Supervised relation extraction methods based on deep neural network play an important role in the recent information extraction field. However, at present, their performance still fails to reach a good level due to the existence of complicated relations. On the other hand, recently proposed pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in multiple tasks of natural language processing through fine-tuning when combined with the model of downstream tasks. However, original standard tasks of PLM do not include the relation extraction task yet. We believe that PLMs can also be used to solve the relation extraction problem, but it is necessary to establish a specially designed downstream task model or even loss function for dealing with complicated relations. In this paper, a new network architecture with a special loss function is designed to serve as a downstream model of PLMs for supervised relation extraction. Experiments have shown that our method significantly exceeded the current optimal baseline models across multiple public datasets of relation extraction.
Language Technologies Institute（语言技术研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Information extraction from conversational data is particularly challenging because the task-centric nature of conversation allows for effective communication of implicit information by humans, but is challenging for machines. The challenges may differ between utterances depending on the role of the speaker within the conversation, especially when relevant expertise is distributed asymmetrically across roles. Further, the challenges may also increase over the conversation as more shared context is built up through information communicated implicitly earlier in the dialogue. In this paper, we p…
Language provides speakers with a rich system of modality for expressing thoughts about events, without being committed to their actual occurrence. Modality is commonly used in the political news domain, where both actual and possible courses of events are discussed. NLP systems struggle with these semantic phenomena, often incorrectly extracting events which did not happen, which can lead to issues in downstream applications. We present an open-domain, lexicon-based event extraction system that captures various types of modality. This information is valuable for Question Answering, Knowledge …
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
There has been a steady need in the medical community to precisely extract the temporal relations between clinical events. In particular, temporal information can facilitate a variety of downstream applications such as case report retrieval and medical question answering. Existing methods either require expensive feature engineering or are incapable of modeling the global relational dependencies among the events. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Clinical Temporal ReLation Exaction with Probabilistic Soft Logic Regularization and Global Inference (CTRL-PG) to tackle the problem at the …
Background: Given the importance of relation or event extraction from biomedical research publications to support knowledge capture and synthesis, and the strong dependency of approaches to this information extraction task on syntactic information, it is valuable to understand which approaches to syntactic processing of biomedical text have the highest performance. Results: We perform an empirical study comparing state-of-the-art traditional feature-based and neural network-based models for two core natural language processing tasks of part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing on two…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Megagon Labs（Megagon实验室）
A major drawback of modern neural OpenIE systems and benchmarks is that they prioritize high coverage of information in extractions over compactness of their constituents. This severely limits the usefulness of OpenIE extractions in many downstream tasks. The utility of extractions can be improved if extractions are compact and share constituents. To this end, we study the problem of identifying compact extractions with neural-based methods. We propose CompactIE, an OpenIE system that uses a novel pipelined approach to produce compact extractions with overlapping constituents. It first detects…
Certain applications require that the output of an information extraction system be probabilistic, so that a downstream system can reliably fuse the output with possibly contradictory information from other sources. In this paper we consider the problem of assigning a probability distribution to alternative sets of coreference relationships among entity descriptions. We present the results of initial experiments with several approaches to estimating such distributions in an application using SRI's FASTUS information extraction system.
