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.
National Library of Finland, Centre for Preservation and Digitization（芬兰国家图书馆，保存与数字化中心）；Aalto University, Semantic Computing Research Group（阿尔托大学，语义计算研究组）；University of Helsinki, Department of Modern Languages（赫尔辛基大学，现代语言系）；Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学，语言学与英语语言系）
Named Entity Recognition (NER), search, classification and tagging of names and name like frequent informational elements in texts, has become a standard information extraction procedure for textual data. NER has been applied to many types of texts and different types of entities: newspapers, fiction, historical records, persons, locations, chemical compounds, protein families, animals etc. In general a NER system's performance is genre and domain dependent and also used entity categories vary (Nadeau and Sekine, 2007). The most general set of named entities is usually some version of three pa…
The National Library of Finland has digitized the historical newspapers published in Finland between 1771 and 1910. This collection contains approximately 1.95 million pages in Finnish and Swedish. Finnish part of the collection consists of about 2.40 billion words. The National Library's Digital Collections are offered via the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi web service, also known as Digi. Part of the newspaper material (from 1771 to 1874) is also available freely downloadable in The Language Bank of Finland provided by the FINCLARIN consortium. The collection can also be accessed through the Korp…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）；Digital Health CRC（数字健康合作研究中心）
Named entity recognition (NER) is widely used in natural language processing applications and downstream tasks. However, most NER tools target flat annotation from popular datasets, eschewing the semantic information available in nested entity mentions. We describe NNE---a fine-grained, nested named entity dataset over the full Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank (PTB). Our annotation comprises 279,795 mentions of 114 entity types with up to 6 layers of nesting. We hope the public release of this large dataset for English newswire will encourage development of new techniques for n…
Deep learning-based language models pretrained on large unannotated text corpora have been demonstrated to allow efficient transfer learning for natural language processing, with recent approaches such as the transformer-based BERT model advancing the state of the art across a variety of tasks. While most work on these models has focused on high-resource languages, in particular English, a number of recent efforts have introduced multilingual models that can be fine-tuned to address tasks in a large number of different languages. However, we still lack a thorough understanding of the capabilit…
University of Eastern Finland（东芬兰大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；The National Library of Finland（芬兰国家图书馆）
Introduction. We study effect of different quality optical character recognition in interactive information retrieval with a collection of one digitized historical Finnish newspaper. Method. This study is based on the simulated interactive information retrieval work task model. Thirty-two users made searches to an article collection of Finnish newspaper Uusi Suometar 1869-1918 with ca. 1.45 million auto segmented articles. Our article search database had two versions of each article with different quality optical character recognition. Each user performed six pre-formulated and six self-formul…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Automatic identification of mentioned entities in social media posts facilitates quick digestion of trending topics and popular opinions. Nonetheless, this remains a challenging task due to limited context and diverse name variations. In this paper, we study the problem of entity linking for Chinese news comments given mentions' spans. We hypothesize that comments often refer to entities in the corresponding news article, as well as topics involving the entities. We therefore propose a novel model, XREF, that leverages attention mechanisms to (1) pinpoint relevant context within comments, and …
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；École Normale Supérieure-PSL（巴黎高等师范学院-PSL大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Sorbonne nouvelle（新索邦大学）
We present a novel approach to generating news headlines in Finnish for a given news story. We model this as a summarization task where a model is given a news article, and its task is to produce a concise headline describing the main topic of the article. Because there are no openly available GPT-2 models for Finnish, we will first build such a model using several corpora. The model is then fine-tuned for the headline generation task using a massive news corpus. The system is evaluated by 3 expert journalists working in a Finnish media house. The results showcase the usability of the presente…
We present Namesakes, a dataset of ambiguously named entities obtained from English-language Wikipedia and news articles. It consists of 58862 mentions of 4148 unique entities and their namesakes: 1000 mentions from news, 28843 from Wikipedia articles about the entity, and 29019 Wikipedia backlink mentions. Namesakes should be helpful in establishing challenging benchmarks for the task of named entity linking (NEL).
