down the learning process into multiple stages, our framework facilitates the model to acquire general IE task knowledge and improve its generalization ability. Extensive experiments across four IE tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on 13 out of 17 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/IE-E2H.

Entity linking is a prominent thread of research focused on structured data creation by linking spans of text to an ontology or knowledge source. We revisit the use of structured prediction for entity linking which classifies each individual input token as an entity, and aggregates the token predictions. Our system, called SpEL (Structured prediction for Entity Linking) is a state-of-the-art entity linking system that uses some new ideas to apply structured prediction to the task of entity linking including: two refined fine-tuning steps; a context sensitive prediction aggregation strategy; reduction of the size of the model's output vocabulary, and; we address a common problem in entity-linking systems where there is a training vs. inference tokenization mismatch. Our experiments show that we can outperform the state-of-the-art on the commonly used AIDA benchmark dataset for entity linking to Wikipedia. Our method is also very compute efficient in terms of number of parameters and speed of inference.

We present RONEC - the Named Entity Corpus for the Romanian language. The corpus contains over 26000 entities in ~5000 annotated sentences, belonging to 16 distinct classes. The sentences have been extracted from a copy-right free newspaper, covering several styles. This corpus represents the first initiative in the Romanian language space specifically targeted for named entity recognition. It is available in BRAT and CoNLL-U Plus formats, and it is free to use and extend at github.com/dumitrescustefan/ronec .

This paper describes the KnowledgeHub tool, a scientific literature Information Extraction (IE) and Question Answering (QA) pipeline. This is achieved by supporting the ingestion of PDF documents that are converted to text and structured representations. An ontology can then be constructed where a user defines the types of entities and relationships they want to capture. A browser-based annotation tool enables annotating the contents of the PDF documents according to the ontology. Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Classification (RC) models can be trained on the resulting annotations and can be used to annotate the unannotated portion of the documents. A knowledge graph is constructed from these entity and relation triples which can be queried to obtain insights from the data. Furthermore, we integrate a suite of Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be used for QA and summarisation that is grounded in the included documents via a retrieval component. KnowledgeHub is a unique tool that supports annotation, IE and QA, which gives the user full insight into the knowledge discovery pipeline.

Event Extraction (EE) is one of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction (IE) that aims to recognize event mentions and their arguments (i.e., participants) from text. Due to its importance, extensive methods and resources have been developed for Event Extraction. However, one limitation of current research for EE involves the under-exploration for non-English languages in which the lack of high-quality multilingual EE datasets for model training and evaluation has been the main hindrance. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Multilingual Event Extraction dataset (MEE) that provides annotation for more than 50K event mentions in 8 typologically different languages. MEE comprehensively annotates data for entity mentions, event triggers and event arguments. We conduct extensive experiments on the proposed dataset to reveal challenges and opportunities for multilingual EE.

NLP research has been focused on NER extraction and how to efficiently extract them from a sentence. However, generating relevant context of entities from a sentence has remained under-explored. In this work we introduce the task Context-NER in which relevant context of an entity has to be generated. The extracted context may not be found exactly as a substring in the sentence. We also introduce the EDGAR10-Q dataset for the same, which is a corpus of 1,500 publicly traded companies. It is a manually created complex corpus and one of the largest in terms of number of sentences and entities (1 M and 2.8 M). We introduce a baseline approach that leverages phrase generation algorithms and uses the pre-trained BERT model to get 33% ROUGE-L score. We also do a one shot evaluation with GPT-3 and get 39% score, signifying the hardness and future scope of this task. We hope that addition of this dataset and our study will pave the way for further research in this domain.

It is crucial to automatically construct knowledge graphs (KGs) of diverse new relations to support knowledge discovery and broad applications. Previous KG construction methods, based on either crowdsourcing or text mining, are often limited to a small predefined set of relations due to manual cost or restrictions in text corpus. Recent research proposed to use pretrained language models (LMs) as implicit knowledge bases that accept knowledge queries with prompts. Yet, the implicit knowledge lacks many desirable properties of a full-scale symbolic KG, such as easy access, navigation, editing, and quality assurance. In this paper, we propose a new approach of harvesting massive KGs of arbitrary relations from pretrained LMs. With minimal input of a relation definition (a prompt and a few shot of example entity pairs), the approach efficiently searches in the vast entity pair space to extract diverse accurate knowledge of the desired relation. We develop an effective search-and-rescore mechanism for improved efficiency and accuracy. We deploy the approach to harvest KGs of over 400 new relations from different LMs. Extensive human and automatic evaluations show our approach manages to extract diverse accurate knowledge, including tuples of complex relations (e.g., "A is capable of but not good at B"). The resulting KGs as a symbolic interpretation of the source LMs also reveal new insights into the LMs' knowledge capacities.

Despite the extensive applications of relation extraction (RE) tasks in various domains, little has been explored in the historical context, which contains promising data across hundreds and thousands of years. To promote the historical RE research, we present HistRED constructed from Yeonhaengnok. Yeonhaengnok is a collection of records originally written in Hanja, the classical Chinese writing, which has later been translated into Korean. HistRED provides bilingual annotations such that RE can be performed on Korean and Hanja texts. In addition, HistRED supports various self-contained subtexts with different lengths, from a sentence level to a document level, supporting diverse context settings for researchers to evaluate the robustness of their RE models. To demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset, we propose a bilingual RE model that leverages both Korean and Hanja contexts to predict relations between entities. Our model outperforms monolingual baselines on HistRED, showing that employing multiple language contexts supplements the RE predictions. The dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Soyoung/HistRED under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Understanding the relations between entities denoted by NPs in a text is a critical part of human-like natural language understanding. However, only a fraction of such relations is covered by standard NLP tasks and benchmarks nowadays. In this work, we propose a novel task termed text-based NP enrichment (TNE), in which we aim to enrich each NP in a text with all the preposition-mediated relations -- either explicit or implicit -- that hold between it and other NPs in the text. The relations are represented as triplets, each denoted by two NPs related via a preposition. Humans recover such relations seamlessly, while current state-of-the-art models struggle with them due to the implicit nature of the problem. We build the first large-scale dataset for the problem, provide the formal framing and scope of annotation, analyze the data, and report the results of fine-tuned language models on the task, demonstrating the challenge it poses to current technology. A webpage with a data-exploration UI, a demo, and links to the code, models, and leaderboard, to foster further research into this challenging problem can be found at: yanaiela.github.io/TNE/.