One of the challenges in event extraction via traditional supervised learning paradigm is the need for a sizeable annotated dataset to achieve satisfactory model performance. It is even more challenging when it comes to event extraction in the finance and economics domain, a domain with considerably fewer resources. This paper presents a complete framework for extracting and processing crude oil-related events found in CrudeOilNews corpus, addressing the issue of annotation scarcity and class imbalance by leveraging on the effectiveness of transfer learning. Apart from event extraction, we pla…
LDP: Generalizing to Multilingual Visual Information Extraction by Language Decoupled Pretraining
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Nankai University（南开大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
University of Passau（帕绍大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
We introduce Graphene, an Open IE system whose goal is to generate accurate, meaningful and complete propositions that may facilitate a variety of downstream semantic applications. For this purpose, we transform syntactically complex input sentences into clean, compact structures in the form of core facts and accompanying contexts, while identifying the rhetorical relations that hold between them in order to maintain their semantic relationship. In that way, we preserve the context of the relational tuples extracted from a source sentence, generating a novel lightweight semantic representation…
Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of the unsupervised creation of structured information from text. OIE is often used as a starting point for a number of downstream tasks including knowledge base construction, relation extraction, and question answering. While OIE methods are targeted at being domain independent, they have been evaluated primarily on newspaper, encyclopedic or general web text. In this article, we evaluate the performance of OIE on scientific texts originating from 10 different disciplines. To do so, we use two state-of-the-art OIE systems applying a crowd-sourcing…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Events are inter-related in documents. Motivated by the one-sense-per-discourse theory, we hypothesize that a participant tends to play consistent roles across multiple events in the same document. However recent work on document-level event argument extraction models each individual event in isolation and therefore causes inconsistency among extracted arguments across events, which will further cause discrepancy for downstream applications such as event knowledge base population, question answering, and hypothesis generation. In this work, we formulate event argument consistency as the constr…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Mila – Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）
In parallel to their overwhelming success across NLP tasks, language ability of deep Transformer networks, pretrained via language modeling (LM) objectives has undergone extensive scrutiny. While probing revealed that these models encode a range of syntactic and semantic properties of a language, they are still prone to fall back on superficial cues and simple heuristics to solve downstream tasks, rather than leverage deeper linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we target one such area of their deficiency, verbal reasoning. We investigate whether injecting explicit information on verbs' semanti…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）
Symptom information is primarily documented in free-text clinical notes and is not directly accessible for downstream applications. To address this challenge, information extraction approaches that can handle clinical language variation across different institutions and specialties are needed. In this paper, we present domain generalization for symptom extraction using pretraining and fine-tuning data that differs from the target domain in terms of institution and/or specialty and patient population. We extract symptom events using a transformer-based joint entity and relation extraction metho…
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Meta AI
Structured and grounded representation of text is typically formalized by closed information extraction, the problem of extracting an exhaustive set of (subject, relation, object) triplets that are consistent with a predefined set of entities and relations from a knowledge base schema. Most existing works are pipelines prone to error accumulation, and all approaches are only applicable to unrealistically small numbers of entities and relations. We introduce GenIE (generative information extraction), the first end-to-end autoregressive formulation of closed information extraction. GenIE natural…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）
Clinical studies often require understanding elements of a patient's narrative that exist only in free text clinical notes. To transform notes into structured data for downstream use, these elements are commonly extracted and normalized to medical vocabularies. In this work, we audit the performance of and indicate areas of improvement for state-of-the-art systems. We find that high task accuracies for clinical entity normalization systems on the 2019 n2c2 Shared Task are misleading, and underlying performance is still brittle. Normalization accuracy is high for common concepts (95.3%), but mu…
Relation extraction is used to populate knowledge bases that are important to many applications. Prior datasets used to train relation extraction models either suffer from noisy labels due to distant supervision, are limited to certain domains or are too small to train high-capacity models. This constrains downstream applications of relation extraction. We therefore introduce: WebRED (Web Relation Extraction Dataset), a strongly-supervised human annotated dataset for extracting relationships from a variety of text found on the World Wide Web, consisting of ~110K examples. We also describe the …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Zhejiang University City College（浙江大学城市学院）
Open relation extraction (OpenRE) is the task of extracting relation schemes from open-domain corpora. Most existing OpenRE methods either do not fully benefit from high-quality labeled corpora or can not learn semantic representation directly, affecting downstream clustering efficiency. To address these problems, in this work, we propose a novel learning framework named MORE (Metric learning-based Open Relation Extraction). The framework utilizes deep metric learning to obtain rich supervision signals from labeled data and drive the neural model to learn semantic relational representation dir…
Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校格兰杰工程学院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Apple Knowledge Platform（苹果知识平台）
Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) has been used in the pipelines of various NLP tasks. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus on which models to use in which tasks. Muddying things further is the lack of comparisons that take differing training sets into account. In this paper, we present an application-focused empirical survey of neural OpenIE models, training sets, and benchmarks in an effort to help users choose the most suitable OpenIE systems for their applications. We find that the different assumptions made by different models and datasets have a statistically significant effect …
We cast a suite of information extraction tasks into a text-to-triple translation framework. Instead of solving each task relying on task-specific datasets and models, we formalize the task as a translation between task-specific input text and output triples. By taking the task-specific input, we enable a task-agnostic translation by leveraging the latent knowledge that a pre-trained language model has about the task. We further demonstrate that a simple pre-training task of predicting which relational information corresponds to which input text is an effective way to produce task-specific out…
Chest imaging reports describe the results of chest radiography procedures. Automatic extraction of abnormal imaging signs from chest imaging reports has a pivotal role in clinical research and a wide range of downstream medical tasks. However, there are few studies on information extraction from Chinese chest imaging reports. In this paper, we formulate chest abnormal imaging sign extraction as a sequence tagging and matching problem. On this basis, we propose a transferred abnormal imaging signs extractor with pretrained ERNIE as the backbone, named EASON (fine-tuning ERNIE with CRF for Abno…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University Of Electronic Science And Technology Of China（电子科技大学）
Medical Relation Extraction (MRE) task aims to extract relations between entities in medical texts. Traditional relation extraction methods achieve impressive success by exploring the syntactic information, e.g., dependency tree. However, the quality of the 1-best dependency tree for medical texts produced by an out-of-domain parser is relatively limited so that the performance of medical relation extraction method may degenerate. To this end, we propose a method to jointly model semantic and syntactic information from medical texts based on causal explanation theory. We generate dependency fo…
Event extraction (EE) is crucial to downstream tasks such as new aggregation and event knowledge graph construction. Most existing EE datasets manually define fixed event types and design specific schema for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. Moreover, news titles, an important source of event mentions, have not gained enough attention in current EE research. In this paper, We present Title2Event, a large-scale sentence-level dataset benchmarking Open Event Extraction without restricting event types. Title2Event contains more than 42,000 news titles in…
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；UMass Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）
Clinical notes often describe important aspects of a patient's stay and are therefore critical to medical research. Clinical concept extraction (CCE) of named entities - such as problems, tests, and treatments - aids in forming an understanding of notes and provides a foundation for many downstream clinical decision-making tasks. Historically, this task has been posed as a standard named entity recognition (NER) sequence tagging problem, and solved with feature-based methods using handengineered domain knowledge. Recent advances, however, have demonstrated the efficacy of LSTM-based models for…
Improving Extraction of Clinical Event Contextual Properties from Electronic Health Records: A Comparative Study
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust（盖伊和圣托马斯 NHS 基金会信托）；King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust（国王学院医院 NHS 基金会信托）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Health Data Research UK London（英国健康数据研究伦敦中心）
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能研究院）；State Key Lab on Intelligent Technology and Systems, Tsinghua University（清华大学智能技术与系统国家重点实验室）
OpenNRE is an open-source and extensible toolkit that provides a unified framework to implement neural models for relation extraction (RE). Specifically, by implementing typical RE methods, OpenNRE not only allows developers to train custom models to extract structured relational facts from the plain text but also supports quick model validation for researchers. Besides, OpenNRE provides various functional RE modules based on both TensorFlow and PyTorch to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility, making it becomes easy to incorporate new models into the framework. Besides the toolkit,…
LexRel: Benchmarking Legal Relation Extraction for Chinese Civil Cases
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Distant supervision for relation extraction provides uniform bag labels for each sentence inside the bag, while accurate sentence labels are important for downstream applications that need the exact relation type. Directly using bag labels for sentence-level training will introduce much noise, thus severely degrading performance. In this work, we propose the use of negative training (NT), in which a model is trained using complementary labels regarding that ``the instance does not belong to these complementary labels". Since the probability of selecting a true label as a complementary label is…
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 …
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis（印第安纳大学与普渡大学印第安纳波利斯联合分校）
Semantic relationships, such as hyponym-hypernym, cause-effect, meronym-holonym etc. between a pair of entities in a sentence are usually reflected through syntactic patterns. Automatic extraction of such patterns benefits several downstream tasks, including, entity extraction, ontology building, and question answering. Unfortunately, automatic extraction of such patterns has not yet received much attention from NLP and information retrieval researchers. In this work, we propose an attention-based supervised deep learning model, ASPER, which extracts syntactic patterns between entities exhibit…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）
Entity and relation extraction is a key task in information extraction, where the output can be used for downstream NLP tasks. Existing approaches for entity and relation extraction tasks mainly focus on the English corpora and ignore other languages. Thus, it is critical to improving performance in a multilingual setting. Meanwhile, multilingual training is usually used to boost cross-lingual performance by transferring knowledge from languages (e.g., high-resource) to other (e.g., low-resource) languages. However, language interference usually exists in multilingual tasks as the model parame…