In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2018 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Finnish to English. The system used a Character Based Neural Machine Translation model to accomplish the given task. The current paper documents the preprocessing steps, the description of the submitted system and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 12.9.
News articles such as sports game reports are often thought to closely follow the underlying game statistics, but in practice they contain a notable amount of background knowledge, interpretation, insight into the game, and quotes that are not present in the official statistics. This poses a challenge for automated data-to-text news generation with real-world news corpora as training data. We report on the development of a corpus of Finnish ice hockey news, edited to be suitable for training of end-to-end news generation methods, as well as demonstrate generation of text, which was judged by j…
Russian-Armenian University（俄罗斯-亚美尼亚大学）；Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院伊万尼科夫系统编程研究所）
In this work, we tackle the problem of Armenian named entity recognition, providing silver- and gold-standard datasets as well as establishing baseline results on popular models. We present a 163000-token named entity corpus automatically generated and annotated from Wikipedia, and another 53400-token corpus of news sentences with manual annotation of people, organization and location named entities. The corpora were used to train and evaluate several popular named entity recognition models. Alongside the datasets, we release 50-, 100-, 200-, 300-dimensional GloVe word embeddings trained on a …
We propose a simple and practical method for named entity linking (NEL), based on entity representation by multiple embeddings. To explore this method, and to review its dependency on parameters, we measure its performance on Namesakes, a highly challenging dataset of ambiguously named entities. Our observations suggest that the minimal number of mentions required to create a knowledge base (KB) entity is very important for NEL performance. The number of embeddings is less important and can be kept small, within as few as 10 or less. We show that our representations of KB entities can be adjus…
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Basement AI（Basement人工智能公司）
In this paper, we present the University of Helsinki submissions to the WMT 2019 shared task on news translation in three language pairs: English-German, English-Finnish and Finnish-English. This year, we focused first on cleaning and filtering the training data using multiple data-filtering approaches, resulting in much smaller and cleaner training sets. For English-German, we trained both sentence-level transformer models and compared different document-level translation approaches. For Finnish-English and English-Finnish we focused on different segmentation approaches, and we also included …
This study presents a new dataset on rumor detection in Finnish language news headlines. We have evaluated two different LSTM based models and two different BERT models, and have found very significant differences in the results. A fine-tuned FinBERT reaches the best overall accuracy of 94.3% and rumor label accuracy of 96.0% of the time. However, a model fine-tuned on Multilingual BERT reaches the best factual label accuracy of 97.2%. Our results suggest that the performance difference is due to a difference in the original training data. Furthermore, we find that a regular LSTM model works b…
For a news content distribution platform like Dailyhunt, Named Entity Recognition is a pivotal task for building better user recommendation and notification algorithms. Apart from identifying names, locations, organisations from the news for 13+ Indian languages and use them in algorithms, we also need to identify n-grams which do not necessarily fit in the definition of Named-Entity, yet they are important. For example, "me too movement", "beef ban", "alwar mob lynching". In this exercise, given an English language text, we are trying to detect case-less n-grams which convey important informa…
Understanding who blames or supports whom in news text is a critical research question in computational social science. Traditional methods and datasets for sentiment analysis are, however, not suitable for the domain of political text as they do not consider the direction of sentiments expressed between entities. In this paper, we propose a novel NLP task of identifying directed sentiment relationship between political entities from a given news document, which we call directed sentiment extraction. From a million-scale news corpus, we construct a dataset of news sentences where sentiment rel…
Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB)（莱布尼茨科学技术信息中心（TIB））；Leibniz Universität Hannover（莱布尼茨汉诺威大学）；L3S Research Center, Leibniz Universität Hannover（莱布尼茨汉诺威大学L3S研究中心）
The World Wide Web has become a popular source for gathering information and news. Multimodal information, e.g., enriching text with photos, is typically used to convey the news more effectively or to attract attention. Photo content can range from decorative, depict additional important information, or can even contain misleading information. Therefore, automatic approaches to quantify cross-modal consistency of entity representation can support human assessors to evaluate the overall multimodal message, for instance, with regard to bias or sentiment. In some cases such measures could give hi…
European Commission – Joint Research Centre（欧洲委员会联合研究中心）
This paper describes a new, freely available, highly multilingual named entity resource for person and organisation names that has been compiled over seven years of large-scale multilingual news analysis combined with Wikipedia mining, resulting in 205,000 per-son and organisation names plus about the same number of spelling variants written in over 20 different scripts and in many more languages. This resource, produced as part of the Europe Media Monitor activity (EMM, http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html), can be used for a number of purposes. These include improving name search in databas…
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 .
