The French TreeBank developed at the University Paris 7 is the main source of morphosyntactic and syntactic annotations for French. However, it does not include explicit information related to named entities, which are among the most useful information for several natural language processing tasks and applications. Moreover, no large-scale French corpus with named entity annotations contain referential information, which complement the type and the span of each mention with an indication of the entity it refers to. We have manually annotated the French TreeBank with such information, after an automatic pre-annotation step. We sketch the underlying annotation guidelines and we provide a few figures about the resulting annotations.
Delhi Technological University（德里理工大学）；Université du Québec à Montréal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）
Named Entity Recognition (NER) involves the identification and classification of named entities in unstructured text into predefined classes. NER in languages with limited resources, like French, is still an open problem due to the lack of large, robust, labelled datasets. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based NER approach for French using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora for improved feature extraction and better generalization. We evaluate our approach on three labelled datasets and show that our adaptation framework outperforms the corresponding non-adapti…
In this paper we present a new method to learn a model robust to typos for a Named Entity Recognition task. Our improvement over existing methods helps the model to take into account the context of the sentence inside a court decision in order to recognize an entity with a typo. We used state-of-the-art models and enriched the last layer of the neural network with high-level information linked with the potential of the word to be a certain type of entity. More precisely, we utilized the similarities between the word and the potential entity candidates in the tagged sentence context. The experi…
Delhi Technological University（德里理工大学）；Université du Québec à Montréal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying and classifying named entities in large-scale texts into predefined classes. NER in French and other relatively limited-resource languages cannot always benefit from approaches proposed for languages like English due to a dearth of large, robust datasets. In this paper, we present our work that aims to mitigate the effects of this dearth of large, labeled datasets. We propose a Transformer-based NER approach for French, using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora to improve feature extraction and enable better gene…
The paper describes the CAp 2017 challenge. The challenge concerns the problem of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for tweets written in French. We first present the data preparation steps we followed for constructing the dataset released in the framework of the challenge. We begin by demonstrating why NER for tweets is a challenging problem especially when the number of entities increases. We detail the annotation process and the necessary decisions we made. We provide statistics on the inter-annotator agreement, and we conclude the data description part with examples and statistics for the dat…
Paris University（巴黎大学）；AP-HP（巴黎公共援助医院）；LIMSI（法国计算机科学与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Univ. Paris-Sud（巴黎南大学）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Univ Paris 13（巴黎第十三大学）；LIMICS（医学信息学与电子健康知识工程实验室）
We aimed to enhance the performance of a supervised model for clinical named-entity recognition (NER) using medical terminologies. In order to evaluate our system in French, we built a corpus for 5 types of clinical entities. We used a terminology-based system as baseline, built upon UMLS and SNOMED. Then, we evaluated a biGRU-CRF, and an hybrid system using the prediction of the terminology-based system as feature for the biGRU-CRF. In English, we evaluated the NER systems on the i2b2-2009 Medication Challenge for Drug name recognition, which contained 8,573 entities for 268 documents. In Fre…
Synapse Développement（Synapse发展公司）；IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier（保罗·萨巴捷大学IRIT研究所）
We present our system for the CAp 2017 NER challenge which is about named entity recognition on French tweets. Our system leverages unsupervised learning on a larger dataset of French tweets to learn features feeding a CRF model. It was ranked first without using any gazetteer or structured external data, with an F-measure of 58.89\%. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first system to use fasttext embeddings (which include subword representations) and an embedding-based sentence representation for NER.
University of Le Mans（勒芒大学）；University of Nantes（南特大学）
Named entity recognition (NER) is among SLU tasks that usually extract semantic information from textual documents. Until now, NER from speech is made through a pipeline process that consists in processing first an automatic speech recognition (ASR) on the audio and then processing a NER on the ASR outputs. Such approach has some disadvantages (error propagation, metric to tune ASR systems sub-optimal in regards to the final task, reduced space search at the ASR output level...) and it is known that more integrated approaches outperform sequential ones, when they can be applied. In this paper,…
This paper investigates the problem of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for extreme low-resource languages with only a few hundred tagged data samples. NER is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). A critical driver accelerating NER systems' progress is the existence of large-scale language corpora that enable NER systems to achieve outstanding performance in languages such as English and French with abundant training data. However, NER for low-resource languages remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Mask Augmented Named Entity Recognition (MANER), a new me…
The package cleanNLP provides a set of fast tools for converting a textual corpus into a set of normalized tables. The underlying natural language processing pipeline utilizes Stanford's CoreNLP library, exposing a number of annotation tasks for text written in English, French, German, and Spanish. Annotators include tokenization, part of speech tagging, named entity recognition, entity linking, sentiment analysis, dependency parsing, coreference resolution, and information extraction.