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Adam Mickiewicz University（亚当·密茨凯维奇大学）
We introduce a simple new approach to the problem of understanding documents where non-trivial layout influences the local semantics. To this end, we modify the Transformer encoder architecture in a way that allows it to use layout features obtained from an OCR system, without the need to re-learn language semantics from scratch. We only augment the input of the model with the coordinates of token bounding boxes, avoiding, in this way, the use of raw images. This leads to a layout-aware language model which can then be fine-tuned on downstream tasks. The model is evaluated on an end-to-end inf…
Umeå University（于默奥大学）；The Australian E-Health Research Centre, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织澳大利亚电子健康研究中心）；The University of Tasmania（塔斯马尼亚大学）
Given many recent advanced embedding models, selecting pre-trained word embedding (a.k.a., word representation) models best fit for a specific downstream task is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach, called ETNLP, for extracting, evaluating, and visualizing multiple sets of pre-trained word embeddings to determine which embeddings should be used in a downstream task. For extraction, we provide a method to extract subsets of the embeddings to be used in the downstream task. For evaluation, we analyse the quality of pre-trained embeddings using an input word analogy list.…
NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH（NEC欧洲实验室有限公司）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
Intrinsic evaluations of OIE systems are carried out either manually -- with human evaluators judging the correctness of extractions -- or automatically, on standardized benchmarks. The latter, while much more cost-effective, is less reliable, primarily because of the incompleteness of the existing OIE benchmarks: the ground truth extractions do not include all acceptable variants of the same fact, leading to unreliable assessment of the models' performance. Moreover, the existing OIE benchmarks are available for English only. In this work, we introduce BenchIE: a benchmark and evaluation fram…
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Platform and Content Group, Tencent（腾讯平台与内容事业群）；School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学智能系统工程学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) aims to discover novel relations from open domains. Previous OpenRE methods mainly suffer from two problems: (1) Insufficient capacity to discriminate between known and novel relations. When extending conventional test settings to a more general setting where test data might also come from seen classes, existing approaches have a significant performance decline. (2) Secondary labeling must be performed before practical application. Existing methods cannot label human-readable and meaningful types for novel relations, which is urgently required by the downstrea…
Multimodal Question Answering for Unified Information Extraction
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工学院）
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学第一附属医院）
Constructing large-scaled medical knowledge graphs can significantly boost healthcare applications for medical surveillance, bring much attention from recent research. An essential step in constructing large-scale MKG is extracting information from medical reports. Recently, information extraction techniques have been proposed and show promising performance in biomedical information extraction. However, these methods only consider limited types of entity and relation due to the noisy biomedical text data with complex entity correlations. Thus, they fail to provide enough information for constr…
An overwhelmingly large amount of knowledge in the materials domain is generated and stored as text published in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Recent developments in natural language processing, such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) models, provide promising tools to extract information from these texts. However, direct application of these models in the materials domain may yield suboptimal results as the models themselves may not be trained on notations and jargon that are specific to the domain. Here, we present a materials-aware language model, namel…
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Xiaomi AI Lab, Xiaomi Inc.（小米公司小米人工智能实验室）
Increasing the Accessibility of Causal Domain Knowledge via Causal Information Extraction Methods: A Case Study in the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry
Infineon Technologies Austria AG（英飞凌奥地利技术公司）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）；Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté（勃艮第-弗朗什-孔泰大学）；Know-Center GmbH（Know-Center有限公司）
CLEF HIPE-2026: Evaluating Accurate and Efficient Person-Place Relation Extraction from Multilingual Historical Texts
University of Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学，瑞士）；Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI), University of Zurich（瑞士艺术研究基础设施（SARI），苏黎世大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland（洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL），瑞士）
The Joint Entity-Relation Extraction Model Based on Span and Interactive Fusion Representation for Chinese Medical Texts with Complex Semantics
School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学计算机与人工智能学院）；Cooperative Innovation Center of Internet Healthcare, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学互联网医疗协同创新中心）；Fuwai Hospital, National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College（中国医学科学院北京协和医学院国家心血管病中心阜外医院）；Department of Geriatrics, Beijing Friendship Hospital, Capital Medical University（首都医科大学附属北京友谊医院老年医学科）
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science（萨尔布吕肯计算机科学研究生院）
Exploiting natural language processing in the clinical domain requires de-identification, i.e., anonymization of personal information in texts. However, current research considers de-identification and downstream tasks, such as concept extraction, only in isolation and does not study the effects of de-identification on other tasks. In this paper, we close this gap by reporting concept extraction performance on automatically anonymized data and investigating joint models for de-identification and concept extraction. In particular, we propose a stacked model with restricted access to privacy-sen…
Detecting automatically the layout of clinical documents to enhance the performances of downstream natural language processing
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Institut Pierre-Louis d'Epidémiologie et de Santé Publique（皮埃尔-路易流行病学与公共卫生研究所）；Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris（巴黎公共医疗集团）；LIMICS（医学信息学与信号处理实验室）