Temporal and numerical expression understanding is of great importance in many downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. However, much previous work covers only a few sub-types and focuses only on entity extraction, which severely limits the usability of identified mentions. In order for such entities to be useful in downstream scenarios, coverage and granularity of sub-types are important; and, even more so, providing resolution into concrete values that can be manipulated. Furthermore, most previous work addresses only a handful of languages. Here we describe a multi-lingual evaluation dataset - NTX - covering diverse temporal and numerical expressions across 14 languages and covering extraction, normalization, and resolution. Along with the dataset we provide a robust rule-based system as a strong baseline for comparisons against other models to be evaluated in this dataset. Data and code are available at https://aka.ms/NTX.

We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.

In this paper we present the RuSentRel corpus including analytical texts in the sphere of international relations. For each document we annotated sentiments from the author to mentioned named entities, and sentiments of relations between mentioned entities. In the current experiments, we considered the problem of extracting sentiment relations between entities for the whole documents as a three-class machine learning task. We experimented with conventional machine-learning methods (Naive Bayes, SVM, Random Forest).

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is essential in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Traditional NER models are effective but limited to a set of predefined entity types. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) can extract arbitrary entities through natural language instructions, offering greater flexibility. However, their size and cost, particularly for those accessed via APIs like ChatGPT, make them impractical in resource-limited scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a compact NER model trained to identify any type of entity. Leveraging a bidirectional transformer encoder, our model, GLiNER, facilitates parallel entity extraction, an advantage over the slow sequential token generation of LLMs. Through comprehensive testing, GLiNER demonstrate strong performance, outperforming both ChatGPT and fine-tuned LLMs in zero-shot evaluations on various NER benchmarks.

This paper presents NorNE, a manually annotated corpus of named entities which extends the annotation of the existing Norwegian Dependency Treebank. Comprising both of the official standards of written Norwegian (Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk), the corpus contains around 600,000 tokens and annotates a rich set of entity types including persons, organizations, locations, geo-political entities, products, and events, in addition to a class corresponding to nominals derived from names. We here present details on the annotation effort, guidelines, inter-annotator agreement and an experimental analysis of the corpus using a neural sequence labeling architecture.

Lately, instruction-based techniques have made significant strides in improving performance in few-shot learning scenarios. They achieve this by bridging the gap between pre-trained language models and fine-tuning for specific downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in information extraction tasks like Named Entity Recognition (NER), using prompts or instructions, still falls short of supervised baselines. The reason for this performance gap can be attributed to the fundamental disparity between NER and LLMs. NER is inherently a sequence labeling task, where the model must assign entity-type labels to individual tokens within a sentence. In contrast, LLMs are designed as a text generation task. This distinction between semantic labeling and text generation leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we transform the NER task into a text-generation task that can be readily adapted by LLMs. This involves enhancing source sentences with task-specific instructions and answer choices, allowing for the identification of entities and their types within natural language. We harness the strength of LLMs by integrating supervised learning within them. The goal of this combined strategy is to boost the performance of LLMs in extraction tasks like NER while simultaneously addressing hallucination issues often observed in LLM-generated content. A novel corpus Contract NER comprising seven frequently observed contract categories, encompassing named entities associated with 18 distinct legal entity types is released along with our baseline models. Our models and dataset are available to the community for future research * .

Entity Linking (EL) is an essential and challenging task in natural language processing that seeks to link some text representing an entity within a document or sentence with its corresponding entry in a dictionary or knowledge base. Most existing approaches focus on creating elaborate contextual models that look for clues the words surrounding the entity-text to help solve the linking problem. Although these fine-tuned language models tend to work, they can be unwieldy, difficult to train, and do not transfer well to other domains. Fortunately, Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT provide a highly-advanced solution to the problems inherent in EL models, but simply naive prompts to LLMs do not work well. In the present work, we define ChatEL, which is a three-step framework to prompt LLMs to return accurate results. Overall the ChatEL framework improves the average F1 performance across 10 datasets by more than 2%. Finally, a thorough error analysis shows many instances with the ground truth labels were actually incorrect, and the labels predicted by ChatEL were actually correct. This indicates that the quantitative results presented in this paper may be a conservative estimate of the actual performance. All data and code are available as an open-source package on GitHub at https://github.com/yifding/In_Context_EL.

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has garnered significant attention due to its ability to address model explosion problems effectively. Extractive UIE can achieve strong performance using a relatively small model, making it widely adopted. Extractive UIEs generally rely on task instructions for different tasks, including single-target instructions and multiple-target instructions. Single-target instruction UIE enables the extraction of only one type of relation at a time, limiting its ability to model correlations between relations and thus restricting its capability to extract complex relations. While multiple-target instruction UIE allows for the extraction of multiple relations simultaneously, the inclusion of irrelevant relations introduces decision complexity and impacts extraction accuracy. Therefore, for multi-relation extraction, we propose LDNet, which incorporates multi-aspect relation modeling and a label drop mechanism. By assigning different relations to different levels for understanding and decision-making, we reduce decision confusion. Additionally, the label drop mechanism effectively mitigates the impact of irrelevant relations. Experiments show that LDNet outperforms or achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems on 9 tasks, 33 datasets, in both single-modal and multi-modal, few-shot and zero-shot settings.https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/LDNet

Textual health records of cancer patients are usually protracted and highly unstructured, making it very time-consuming for health professionals to get a complete overview of the patient's therapeutic course. As such limitations can lead to suboptimal and/or inefficient treatment procedures, healthcare providers would greatly benefit from a system that effectively summarizes the information of those records. With the advent of deep neural models, this objective has been partially attained for English clinical texts, however, the research community still lacks an effective solution for languages with limited resources. In this paper, we present the approach we developed to extract procedures, drugs, and diseases from oncology health records written in European Portuguese. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Portuguese Institute for Oncology which, besides holding over 10 years of duly protected medical records, also provided oncologist expertise throughout the development of the project. Since there is no annotated corpus for biomedical entity extraction in Portuguese, we also present the strategy we followed in annotating the corpus for the development of the models. The final models, which combined a neural architecture with entity linking, achieved F_1 scores of 88.6, 95.0, and 55.8 per cent in the mention extraction of procedures, drugs, and diseases, respectively.

Domain-specific named entity recognition (NER) on Computer Science (CS) scholarly articles is an information extraction task that is arguably more challenging for the various annotation aims that can beset the task and has been less studied than NER in the general domain. Given that significant progress has been made on NER, we believe that scholarly domain-specific NER will receive increasing attention in the years to come. Currently, progress on CS NER -- the focus of this work -- is hampered in part by its recency and the lack of a standardized annotation aim for scientific entities/terms. This work proposes a standardized task by defining a set of seven contribution-centric scholarly entities for CS NER viz., research problem, solution, resource, language, tool, method, and dataset. Following which, its main contributions are: combines existing CS NER resources that maintain their annotation focus on the set or subset of contribution-centric scholarly entities we consider; further, noting the need for big data to train neural NER models, this work additionally supplies thousands of contribution-centric entity annotations from article titles and abstracts, thus releasing a cumulative large novel resource for CS NER; and, finally, trains a sequence labeling CS NER model inspired after state-of-the-art neural architectures from the general domain NER task. Throughout the work, several practical considerations are made which can be useful to information technology designers of the digital libraries.

Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and contextually generate their mentions. Our model is generative and flexible; it can model an arbitrary number of entities in context while generating each entity mention at an arbitrary length. In addition, it can be used for several different tasks such as language modeling, coreference resolution, and entity prediction. Experimental results with all these tasks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines and prior work.

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) is the task of extracting all semantic relationships from a document. While studies have been conducted on English DocRE, limited attention has been given to DocRE in non-English languages. This work delves into effectively utilizing existing English resources to promote DocRE studies in non-English languages, with Japanese as the representative case. As an initial attempt, we construct a dataset by transferring an English dataset to Japanese. However, models trained on such a dataset suffer from low recalls. We investigate the error cases and attribute the failure to different surface structures and semantics of documents translated from English and those written by native speakers. We thus switch to explore if the transferred dataset can assist human annotation on Japanese documents. In our proposal, annotators edit relation predictions from a model trained on the transferred dataset. Quantitative analysis shows that relation recommendations suggested by the model help reduce approximately 50% of the human edit steps compared with the previous approach. Experiments quantify the performance of existing DocRE models on our collected dataset, portraying the challenges of Japanese and cross-lingual DocRE.

Identifying named entities such as a person, location or organization, in documents can highlight key information to readers. Training Named Entity Recognition (NER) models requires an annotated data set, which can be a time-consuming labour-intensive task. Nevertheless, there are publicly available NER data sets for general English. Recently there has been interest in developing NER for legal text. However, prior work and experimental results reported here indicate that there is a significant degradation in performance when NER methods trained on a general English data set are applied to legal text. We describe a publicly available legal NER data set, called E-NER, based on legal company filings available from the US Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR data set. Training a number of different NER algorithms on the general English CoNLL-2003 corpus but testing on our test collection confirmed significant degradations in accuracy, as measured by the F1-score, of between 29.4\% and 60.4\%, compared to training and testing on the E-NER collection.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a core natural language processing task in which pre-trained language models have shown remarkable performance. However, standard benchmarks like CoNLL 2003 do not address many of the challenges that deployed NER systems face, such as having to classify emerging or complex entities in a fine-grained way. In this paper we present a novel NER cascade approach comprising three steps: first, identifying candidate entities in the input sentence; second, linking the each candidate to an existing knowledge base; third, predicting the fine-grained category for each entity candidate. We empirically demonstrate the significance of external knowledge bases in accurately classifying fine-grained and emerging entities. Our system exhibits robust performance in the MultiCoNER2 shared task, even in the low-resource language setting where we leverage knowledge bases of high-resource languages.

We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.

Despite significant popularity, Large-language Models (LLMs) require explicit, contextual facts to support domain-specific knowledge-intensive tasks in the design process. The applications built using LLMs should hence adopt Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to better suit the design process. In this article, we present a data-driven method to identify explicit facts from patent documents that provide standard descriptions of over 8 million artefacts. In our method, we train roBERTa Transformer-based sequence classification models using our dataset of 44,227 sentences and facts. Upon classifying tokens in a sentence as entities or relationships, our method uses another classifier to identify specific relationship tokens for a given pair of entities so that explicit facts of the form head entity :: relationship :: tail entity are identified. In the benchmark approaches for constructing facts, we use linear classifiers and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) both incorporating BERT Transformer-based token embeddings to predict associations among the entities and relationships. We apply our method to 4,870 fan system related patents and populate a knowledge base of around 3 million facts. Upon retrieving the facts representing generalisable domain knowledge and the knowledge of specific subsystems and issues, we demonstrate how these facts contextualise LLMs for generating text that is more relevant to the design process.

Ever-larger language models with ever-increasing capabilities are by now well-established text processing tools. Alas, information extraction tasks such as named entity recognition are still largely unaffected by this progress as they are primarily based on the previous generation of encoder-only transformer models. Here, we propose a simple yet effective approach, Informed Named Entity Recognition Decoding (iNERD), which treats named entity recognition as a generative process. It leverages the language understanding capabilities of recent generative models in a future-proof manner and employs an informed decoding scheme incorporating the restricted nature of information extraction into open-ended text generation, improving performance and eliminating any risk of hallucinations. We coarse-tune our model on a merged named entity corpus to strengthen its performance, evaluate five generative language models on eight named entity recognition datasets, and achieve remarkable results, especially in an environment with an unknown entity class set, demonstrating the adaptability of the approach.

Open information extraction (OIE) systems extract relations and their arguments from natural language text in an unsupervised manner. The resulting extractions are a valuable resource for downstream tasks such as knowledge base construction, open question answering, or event schema induction. In this paper, we release, describe, and analyze an OIE corpus called OPIEC, which was extracted from the text of English Wikipedia. OPIEC complements the available OIE resources: It is the largest OIE corpus publicly available to date (over 340M triples) and contains valuable metadata such as provenance information, confidence scores, linguistic annotations, and semantic annotations including spatial and temporal information. We analyze the OPIEC corpus by comparing its content with knowledge bases such as DBpedia or YAGO, which are also based on Wikipedia. We found that most of the facts between entities present in OPIEC cannot be found in DBpedia and/or YAGO, that OIE facts often differ in the level of specificity compared to knowledge base facts, and that OIE open relations are generally highly polysemous. We believe that the OPIEC corpus is a valuable resource for future research on automated knowledge base construction.

Definition Extraction (DE) is one of the well-known topics in Information Extraction that aims to identify terms and their corresponding definitions in unstructured texts. This task can be formalized either as a sentence classification task (i.e., containing term-definition pairs or not) or a sequential labeling task (i.e., identifying the boundaries of the terms and definitions). The previous works for DE have only focused on one of the two approaches, failing to model the inter-dependencies between the two tasks. In this work, we propose a novel model for DE that simultaneously performs the two tasks in a single framework to benefit from their inter-dependencies. Our model features deep learning architectures to exploit the global structures of the input sentences as well as the semantic consistencies between the terms and the definitions, thereby improving the quality of the representation vectors for DE. Besides the joint inference between sentence classification and sequential labeling, the proposed model is fundamentally different from the prior work for DE in that the prior work has only employed the local structures of the input sentences (i.e., word-to-word relations), and not yet considered the semantic consistencies between terms and definitions. In order to implement these novel ideas, our model presents a multi-task learning framework that employs graph convolutional neural networks and predicts the dependency paths between the terms and the definitions. We also seek to enforce the consistency between the representations of the terms and definitions both globally (i.e., increasing semantic consistency between the representations of the entire sentences and the terms/definitions) and locally (i.e., promoting the similarity between the representations of the terms and the definitions).