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 …
Understanding the evolution of job requirements is becoming more important for workers, companies and public organizations to follow the fast transformation of the employment market. Fortunately, recent natural language processing (NLP) approaches allow for the development of methods to automatically extract information from job ads and recognize skills more precisely. However, these efficient approaches need a large amount of annotated data from the studied domain which is difficult to access, mainly due to intellectual property. This article proposes a new public dataset, FIJO, containing in…
Named Entity Recognition (NER) from speech is among Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) tasks, aiming to extract semantic information from the speech signal. NER from speech is usually made through a two-step pipeline that consists of (1) processing the audio using an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system and (2) applying an NER tagger to the ASR outputs. Recent works have shown the capability of the End-to-End (E2E) approach for NER from English and French speech, which is essentially entity-aware ASR. However, due to the many homophones and polyphones that exist in Chinese, NER from Chin…
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).
CRH-EHESS（CRH-法国社会科学高等研究院）；EPITA Research & Development Laboratory (LRDE)（EPITA研究与开发实验室（LRDE））；LASTIG；Univ. Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）；IGN-ENSG（法国国家地理学院-国立地理科学学院）
When extracting structured data from repetitively organized documents, such as dictionaries, directories, or even newspapers, a key challenge is to correctly segment what constitutes the basic text regions for the target database. Traditionally, such a problem was tackled as part of the layout analysis and was mostly based on visual clues for dividing (top-down) approaches. Some agglomerating (bottom-up) approaches started to consider textual information to link similar contents, but they required a proper over-segmentation of fine-grained units. In this work, we propose a new pragmatic approa…
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）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工学院）；Xiaomi AI Lab, Xiaomi Inc.（小米人工智能实验室，小米公司）
More recently, Named Entity Recognition hasachieved great advances aided by pre-trainingapproaches such as BERT. However, currentpre-training techniques focus on building lan-guage modeling objectives to learn a gen-eral representation, ignoring the named entity-related knowledge. To this end, we proposea NER-specific pre-training framework to in-ject coarse-to-fine automatically mined entityknowledge into pre-trained models. Specifi-cally, we first warm-up the model via an en-tity span identification task by training it withWikipedia anchors, which can be deemed asgeneral-typed entities. Then…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；The Affiliated Eye Hospital of Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学附属眼科医院）
An exhaustive study has been conducted to investigate span-based models for the joint entity and relation extraction task. However, these models sample a large number of negative entities and negative relations during the model training, which are essential but result in grossly imbalanced data distributions and in turn cause suboptimal model performance. In order to address the above issues, we propose a two-phase paradigm for the span-based joint entity and relation extraction, which involves classifying the entities and relations in the first phase, and predicting the types of these entitie…
In this work, we open up the DAWT dataset - Densely Annotated Wikipedia Texts across multiple languages. The annotations include labeled text mentions mapping to entities (represented by their Freebase machine ids) as well as the type of the entity. The data set contains total of 13.6M articles, 5.0B tokens, 13.8M mention entity co-occurrences. DAWT contains 4.8 times more anchor text to entity links than originally present in the Wikipedia markup. Moreover, it spans several languages including English, Spanish, Italian, German, French and Arabic. We also present the methodology used to genera…
We present a bi-encoder framework for named entity recognition (NER), which applies contrastive learning to map candidate text spans and entity types into the same vector representation space. Prior work predominantly approaches NER as sequence labeling or span classification. We instead frame NER as a representation learning problem that maximizes the similarity between the vector representations of an entity mention and its type. This makes it easy to handle nested and flat NER alike, and can better leverage noisy self-supervision signals. A major challenge to this bi-encoder formulation for…
In Contract Life-cycle Management (CLM), managing and tracking the master agreements and their associated amendments is essential, in order to be kept informed with different due dates and obligations. An automatic solution can facilitate the daily jobs and improve the efficiency of legal practitioners. In this paper, we propose an approach based on machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect the amendment relationship between two documents. The algorithm takes two PDF documents preprocessed by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NER (Named Entity Recognition) as …
This study improves the performance of neural named entity recognition by a margin of up to 11% in F-score on the example of a low-resource language like German, thereby outperforming existing baselines and establishing a new state-of-the-art on each single open-source dataset. Rather than designing deeper and wider hybrid neural architectures, we gather all available resources and perform a detailed optimization and grammar-dependent morphological processing consisting of lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging prior to exposing the raw data to any training process. We test our approach in a…
