The MultiCoNER II task aims to detect complex, ambiguous, and fine-grained named entities in low-context situations and noisy scenarios like the presence of spelling mistakes and typos for multiple languages. The task poses significant challenges due to the scarcity of contextual information, the high granularity of the entities(up to 33 classes), and the interference of noisy data. To address these issues, our team {\bf PAI} proposes a universal Named Entity Recognition (NER) system that integrates external entity information to improve performance. Specifically, our system retrieves entities with properties from the knowledge base (i.e. Wikipedia) for a given text, then concatenates entity information with the input sentence and feeds it into Transformer-based models. Finally, our system wins 2 first places, 4 second places, and 1 third place out of 13 tracks. The code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/diqiuzhuanzhuan/semeval-2023}.
The integration of Language Models (LMs) has proven to be an effective way to address domain shifts in speech recognition. However, these approaches usually require a significant amount of target domain text data for the training of LMs. Different from these methods, in this work, with only a domain-specific text prompt, we propose two zero-shot ASR domain adaptation methods using LLaMA, a 7-billion-parameter large language model (LLM). LLM is used in two ways: 1) second-pass rescoring: reranking N-best hypotheses of a given ASR system with LLaMA; 2) deep LLM-fusion: incorporating LLM into the decoder of an encoder-decoder based ASR system. Experiments show that, with only one domain prompt, both methods can effectively reduce word error rates (WER) on out-of-domain TedLium-2 and SPGISpeech datasets. Especially, the deep LLM-fusion has the advantage of better recall of entity and out-of-vocabulary words.
Information extraction(IE) is a crucial subfield within natural language processing. In this study, we introduce a Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition Multi-task (SCNM) approach that combines Sentence Classification (SC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER). We develop a Sentence-to-Label Generation (SLG) framework for SCNM and construct a Wikipedia dataset containing both SC and NER. Using a format converter, we unify input formats and employ a generative model to generate SC-labels, NER-labels, and associated text segments. We propose a Constraint Mechanism (CM) to improve generated format accuracy. Our results show SC accuracy increased by 1.13 points and NER by 1.06 points in SCNM compared to standalone tasks, with CM raising format accuracy from 63.61 to 100. The findings indicate mutual reinforcement effects between SC and NER, and integration enhances both tasks' performance.
The goal of video segmentation is to accurately segment and track every pixel in diverse scenarios. In this paper, we present Tube-Link, a versatile framework that addresses multiple core tasks of video segmentation with a unified architecture. Our framework is a near-online approach that takes a short subclip as input and outputs the corresponding spatial-temporal tube masks. To enhance the modeling of cross-tube relationships, we propose an effective way to perform tube-level linking via attention along the queries. In addition, we introduce temporal contrastive learning to instance-wise discriminative features for tube-level association. Our approach offers flexibility and efficiency for both short and long video inputs, as the length of each subclip can be varied according to the needs of datasets or scenarios. Tube-Link outperforms existing specialized architectures by a significant margin on five video segmentation datasets. Specifically, it achieves almost 13% relative improvements on VIPSeg and 4% improvements on KITTI-STEP over the strong baseline Video K-Net. When using a ResNet50 backbone on Youtube-VIS-2019 and 2021, Tube-Link boosts IDOL by 3% and 4%, respectively. Code will be available.
With the extensive accumulation of conversational data on the Internet, emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) has received increasing attention. Previous efforts of this task mainly focus on leveraging contextual and speaker-specific features, or integrating heterogeneous external commonsense knowledge. Among them, some heavily rely on future contexts, which, however, are not always available in real-life scenarios. This fact inspires us to generate pseudo future contexts to improve ERC. Specifically, for an utterance, we generate its future context with pre-trained language models, potentially containing extra beneficial knowledge in a conversational form homogeneous with the historical ones. These characteristics make pseudo future contexts easily fused with historical contexts and historical speaker-specific contexts, yielding a conceptually simple framework systematically integrating multi-contexts. Experimental results on four ERC datasets demonstrate our method's superiority. Further in-depth analyses reveal that pseudo future contexts can rival real ones to some extent, especially in relatively context-independent conversations.
We describe the systems of the University of Alberta team for the SemEval-2023 Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (V-WSD) Task. We present a novel algorithm that leverages glosses retrieved from BabelNet, in combination with text and image encoders. Furthermore, we compare language-specific encoders against the application of English encoders to translated texts. As the contexts given in the task datasets are extremely short, we also experiment with augmenting these contexts with descriptions generated by a language model. This yields substantial improvements in accuracy. We describe and evaluate additional V-WSD methods which use image generation and text-conditioned image segmentation. Overall, the results of our official submission rank us 18 out of 56 teams. Some of our unofficial results are even better than the official ones. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/UAlberta-NLP/v-wsd.
Few-shot learning aims to learn novel categories from very few samples given some base categories with sufficient training samples. The main challenge of this task is the novel categories are prone to dominated by color, texture, shape of the object or background context (namely specificity), which are distinct for the given few training samples but not common for the corresponding categories (see Figure 1). Fortunately, we find that transferring information of the correlated based categories can help learn the novel concepts and thus avoid the novel concept being dominated by the specificity. Besides, incorporating semantic correlations among different categories can effectively regularize this information transfer. In this work, we represent the semantic correlations in the form of structured knowledge graph and integrate this graph into deep neural networks to promote few-shot learning by a novel Knowledge Graph Transfer Network (KGTN). Specifically, by initializing each node with the classifier weight of the corresponding category, a propagation mechanism is learned to adaptively propagate node message through the graph to explore node interaction and transfer classifier information of the base categories to those of the novel ones. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset show significant performance improvement compared with current leading competitors. Furthermore, we construct an ImageNet-6K dataset that covers larger scale categories, i.e, 6,000 categories, and experiments on this dataset further demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
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.
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.
We study the problem of named entity recognition (NER) from electronic medical records, which is one of the most fundamental and critical problems for medical text mining. Medical records which are written by clinicians from different specialties usually contain quite different terminologies and writing styles. The difference of specialties and the cost of human annotation makes it particularly difficult to train a universal medical NER system. In this paper, we propose a label-aware double transfer learning framework (La-DTL) for cross-specialty NER, so that a medical NER system designed for one specialty could be conveniently applied to another one with minimal annotation efforts. The transferability is guaranteed by two components: (i) we propose label-aware MMD for feature representation transfer, and (ii) we perform parameter transfer with a theoretical upper bound which is also label aware. We conduct extensive experiments on 12 cross-specialty NER tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that La-DTL provides consistent accuracy improvement over strong baselines. Besides, the promising experimental results on non-medical NER scenarios indicate that La-DTL is potential to be seamlessly adapted to a wide range of NER tasks.
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.