We propose KnowGL, a tool that allows converting text into structured relational data represented as a set of ABox assertions compliant with the TBox of a given Knowledge Graph (KG), such as Wikidata. We address this problem as a sequence generation task by leveraging pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models, e.g. BART. Given a sentence, we fine-tune such models to detect pairs of entity mentions and jointly generate a set of facts consisting of the full set of semantic annotations for a KG, such as entity labels, entity types, and their relationships. To showcase the capabilities of our tool, we build a web application consisting of a set of UI widgets that help users to navigate through the semantic data extracted from a given input text. We make the KnowGL model available at https://huggingface.co/ibm/knowgl-large.

Despite efforts to distinguish three different evaluation setups (Bekoulis et al., 2018), numerous end-to-end Relation Extraction (RE) articles present unreliable performance comparison to previous work. In this paper, we first identify several patterns of invalid comparisons in published papers and describe them to avoid their propagation. We then propose a small empirical study to quantify the impact of the most common mistake and evaluate it leads to overestimating the final RE performance by around 5% on ACE05. We also seize this opportunity to study the unexplored ablations of two recent developments: the use of language model pretraining (specifically BERT) and span-level NER. This meta-analysis emphasizes the need for rigor in the report of both the evaluation setting and the datasets statistics and we call for unifying the evaluation setting in end-to-end RE.

In text documents such as news articles, the content and key events usually revolve around a subset of all the entities mentioned in a document. These entities, often deemed as salient entities, provide useful cues of the aboutness of a document to a reader. Identifying the salience of entities was found helpful in several downstream applications such as search, ranking, and entity-centric summarization, among others. Prior work on salient entity detection mainly focused on machine learning models that require heavy feature engineering. We show that fine-tuning medium-sized language models with a cross-encoder style architecture yields substantial performance gains over feature engineering approaches. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive benchmarking of four publicly available datasets using models representative of the medium-sized pre-trained language model family. Additionally, we show that zero-shot prompting of instruction-tuned language models yields inferior results, indicating the task's uniqueness and complexity.

We introduce ReFinED, an efficient end-to-end entity linking model which uses fine-grained entity types and entity descriptions to perform linking. The model performs mention detection, fine-grained entity typing, and entity disambiguation for all mentions within a document in a single forward pass, making it more than 60 times faster than competitive existing approaches. ReFinED also surpasses state-of-the-art performance on standard entity linking datasets by an average of 3.7 F1. The model is capable of generalising to large-scale knowledge bases such as Wikidata (which has 15 times more entities than Wikipedia) and of zero-shot entity linking. The combination of speed, accuracy and scale makes ReFinED an effective and cost-efficient system for extracting entities from web-scale datasets, for which the model has been successfully deployed. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/alexa/ReFinED

A conventional approach to entity linking is to first find mentions in a given document and then infer their underlying entities in the knowledge base. A well-known limitation of this approach is that it requires finding mentions without knowing their entities, which is unnatural and difficult. We present a new model that does not suffer from this limitation called EntQA, which stands for Entity linking as Question Answering. EntQA first proposes candidate entities with a fast retrieval module, and then scrutinizes the document to find mentions of each candidate with a powerful reader module. Our approach combines progress in entity linking with that in open-domain question answering and capitalizes on pretrained models for dense entity retrieval and reading comprehension. Unlike in previous works, we do not rely on a mention-candidates dictionary or large-scale weak supervision. EntQA achieves strong results on the GERBIL benchmarking platform.

Identification of named entities from legal texts is an essential building block for developing other legal Artificial Intelligence applications. Named Entities in legal texts are slightly different and more fine-grained than commonly used named entities like Person, Organization, Location etc. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus of 46545 annotated legal named entities mapped to 14 legal entity types. The Baseline model for extracting legal named entities from judgment text is also developed.

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

We consider learning representations of entities and relations in KBs using the neural-embedding approach. We show that most existing models, including NTN (Socher et al., 2013) and TransE (Bordes et al., 2013b), can be generalized under a unified learning framework, where entities are low-dimensional vectors learned from a neural network and relations are bilinear and/or linear mapping functions. Under this framework, we compare a variety of embedding models on the link prediction task. We show that a simple bilinear formulation achieves new state-of-the-art results for the task (achieving a top-10 accuracy of 73.2% vs. 54.7% by TransE on Freebase). Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the learned relation embeddings to mine logical rules such as "BornInCity(a,b) and CityInCountry(b,c) => Nationality(a,c)". We find that embeddings learned from the bilinear objective are particularly good at capturing relational semantics and that the composition of relations is characterized by matrix multiplication. More interestingly, we demonstrate that our embedding-based rule extraction approach successfully outperforms a state-of-the-art confidence-based rule mining approach in mining Horn rules that involve compositional reasoning.

Extracting key information from scientific papers has the potential to help researchers work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Over the last few years, research on Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) witnessed the release of several new systems and benchmarks. However, existing paper-focused datasets mostly focus only on specific parts of a manuscript (e.g., abstracts) and are single-modality (i.e., text- or table-only), due to complex processing and expensive annotations. Moreover, core information can be present in either text or tables or across both. To close this gap in data availability and enable cross-modality IE, while alleviating labeling costs, we propose a semi-supervised pipeline for annotating entities in text, as well as entities and relations in tables, in an iterative procedure. Based on this pipeline, we release novel resources for the scientific community, including a high-quality benchmark, a large-scale corpus, and a semi-supervised annotation pipeline. We further report the performance of state-of-the-art IE models on the proposed benchmark dataset, as a baseline. Lastly, we explore the potential capability of large language models such as ChatGPT for the current task. Our new dataset, results, and analysis validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our semi-supervised pipeline, and we discuss its remaining limitations.

Albeit Natural Language Processing has seen major breakthroughs in the last few years, transferring such advances into real-world business cases can be challenging. One of the reasons resides in the displacement between popular benchmarks and actual data. Lack of supervision, unbalanced classes, noisy data and long documents often affect real problems in vertical domains such as finance, law and health. To support industry-oriented research, we present BUSTER, a BUSiness Transaction Entity Recognition dataset. The dataset consists of 3779 manually annotated documents on financial transactions. We establish several baselines exploiting both general-purpose and domain-specific language models. The best performing model is also used to automatically annotate 6196 documents, which we release as an additional silver corpus to BUSTER.