Efficient extraction of medication information from clinical notes: an evaluation in two languages
University hospital of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学医院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学）；HeKA；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LISN（巴黎第十一大学计算机科学实验室）
Extracting Structured Requirements from Unstructured Building Technical Specifications for Building Information Modeling
LISPEN EA 7515, Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology（LISPEN EA 7515，艺术与技术理工学院）；Information System and Applications Division, CSTB（信息系统与应用部门，CSTB）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, G-SCOP（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学，CNRS，格勒诺布尔INP，G-SCOP）
Cross-lingual named-entity lexica are an important resource to multilingual NLP tasks such as machine translation and cross-lingual wikification. While knowledge bases contain a large number of entities in high-resource languages such as English and French, corresponding entities for lower-resource languages are often missing. To address this, we propose Lexical-Semantic-Phonetic Align (LSP-Align), a technique to automatically mine cross-lingual entity lexica from mined web data. We demonstrate LSP-Align outperforms baselines at extracting cross-lingual entity pairs and mine 164 million entity…
The identification of syllables within phonetic sequences is known as syllabification. This task is thought to play an important role in natural language understanding, speech production, and the development of speech recognition systems. The concept of the syllable is cross-linguistic, though formal definitions are rarely agreed upon, even within a language. In response, data-driven syllabification methods have been developed to learn from syllabified examples. These methods often employ classical machine learning sequence labeling models. In recent years, recurrence-based neural networks hav…
Wikipedia is a great source of general world knowledge which can guide NLP models better understand their motivation to make predictions. Structuring Wikipedia is the initial step towards this goal which can facilitate fine-grain classification of articles. In this work, we introduce the Shinra 5-Language Categorization Dataset (SHINRA-5LDS), a large multi-lingual and multi-labeled set of annotated Wikipedia articles in Japanese, English, French, German, and Farsi using Extended Named Entity (ENE) tag set. We evaluate the dataset using the best models provided for ENE label set classification …
Entity tags in human-machine dialog are integral to natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in conversational assistants. However, current systems struggle to accurately parse spoken queries with the typical use of text input alone, and often fail to understand the user intent. Previous work in linguistics has identified a cross-language tendency for longer speech pauses surrounding nouns as compared to verbs. We demonstrate that the linguistic observation on pauses can be used to improve accuracy in machine-learnt language understanding tasks. Analysis of pauses in French and English utter…
2M-NER: Contrastive Learning for Multilingual and Multimodal NER with Language and Modal Fusion
China University of Political Science and Law（中国政法大学）；Mobvoi（出门问问）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, CAS（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
CHU Necker, AP-HP（巴黎公共医疗救助机构内克尔大学医院）；INSERM UMR-S 872（法国国家健康与医学研究院 UMR-S 872）；Sorbonne Paris Cité, Faculté de Médecine（索邦巴黎西岱大学医学院）；Université de Paris（巴黎大学）
In this study, we evaluated the RNNG, a neural top-down transition based parser, for medication information extraction in clinical texts. We evaluated this model on a French clinical corpus. The task was to extract the name of a drug (or a drug class), as well as attributes informing its administration: frequency, dosage, duration, condition and route of administration. We compared the RNNG model that jointly identifies entities, events and their relations with separate BiLSTMs models for entities, events and relations as baselines. We call seq-BiLSTMs the baseline models for relations extract…
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München（慕尼黑巴伐利亚州立图书馆）；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；Volkswagen AG（大众汽车集团）
Compared to standard Named Entity Recognition (NER), identifying persons, locations, and organizations in historical texts constitutes a big challenge. To obtain machine-readable corpora, the historical text is usually scanned and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) needs to be performed. As a result, the historical corpora contain errors. Also, entities like location or organization can change over time, which poses another challenge. Overall, historical texts come with several peculiarities that differ greatly from modern texts and large labeled corpora for training a neural tagger are hardl…
Pre-trained language models such as BERT have been a key ingredient to achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of tasks in natural language processing and, more recently, also in information retrieval.Recent research even claims that BERT is able to capture factual knowledge about entity relations and properties, the information that is commonly obtained from knowledge graphs. This paper investigates the following question: Do BERT-based entity retrieval models benefit from additional entity information stored in knowledge graphs? To address this research question, we map entity embeddin…
