Publicly traded companies are required to submit periodic reports with eXtensive Business Reporting Language (XBRL) word-level tags. Manually tagging the reports is tedious and costly. We, therefore, introduce XBRL tagging as a new entity extraction task for the financial domain and release FiNER-139, a dataset of 1.1M sentences with gold XBRL tags. Unlike typical entity extraction datasets, FiNER-139 uses a much larger label set of 139 entity types. Most annotated tokens are numeric, with the correct tag per token depending mostly on context, rather than the token itself. We show that subword fragmentation of numeric expressions harms BERT's performance, allowing word-level BILSTMs to perform better. To improve BERT's performance, we propose two simple and effective solutions that replace numeric expressions with pseudo-tokens reflecting original token shapes and numeric magnitudes. We also experiment with FIN-BERT, an existing BERT model for the financial domain, and release our own BERT (SEC-BERT), pre-trained on financial filings, which performs best. Through data and error analysis, we finally identify possible limitations to inspire future work on XBRL tagging.
Wireless sensor networks are among the most promising technologies of the current era because of their small size, lower cost, and ease of deployment. With the increasing number of wireless sensors, the probability of generating missing data also rises. This incomplete data could lead to disastrous consequences if used for decision-making. There is rich literature dealing with this problem. However, most approaches show performance degradation when a sizable amount of data is lost. Inspired by the emerging field of graph signal processing, this paper performs a new study of a Sobolev reconstruction algorithm in wireless sensor networks. Experimental comparisons on several publicly available datasets demonstrate that the algorithm surpasses multiple state-of-the-art techniques by a maximum margin of 54%. We further show that this algorithm consistently retrieves the missing data even during massive data loss situations.
State-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition(NER) models rely heavily on large amountsof fully annotated training data. However, ac-cessible data are often incompletely annotatedsince the annotators usually lack comprehen-sive knowledge in the target domain. Normallythe unannotated tokens are regarded as non-entities by default, while we underline thatthese tokens could either be non-entities orpart of any entity. Here, we study NER mod-eling with incomplete annotated data whereonly a fraction of the named entities are la-beled, and the unlabeled tokens are equiva-lently multi-labeled by every possible label.Taking multi-labeled tokens into account, thenumerous possible paths can distract the train-ing model from the gold path (ground truthlabel sequence), and thus hinders the learn-ing ability. In this paper, we propose AdaK-NER, named the adaptive top-Kapproach, tohelp the model focus on a smaller feasible re-gion where the gold path is more likely to belocated. We demonstrate the superiority ofour approach through extensive experimentson both English and Chinese datasets, aver-agely improving 2% in F-score on the CoNLL-2003 and over 10% on two Chinese datasetscompared with the prior state-of-the-art works.
Article prediction is a task that has long defied accurate linguistic description. As such, this task is ideally suited to evaluate models on their ability to emulate native-speaker intuition. To this end, we compare the performance of native English speakers and pre-trained models on the task of article prediction set up as a three way choice (a/an, the, zero). Our experiments with BERT show that BERT outperforms humans on this task across all articles. In particular, BERT is far superior to humans at detecting the zero article, possibly because we insert them using rules that the deep neural model can easily pick up. More interestingly, we find that BERT tends to agree more with annotators than with the corpus when inter-annotator agreement is high but switches to agreeing more with the corpus as inter-annotator agreement drops. We contend that this alignment with annotators, despite being trained on the corpus, suggests that BERT is not memorising article use, but captures a high level generalisation of article use akin to human intuition.
Text-based adversarial attacks are becoming more commonplace and accessible to general internet users. As these attacks proliferate, the need to address the gap in model robustness becomes imminent. While retraining on adversarial data may increase performance, there remains an additional class of character-level attacks on which these models falter. Additionally, the process to retrain a model is time and resource intensive, creating a need for a lightweight, reusable defense. In this work, we propose the Adversarial Text Normalizer, a novel method that restores baseline performance on attacked content with low computational overhead. We evaluate the efficacy of the normalizer on two problem areas prone to adversarial attacks, i.e. Hate Speech and Natural Language Inference. We find that text normalization provides a task-agnostic defense against character-level attacks that can be implemented supplementary to adversarial retraining solutions, which are more suited for semantic alterations.
We describe the design and use of the CREER dataset, a large corpus annotated with rich English grammar and semantic attributes. The CREER dataset uses the Stanford CoreNLP Annotator to capture rich language structures from Wikipedia plain text. This dataset follows widely used linguistic and semantic annotations so that it can be used for not only most natural language processing tasks but also scaling the dataset. This large supervised dataset can serve as the basis for improving the performance of NLP tasks in the future. We publicize the dataset through the link: //140.116.82.111/share.cgi?ssid=000 dOJ4
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.
Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to identify and classify clinical terms such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, exams, and body parts in electronic health records, which is a fundamental and crucial task for clinical and translational research. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved significant success in named entity recognition and many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Most of these algorithms are trained end to end, and can automatically learn features from large scale labeled datasets. However, these data-driven methods typically lack the capability of processing rare or unseen entities. Previous statistical methods and feature engineering practice have demonstrated that human knowledge can provide valuable information for handling rare and unseen cases. In this paper, we address the problem by incorporating dictionaries into deep neural networks for the Chinese CNER task. Two different architectures that extend the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network and five different feature representation schemes are proposed to handle the task. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset show that the proposed method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods.
In this paper we investigate the role of the dependency tree in a named entity recognizer upon using a set of GCN. We perform a comparison among different NER architectures and show that the grammar of a sentence positively influences the results. Experiments on the ontonotes dataset demonstrate consistent performance improvements, without requiring heavy feature engineering nor additional language-specific knowledge.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.