We present a corpus of Finnish news articles with a manually prepared named entity annotation. The corpus consists of 953 articles (193,742 word tokens) with six named entity classes (organization, location, person, product, event, and date). The articles are extracted from the archives of Digitoday, a Finnish online technology news source. The corpus is available for research purposes. We present baseline experiments on the corpus using a rule-based and two deep learning systems on two, in-domain and out-of-domain, test sets.

Dependency tree structures capture long-distance and syntactic relationships between words in a sentence. The syntactic relations (e.g., nominal subject, object) can potentially infer the existence of certain named entities. In addition, the performance of a named entity recognizer could benefit from the long-distance dependencies between the words in dependency trees. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective dependency-guided LSTM-CRF model to encode the complete dependency trees and capture the above properties for the task of named entity recognition (NER). The data statistics show strong correlations between the entity types and dependency relations. We conduct extensive experiments on several standard datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in improving NER and achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our analysis reveals that the significant improvements mainly result from the dependency relations and long-distance interactions provided by dependency trees.

In recent years, the fine-tuned generative models have been proven more powerful than the previous tagging-based or span-based models on named entity recognition (NER) task. It has also been found that the information related to entities, such as entity types, can prompt a model to achieve NER better. However, it is not easy to determine the entity types indeed existing in the given sentence in advance, and inputting too many potential entity types would distract the model inevitably. To exploit entity types' merit on promoting NER task, in this paper we propose a novel NER framework, namely ToNER based on a generative model. In ToNER, a type matching model is proposed at first to identify the entity types most likely to appear in the sentence. Then, we append a multiple binary classification task to fine-tune the generative model's encoder, so as to generate the refined representation of the input sentence. Moreover, we add an auxiliary task for the model to discover the entity types which further fine-tunes the model to output more accurate results. Our extensive experiments on some NER benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed strategies in ToNER that are oriented towards entity types' exploitation.

Process extraction from text is an important task of process discovery, for which various approaches have been developed in recent years. However, in contrast to other information extraction tasks, there is a lack of gold-standard corpora of business process descriptions that are carefully annotated with all the entities and relationships of interest. Due to this, it is currently hard to compare the results obtained by extraction approaches in an objective manner, whereas the lack of annotated texts also prevents the application of data-driven information extraction methodologies, typical of the natural language processing field. Therefore, to bridge this gap, we present the PET dataset, a first corpus of business process descriptions annotated with activities, gateways, actors, and flow information. We present our new resource, including a variety of baselines to benchmark the difficulty and challenges of business process extraction from text. PET can be accessed via huggingface.co/datasets/patriziobellan/PET

Scaling language models have revolutionized widespread NLP tasks, yet little comprehensively explored few-shot relation extraction with large language models. In this paper, we investigate principal methodologies, in-context learning and data generation, for few-shot relation extraction via GPT-3.5 through exhaustive experiments. To enhance few-shot performance, we further propose task-related instructions and schema-constrained data generation. We observe that in-context learning can achieve performance on par with previous prompt learning approaches, and data generation with the large language model can boost previous solutions to obtain new state-of-the-art few-shot results on four widely-studied relation extraction datasets. We hope our work can inspire future research for the capabilities of large language models in few-shot relation extraction. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/llm.

We show that relation extraction can be reduced to answering simple reading comprehension questions, by associating one or more natural-language questions with each relation slot. This reduction has several advantages: we can (1) learn relation-extraction models by extending recent neural reading-comprehension techniques, (2) build very large training sets for those models by combining relation-specific crowd-sourced questions with distant supervision, and even (3) do zero-shot learning by extracting new relation types that are only specified at test-time, for which we have no labeled training examples. Experiments on a Wikipedia slot-filling task demonstrate that the approach can generalize to new questions for known relation types with high accuracy, and that zero-shot generalization to unseen relation types is possible, at lower accuracy levels, setting the bar for future work on this task.

Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important task in information extraction, which has a significant impact on downstream applications. Due to the lack of natural separators in Chinese, previous NER methods mostly relied on external dictionaries to enrich the semantic and boundary information of Chinese words. However, such methods may introduce noise that affects the accuracy of named entity recognition. To this end, we propose a character relation enhanced Chinese NER model (CRENER). This model defines four types of tags that reflect the relationships between characters, and proposes a fine-grained modeling of the relationships between characters based on three types of relationships: adjacency relations between characters, relations between characters and tags, and relations between tags, to more accurately identify entity boundaries and improve Chinese NER accuracy. Specifically, we transform the Chinese NER task into a character-character relationship classification task, ensuring the accuracy of entity boundary recognition through joint modeling of relation tags. To enhance the model's ability to understand contextual information, WRENER further constructed an adapted transformer encoder that combines unscaled direction-aware and distance-aware masked self-attention mechanisms. Moreover, a relationship representation enhancement module was constructed to model predefined relationship tags, effectively mining the relationship representations between characters and tags. Experiments conducted on four well-known Chinese NER benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The ablation experiment also demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Recognizing software entities such as library names from free-form text is essential to enable many software engineering (SE) technologies, such as traceability link recovery, automated documentation, and API recommendation. While many approaches have been proposed to address this problem, they suffer from small entity vocabularies or noisy training data, hindering their ability to recognize software entities mentioned in sophisticated narratives. To address this challenge, we leverage the Wikipedia taxonomy to develop a comprehensive entity lexicon with 79K unique software entities in 12 fine-grained types, as well as a large labeled dataset of over 1.7M sentences. Then, we propose self-regularization, a noise-robust learning approach, to the training of our software entity recognition (SER) model by accounting for many dropouts. Results show that models trained with self-regularization outperform both their vanilla counterparts and state-of-the-art approaches on our Wikipedia benchmark and two Stack Overflow benchmarks. We release our models, data, and code for future research.

The use of BERT, one of the most popular language models, has led to improvements in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. One such task is Named Entity Recognition (NER) i.e. automatic identification of named entities such as location, person, organization, etc. from a given text. It is also an important base step for many NLP tasks such as information extraction and argumentation mining. Even though there is much research done on NER using BERT and other popular language models, the same is not explored in detail when it comes to Legal NLP or Legal Tech. Legal NLP applies various NLP techniques such as sentence similarity or NER specifically on legal data. There are only a handful of models for NER tasks using BERT language models, however, none of these are aimed at legal documents in German. In this paper, we fine-tune a popular BERT language model trained on German data (German BERT) on a Legal Entity Recognition (LER) dataset. To make sure our model is not overfitting, we performed a stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The results we achieve by fine-tuning German BERT on the LER dataset outperform the BiLSTM-CRF+ model used by the authors of the same LER dataset. Finally, we make the model openly available via HuggingFace.