Named entities recognition (NER) and disambiguation (NED) can add semantic context to the recognized named entities in texts. Named entity linkage in texts, regardless of a domain, provides links between the entities mentioned in unstructured texts and individual instances of real-world objects. In this poster, we present a tool - protagonistTagger - for person NER and NED in texts. The tool was tested on texts extracted from classic English novels and Polish Internet news. The tool's performance (both precision and recall) fluctuates between 78% and even 88%.
We present the results of the CAPITEL-EVAL shared task, held in the context of the IberLEF 2020 competition series. CAPITEL-EVAL consisted on two subtasks: (1) Named Entity Recognition and Classification and (2) Universal Dependency parsing. For both, the source data was a newly annotated corpus, CAPITEL, a collection of Spanish articles in the newswire domain. A total of seven teams participated in CAPITEL-EVAL, with a total of 13 runs submitted across all subtasks. Data, results and further information about this task can be found at sites.google.com/view/capitel2020.
YoNER: A New Yorùbá Multi-domain Named Entity Recognition Dataset
University of Ibadan（伊巴丹大学）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Atiba University（阿提巴大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（Mila - 魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）
Named entity recognition often fails in idiosyncratic domains. That causes a problem for depending tasks, such as entity linking and relation extraction. We propose a generic and robust approach for high-recall named entity recognition. Our approach is easy to train and offers strong generalization over diverse domain-specific language, such as news documents (e.g. Reuters) or biomedical text (e.g. Medline). Our approach is based on deep contextual sequence learning and utilizes stacked bidirectional LSTM networks. Our model is trained with only few hundred labeled sentences and does not rely …
This paper discusses the development of trainable statistical models for extracting content from television and radio news broadcasts. In particular we concentrate on statistical finite state models for identifying proper names and other named entities in broadcast speech. Two models are presented: the first represents name class information as a word attribute; the second represents both word-word and class-class transitions explicitly. A common n-gram based formulation is used for both models. The task of named entity identification is characterized by relatively sparse training data and iss…
People are often entities of interest in tasks such as search and information extraction. In these tasks, the goal is to find as much information as possible about people specified by their name. However in text, some of the references to people are by pronouns (she, his) or generic descriptions (the professor, the German chancellor). It is therefore important that coreference resolution systems are able to link these different types of mentions to the correct person name. Here, we evaluate two state of the art coreference resolution systems on the subtask of Named Person Coreference, in which…
Question Answering is a task which requires building models capable of providing answers to questions expressed in human language. Full question answering involves some form of reasoning ability. We introduce a neural network architecture for this task, which is a form of $Memory\ Network$, that recognizes entities and their relations to answers through a focus attention mechanism. Our model is named $Question\ Dependent\ Recurrent\ Entity\ Network$ and extends $Recurrent\ Entity\ Network$ by exploiting aspects of the question during the memorization process. We validate the model on both synt…
In this paper we present KIND, an Italian dataset for Named-entity recognition. It contains more than one million tokens with annotation covering three classes: person, location, and organization. The dataset (around 600K tokens) mostly contains manual gold annotations in three different domains (news, literature, and political discourses) and a semi-automatically annotated part. The multi-domain feature is the main strength of the present work, offering a resource which covers different styles and language uses, as well as the largest Italian NER dataset with manual gold annotations. It repre…
Entity disambiguation (ED) is the last step of entity linking (EL), when candidate entities are reranked according to the context they appear in. All datasets for training and evaluating models for EL consist of convenience samples, such as news articles and tweets, that propagate the prior probability bias of the entity distribution towards more frequently occurring entities. It was previously shown that the performance of the EL systems on such datasets is overestimated since it is possible to obtain higher accuracy scores by merely learning the prior. To provide a more adequate evaluation b…
Ghent University（根特大学）；imec（比利时微电子研究中心）；IDLab（ID实验室）；Department of Information Technology（信息技术系）
Adversarial training (AT) is a regularization method that can be used to improve the robustness of neural network methods by adding small perturbations in the training data. We show how to use AT for the tasks of entity recognition and relation extraction. In particular, we demonstrate that applying AT to a general purpose baseline model for jointly extracting entities and relations, allows improving the state-of-the-art effectiveness on several datasets in different contexts (i.e., news, biomedical, and real estate data) and for different languages (English and Dutch).