Ultra-fine entity typing plays a crucial role in information extraction by predicting fine-grained semantic types for entity mentions in text. However, this task poses significant challenges due to the massive number of entity types in the output space. The current state-of-the-art approaches, based on standard multi-label classifiers or cross-encoder models, suffer from poor generalization performance or inefficient inference. In this paper, we present CASENT, a seq2seq model designed for ultra-fine entity typing that predicts ultra-fine types with calibrated confidence scores. Our model takes an entity mention as input and employs constrained beam search to generate multiple types autoregressively. The raw sequence probabilities associated with the predicted types are then transformed into confidence scores using a novel calibration method. We conduct extensive experiments on the UFET dataset which contains over 10k types. Our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in terms of F1 score and calibration error, while achieving an inference speedup of over 50 times. Additionally, we demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our model by evaluating it in zero-shot and few-shot settings on five specialized domain entity typing datasets that are unseen during training. Remarkably, our model outperforms large language models with 10 times more parameters in the zero-shot setting, and when fine-tuned on 50 examples, it significantly outperforms ChatGPT on all datasets. Our code, models and demo are available at https://github.com/yanlinf/CASENT.

Embedding knowledge graphs (KGs) into continuous vector spaces is a focus of current research. Early works performed this task via simple models developed over KG triples. Recent attempts focused on either designing more complicated triple scoring models, or incorporating extra information beyond triples. This paper, by contrast, investigates the potential of using very simple constraints to improve KG embedding. We examine non-negativity constraints on entity representations and approximate entailment constraints on relation representations. The former help to learn compact and interpretable representations for entities. The latter further encode regularities of logical entailment between relations into their distributed representations. These constraints impose prior beliefs upon the structure of the embedding space, without negative impacts on efficiency or scalability. Evaluation on WordNet, Freebase, and DBpedia shows that our approach is simple yet surprisingly effective, significantly and consistently outperforming competitive baselines. The constraints imposed indeed improve model interpretability, leading to a substantially increased structuring of the embedding space. Code and data are available at https://github.com/iieir-km/ComplEx-NNE_AER.

Recent studies have shown that multilingual pretrained language models can be effectively improved with cross-lingual alignment information from Wikipedia entities. However, existing methods only exploit entity information in pretraining and do not explicitly use entities in downstream tasks. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of leveraging entity representations for downstream cross-lingual tasks. We train a multilingual language model with 24 languages with entity representations and show the model consistently outperforms word-based pretrained models in various cross-lingual transfer tasks. We also analyze the model and the key insight is that incorporating entity representations into the input allows us to extract more language-agnostic features. We also evaluate the model with a multilingual cloze prompt task with the mLAMA dataset. We show that entity-based prompt elicits correct factual knowledge more likely than using only word representations. Our source code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/luke.

While large language models (LMs) demonstrate remarkable performance, they encounter challenges in providing accurate responses when queried for information beyond their pre-trained memorization. Although augmenting them with relevant external information can mitigate these issues, failure to consider the necessity of retrieval may adversely affect overall performance. Previous research has primarily focused on examining how entities influence retrieval models and knowledge recall in LMs, leaving other aspects relatively unexplored. In this work, our goal is to offer a more detailed, fact-centric analysis by exploring the effects of combinations of entities and relations. To facilitate this, we construct a new question answering (QA) dataset called WiTQA (Wikipedia Triple Question Answers). This dataset includes questions about entities and relations of various popularity levels, each accompanied by a supporting passage. Our extensive experiments with diverse LMs and retrievers reveal when retrieval does not consistently enhance LMs from the viewpoints of fact-centric popularity.Confirming earlier findings, we observe that larger LMs excel in recalling popular facts. However, they notably encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers. Interestingly, they can effectively retain popular relations of less common entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our finer-grained metric and insights through an adaptive retrieval system that selectively employs retrieval and recall based on the frequencies of entities and relations in the question.

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) detects named entities within text using only a few annotated examples. One promising line of research is to leverage natural language descriptions of each entity type: the common label PER might, for example, be verbalized as ''person entity.'' In an initial label interpretation learning phase, the model learns to interpret such verbalized descriptions of entity types. In a subsequent few-shot tagset extension phase, this model is then given a description of a previously unseen entity type (such as ''music album'') and optionally a few training examples to perform few-shot NER for this type. In this paper, we systematically explore the impact of a strong semantic prior to interpret verbalizations of new entity types by massively scaling up the number and granularity of entity types used for label interpretation learning. To this end, we leverage an entity linking benchmark to create a dataset with orders of magnitude of more distinct entity types and descriptions as currently used datasets. We find that this increased signal yields strong results in zero- and few-shot NER in in-domain, cross-domain, and even cross-lingual settings. Our findings indicate significant potential for improving few-shot NER through heuristical data-based optimization.

Entity matching (EM) is the most critical step for entity resolution (ER). While current deep learningbased methods achieve very impressive performance on standard EM benchmarks, their realworld application performance is much frustrating. In this paper, we highlight that such the gap between reality and ideality stems from the unreasonable benchmark construction process, which is inconsistent with the nature of entity matching and therefore leads to biased evaluations of current EM approaches. To this end, we build a new EM corpus and re-construct EM benchmarks to challenge critical assumptions implicit in the previous benchmark construction process by step-wisely changing the restricted entities, balanced labels, and single-modal records in previous benchmarks into open entities, imbalanced labels, and multimodal records in an open environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the assumptions made in the previous benchmark construction process are not coincidental with the open environment, which conceal the main challenges of the task and therefore significantly overestimate the current progress of entity matching. The constructed benchmarks and code are publicly released

We present QueryNER, a manually-annotated dataset and accompanying model for e-commerce query segmentation. Prior work in sequence labeling for e-commerce has largely addressed aspect-value extraction which focuses on extracting portions of a product title or query for narrowly defined aspects. Our work instead focuses on the goal of dividing a query into meaningful chunks with broadly applicable types. We report baseline tagging results and conduct experiments comparing token and entity dropping for null and low recall query recovery. Challenging test sets are created using automatic transformations and show how simple data augmentation techniques can make the models more robust to noise. We make the QueryNER dataset publicly available.