University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria（上奥地利应用科学大学）
For the webportal "Who is in the News!" with statistics about the appearence of persons in written news we developed an extension, which measures the relationship of public persons depending on a time parameter, as the relationship may vary over time. On a training corpus of English and German news articles we built a measure by extracting the persons occurrence in the text via pretrained named entity extraction and then construct time series of counts for each person. Pearson correlation over a sliding window is then used to measure the relation of two persons.
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）
Pretrained language models based on Transformer architecture are the reason for recent breakthroughs in many areas of NLP, including sentiment analysis, question answering, named entity recognition. Headline generation is a special kind of text summarization task. Models need to have strong natural language understanding that goes beyond the meaning of individual words and sentences and an ability to distinguish essential information to succeed in it. In this paper, we fine-tune two pretrained Transformer-based models (mBART and BertSumAbs) for that task and achieve new state-of-the-art result…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Google AI（谷歌人工智能）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Named entity recognition systems perform well on standard datasets comprising English news. But given the paucity of data, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the robustness of systems with respect to recognizing a diverse set of entities. We propose a method for auditing the in-domain robustness of systems, focusing specifically on differences in performance due to the national origin of entities. We create entity-switched datasets, in which named entities in the original texts are replaced by plausible named entities of the same type but of different national origin. We find that state…
Entity Linking (EL) is an essential task for semantic text understanding and information extraction. Popular methods separately address the Mention Detection (MD) and Entity Disambiguation (ED) stages of EL, without leveraging their mutual dependency. We here propose the first neural end-to-end EL system that jointly discovers and links entities in a text document. The main idea is to consider all possible spans as potential mentions and learn contextual similarity scores over their entity candidates that are useful for both MD and ED decisions. Key components are context-aware mention embeddi…
Recognizing non-standard entity types and relations, such as B2B products, product classes and their producers, in news and forum texts is important in application areas such as supply chain monitoring and market research. However, there is a decided lack of annotated corpora and annotation guidelines in this domain. In this work, we present a corpus study, an annotation schema and associated guidelines, for the annotation of product entity and company-product relation mentions. We find that although product mentions are often realized as noun phrases, defining their exact extent is difficult …
Named entity recognition (NER) is frequently addressed as a sequence classification task where each input consists of one sentence of text. It is nevertheless clear that useful information for the task can often be found outside of the scope of a single-sentence context. Recently proposed self-attention models such as BERT can both efficiently capture long-distance relationships in input as well as represent inputs consisting of several sentences, creating new opportunitites for approaches that incorporate cross-sentence information in natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we prese…
College of Information and Computer Sciences（信息与计算机科学学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
We propose a new, socially-impactful task for natural language processing: from a news corpus, extract names of persons who have been killed by police. We present a newly collected police fatality corpus, which we release publicly, and present a model to solve this problem that uses EM-based distant supervision with logistic regression and convolutional neural network classifiers. Our model outperforms two off-the-shelf event extractor systems, and it can suggest candidate victim names in some cases faster than one of the major manually-collected police fatality databases.