Whilst there has been growing progress in Entity Linking (EL) for general language, existing datasets fail to address the complex nature of health terminology in layman's language. Meanwhile, there is a growing need for applications that can understand the public's voice in the health domain. To address this we introduce a new corpus called COMETA, consisting of 20k English biomedical entity mentions from Reddit expert-annotated with links to SNOMED CT, a widely-used medical knowledge graph. Our corpus satisfies a combination of desirable properties, from scale and coverage to diversity and quality, that to the best of our knowledge has not been met by any of the existing resources in the field. Through benchmark experiments on 20 EL baselines from string- to neural-based models we shed light on the ability of these systems to perform complex inference on entities and concepts under 2 challenging evaluation scenarios. Our experimental results on COMETA illustrate that no golden bullet exists and even the best mainstream techniques still have a significant performance gap to fill, while the best solution relies on combining different views of data.

Recently, prompt-tuning with pre-trained language models (PLMs) has demonstrated the significantly enhancing ability of relation extraction (RE) tasks. However, in low-resource scenarios, where the available training data is scarce, previous prompt-based methods may still perform poorly for prompt-based representation learning due to a superficial understanding of the relation. To this end, we highlight the importance of learning high-quality relation representation in low-resource scenarios for RE, and propose a novel prompt-based relation representation method, named MVRE (Multi-View Relation Extraction), to better leverage the capacity of PLMs to improve the performance of RE within the low-resource prompt-tuning paradigm. Specifically, MVRE decouples each relation into different perspectives to encompass multi-view relation representations for maximizing the likelihood during relation inference. Furthermore, we also design a Global-Local loss and a Dynamic-Initialization method for better alignment of the multi-view relation-representing virtual words, containing the semantics of relation labels during the optimization learning process and initialization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in low-resource settings.

The field of visually rich document understanding (VRDU) aims to solve a multitude of well-researched NLP tasks in a multi-modal domain. Several datasets exist for research on specific tasks of VRDU such as document classification (DC), key entity extraction (KEE), entity linking, visual question answering (VQA), inter alia. These datasets cover documents like invoices and receipts with sparse annotations such that they support one or two co-related tasks (e.g., entity extraction and entity linking). Unfortunately, only focusing on a single specific of documents or task is not representative of how documents often need to be processed in the wild - where variety in style and requirements is expected. In this paper, we introduce BuDDIE (Business Document Dataset for Information Extraction), the first multi-task dataset of 1,665 real-world business documents that contains rich and dense annotations for DC, KEE, and VQA. Our dataset consists of publicly available business entity documents from US state government websites. The documents are structured and vary in their style and layout across states and types (e.g., forms, certificates, reports, etc.). We provide data variety and quality metrics for BuDDIE as well as a series of baselines for each task. Our baselines cover traditional textual, multi-modal, and large language model approaches to VRDU.

Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER). Recently, entity matching based on large language models (LLMs) has shown great promise. However, current LLM-based entity matching approaches typically follow a binary matching paradigm that ignores the global consistency between record relationships. In this paper, we investigate various methodologies for LLM-based entity matching that incorporate record interactions from different perspectives. Specifically, we comprehensively compare three representative strategies: matching, comparing, and selecting, and analyze their respective advantages and challenges in diverse scenarios. Based on our findings, we further design a compound entity matching framework (ComEM) that leverages the composition of multiple strategies and LLMs. ComEM benefits from the advantages of different sides and achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results on 8 ER datasets and 9 LLMs verify the superiority of incorporating record interactions through the selecting strategy, as well as the further cost-effectiveness brought by ComEM.

We present a novel architecture, In-Database Entity Linking (IDEL), in which we integrate the analytics-optimized RDBMS MonetDB with neural text mining abilities. Our system design abstracts core tasks of most neural entity linking systems for MonetDB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first defacto implemented system integrating entity-linking in a database. We leverage the ability of MonetDB to support in-database-analytics with user defined functions (UDFs) implemented in Python. These functions call machine learning libraries for neural text mining, such as TensorFlow. The system achieves zero cost for data shipping and transformation by utilizing MonetDB's ability to embed Python processes in the database kernel and exchange data in NumPy arrays. IDEL represents text and relational data in a joint vector space with neural embeddings and can compensate errors with ambiguous entity representations. For detecting matching entities, we propose a novel similarity function based on joint neural embeddings which are learned via minimizing pairwise contrastive ranking loss. This function utilizes a high dimensional index structures for fast retrieval of matching entities. Our first implementation and experiments using the WebNLG corpus show the effectiveness and the potentials of IDEL.

We present the development of a Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset for Tagalog. This corpus helps fill the resource gap present in Philippine languages today, where NER resources are scarce. The texts were obtained from a pretraining corpora containing news reports, and were labeled by native speakers in an iterative fashion. The resulting dataset contains ~7.8k documents across three entity types: Person, Organization, and Location. The inter-annotator agreement, as measured by Cohen's kappa, is 0.81. We also conducted extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across supervised and transfer learning settings. Finally, we released the data and processing code publicly to inspire future work on Tagalog NLP.

Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structural knowledge (e.g., entities, relations, events) from natural language texts, which brings challenges to existing methods due to task-specific schemas and complex text expressions. Code, as a typical kind of formalized language, is capable of describing structural knowledge under various schemas in a universal way. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on both codes and texts have demonstrated powerful capabilities of transforming texts into codes, which provides a feasible solution to IE tasks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a universal retrieval-augmented code generation framework based on LLMs, called Code4UIE, for IE tasks. Specifically, Code4UIE adopts Python classes to define task-specific schemas of various structural knowledge in a universal way. By so doing, extracting knowledge under these schemas can be transformed into generating codes that instantiate the predefined Python classes with the information in texts. To generate these codes more precisely, Code4UIE adopts the in-context learning mechanism to instruct LLMs with examples. In order to obtain appropriate examples for different tasks, Code4UIE explores several example retrieval strategies, which can retrieve examples semantically similar to the given texts. Extensive experiments on five representative IE tasks across nine datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the Code4UIE framework.

Joint representation learning over multi-sourced knowledge graphs (KGs) yields transferable and expressive embeddings that improve downstream tasks. Entity alignment (EA) is a critical step in this process. Despite recent considerable research progress in embedding-based EA, how it works remains to be explored. In this paper, we provide a similarity flooding perspective to explain existing translation-based and aggregation-based EA models. We prove that the embedding learning process of these models actually seeks a fixpoint of pairwise similarities between entities. We also provide experimental evidence to support our theoretical analysis. We propose two simple but effective methods inspired by the fixpoint computation in similarity flooding, and demonstrate their effectiveness on benchmark datasets. Our work bridges the gap between recent embedding-based models and the conventional similarity flooding algorithm. It would improve our understanding of and increase our faith in embedding-based EA.