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；EURECOM；Università di Torino（都灵大学）；VU University Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）
Applying natural language processing for mining and intelligent information access to tweets (a form of microblog) is a challenging, emerging research area. Unlike carefully authored news text and other longer content, tweets pose a number of new challenges, due to their short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. Information extraction from tweets is typically performed in a pipeline, comprising consecutive stages of language identification, tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and entity disambiguation (e.g. with respect to DBpedia). In this work, we descri…
Monitoring mobility- and industry-relevant events is important in areas such as personal travel planning and supply chain management, but extracting events pertaining to specific companies, transit routes and locations from heterogeneous, high-volume text streams remains a significant challenge. This work describes a corpus of German-language documents which has been annotated with fine-grained geo-entities, such as streets, stops and routes, as well as standard named entity types. It has also been annotated with a set of 15 traffic- and industry-related n-ary relations and events, such as acc…
Human-Annotated NER Dataset for the Kyrgyz Language
The Cramer Project（Cramer项目）；PDMI RAS, SPbU, KFU（俄罗斯科学院普列汉ov物理技术研究所、圣彼得堡大学、卡斯皮斯联邦大学）；Dep. of Computer Linguistics（计算机语言学系）；Information Technology Institute（信息技术研究所）；St. Petersburg Dep. of Steklov Math. Institute（圣彼得堡斯捷克洛夫数学研究所部门）；St. Petersburg State University（圣彼得堡国立大学）
本文构建了首个吉尔吉斯语人工标注命名实体识别数据集 KyrgyzNER，并通过多模型评估表明多语言预训练模型在低资源语言 NER 任务中具有良好潜力。
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Named Entity Recognition systems achieve remarkable performance on domains such as English news. It is natural to ask: What are these models actually learning to achieve this? Are they merely memorizing the names themselves? Or are they capable of interpreting the text and inferring the correct entity type from the linguistic context? We examine these questions by contrasting the performance of several variants of LSTM-CRF architectures for named entity recognition, with some provided only representations of the context as features. We also perform similar experiments for BERT. We find that co…
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key NLP task, which is all the more challenging on Web and user-generated content with their diverse and continuously changing language. This paper aims to quantify how this diversity impacts state-of-the-art NER methods, by measuring named entity (NE) and context variability, feature sparsity, and their effects on precision and recall. In particular, our findings indicate that NER approaches struggle to generalise in diverse genres with limited training data. Unseen NEs, in particular, play an important role, which have a higher incidence in diverse genres …
University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Named entity linking (NEL) in news is a challenging endeavour due to the frequency of unseen and emerging entities, which necessitates the use of unsupervised or zero-shot methods. However, such methods tend to come with caveats, such as no integration of suitable knowledge bases (like Wikidata) for emerging entities, a lack of scalability, and poor interpretability. Here, we consider person disambiguation in Quotebank, a massive corpus of speaker-attributed quotations from the news, and investigate the suitability of intuitive, lightweight, and scalable heuristics for NEL in web-scale corpora…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Recent research efforts have shown that neural architectures can be effective in conventional information extraction tasks such as named entity recognition, yielding state-of-the-art results on standard newswire datasets. However, despite significant resources required for training such models, the performance of a model trained on one domain typically degrades dramatically when applied to a different domain, yet extracting entities from new emerging domains such as social media can be of significant interest. In this paper, we empirically investigate effective methods for conveniently adaptin…
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；Faculty of Technology（技术学院）；Department of Computing（计算机系）
In this paper, we introduce the first fully manually annotated paraphrase corpus for Finnish containing 53,572 paraphrase pairs harvested from alternative subtitles and news headings. Out of all paraphrase pairs in our corpus 98% are manually classified to be paraphrases at least in their given context, if not in all contexts. Additionally, we establish a manual candidate selection method and demonstrate its feasibility in high quality paraphrase selection in terms of both cost and quality.
This paper presents the NICT's participation to the WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in the eight translation directions of four language pairs: Estonian-English, Finnish-English, Turkish-English and Chinese-English. For each translation direction, we prepared state-of-the-art statistical (SMT) and neural (NMT) machine translation systems. Our NMT systems were trained with the transformer architecture using the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data that we generated with a new incremental training framework. Our primary sub…