The vast majority of existing datasets for Named Entity Recognition (NER) are built primarily on news, research papers and Wikipedia with a few exceptions, created from historical and literary texts. What is more, English is the main source for data for further labelling. This paper aims to fill in multiple gaps by creating a novel dataset "Razmecheno", gathered from the diary texts of the project "Prozhito" in Russian. Our dataset is of interest for multiple research lines: literary studies of diary texts, transfer learning from other domains, low-resource or cross-lingual named entity recognition. Razmecheno comprises 1331 sentences and 14119 tokens, sampled from diaries, written during the Perestroika. The annotation schema consists of five commonly used entity tags: person, characteristics, location, organisation, and facility. The labelling is carried out on the crowdsourcing platfrom Yandex.Toloka in two stages. First, workers selected sentences, which contain an entity of particular type. Second, they marked up entity spans. As a result 1113 entities were obtained. Empirical evaluation of Razmecheno is carried out with off-the-shelf NER tools and by fine-tuning pre-trained contextualized encoders. We release the annotated dataset for open access.

Existing research on large language models (LLMs) shows that they can solve information extraction tasks through multi-step planning. However, their extraction behavior on complex sentences and tasks is unstable, emerging issues such as false positives and missing elements. We observe that decomposing complex extraction tasks and extracting them step by step can effectively improve LLMs' performance, and the extraction orders of entities significantly affect the final results of LLMs. This paper proposes a two-stage multi-step method for LLM-based information extraction and adopts the RL framework to execute the multi-step planning. We regard sequential extraction as a Markov decision process, build an LLM-based extraction environment, design a decision module to adaptively provide the optimal order for sequential entity extraction on different sentences, and utilize the DDQN algorithm to train the decision model. We also design the rewards and evaluation metrics suitable for the extraction results of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving the information extraction capabilities of LLMs.

Pre-trained language models have been found to capture a surprisingly rich amount of lexical knowledge, ranging from commonsense properties of everyday concepts to detailed factual knowledge about named entities. Among others, this makes it possible to distill high-quality word vectors from pre-trained language models. However, it is currently unclear to what extent it is possible to distill relation embeddings, i.e. vectors that characterize the relationship between two words. Such relation embeddings are appealing because they can, in principle, encode relational knowledge in a more fine-grained way than is possible with knowledge graphs. To obtain relation embeddings from a pre-trained language model, we encode word pairs using a (manually or automatically generated) prompt, and we fine-tune the language model such that relationally similar word pairs yield similar output vectors. We find that the resulting relation embeddings are highly competitive on analogy (unsupervised) and relation classification (supervised) benchmarks, even without any task-specific fine-tuning. Source code to reproduce our experimental results and the model checkpoints are available in the following repository: https://github.com/asahi417/relbert

Medical imaging is critical to the diagnosis and treatment of numerous medical problems, including many forms of cancer. Medical imaging reports distill the findings and observations of radiologists, creating an unstructured textual representation of unstructured medical images. Large-scale use of this text-encoded information requires converting the unstructured text to a structured, semantic representation. We explore the extraction and normalization of anatomical information in radiology reports that is associated with radiological findings. We investigate this extraction and normalization task using a span-based relation extraction model that jointly extracts entities and relations using BERT. This work examines the factors that influence extraction and normalization performance, including the body part/organ system, frequency of occurrence, span length, and span diversity. It discusses approaches for improving performance and creating high-quality semantic representations of radiological phenomena.

This paper introduces a conceptually simple, scalable, and highly effective BERT-based entity linking model, along with an extensive evaluation of its accuracy-speed trade-off. We present a two-stage zero-shot linking algorithm, where each entity is defined only by a short textual description. The first stage does retrieval in a dense space defined by a bi-encoder that independently embeds the mention context and the entity descriptions. Each candidate is then re-ranked with a cross-encoder, that concatenates the mention and entity text. Experiments demonstrate that this approach is state of the art on recent zero-shot benchmarks (6 point absolute gains) and also on more established non-zero-shot evaluations (e.g. TACKBP-2010), despite its relative simplicity (e.g. no explicit entity embeddings or manually engineered mention tables). We also show that bi-encoder linking is very fast with nearest neighbour search (e.g. linking with 5.9 million candidates in 2 milliseconds), and that much of the accuracy gain from the more expensive cross-encoder can be transferred to the bi-encoder via knowledge distillation. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/BLINK.

After decades of massive digitisation, an unprecedented amount of historical documents is available in digital format, along with their machine-readable texts. While this represents a major step forward with respect to preservation and accessibility, it also opens up new opportunities in terms of content mining and the next fundamental challenge is to develop appropriate technologies to efficiently search, retrieve and explore information from this 'big data of the past'. Among semantic indexing opportunities, the recognition and classification of named entities are in great demand among humanities scholars. Yet, named entity recognition (NER) systems are heavily challenged with diverse, historical and noisy inputs. In this survey, we present the array of challenges posed by historical documents to NER, inventory existing resources, describe the main approaches deployed so far, and identify key priorities for future developments.

Name tagging is a key component of Information Extraction (IE), particularly in scientific domains such as biomedicine and chemistry, where large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, fall short. We investigate the applicability of transfer learning for enhancing a name tagging model trained in the biomedical domain (the source domain) to be used in the chemical domain (the target domain). A common practice for training such a model in a few-shot learning setting is to pretrain the model on the labeled source data, and then, to finetune it on a hand-full of labeled target examples. In our experiments we observed that such a model is prone to mis-labeling the source entities, which can often appear in the text, as the target entities. To alleviate this problem, we propose a model to transfer the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, however, at the same time, to project the source entities and target entities into separate regions of the feature space. This diminishes the risk of mis-labeling the source entities as the target entities. Our model consists of two stages: 1) entity grouping in the source domain, which incorporates knowledge from annotated events to establish relations between entities, and 2) entity discrimination in the target domain, which relies on pseudo labeling and contrastive learning to enhance discrimination between the entities in the two domains. We carry out our extensive experiments across three source and three target datasets, and demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines, in some scenarios by 5\% absolute value.

Many tasks in natural language processing require the extraction of relationship information for a given condition, such as event argument extraction, relation extraction, and task-oriented semantic parsing. Recent works usually propose sophisticated models for each task independently and pay less attention to the commonality of these tasks and to have a unified framework for all the tasks. In this work, we propose to take a unified view of all these tasks and introduce TAGPRIME to address relational structure extraction problems. TAGPRIME is a sequence tagging model that appends priming words about the information of the given condition (such as an event trigger) to the input text. With the self-attention mechanism in pre-trained language models, the priming words make the output contextualized representations contain more information about the given condition, and hence become more suitable for extracting specific relationships for the condition. Extensive experiments and analyses on three different tasks that cover ten datasets across five different languages demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of TAGPRIME.