Information Retrieval
End-to-End Entity Detection with Proposer and Regressor
Wen, Xueru, Zhou, Changjiang, Tang, Haotian, Liang, Luguang, Jiang, Yu, Qi, Hong
Named entity recognition is a traditional task in natural language processing. In particular, nested entity recognition receives extensive attention for the widespread existence of the nesting scenario. The latest research migrates the well-established paradigm of set prediction in object detection to cope with entity nesting. However, the manual creation of query vectors, which fail to adapt to the rich semantic information in the context, limits these approaches. An end-to-end entity detection approach with proposer and regressor is presented in this paper to tackle the issues. First, the proposer utilizes the feature pyramid network to generate high-quality entity proposals. Then, the regressor refines the proposals for generating the final prediction. The model adopts encoder-only architecture and thus obtains the advantages of the richness of query semantics, high precision of entity localization, and easiness of model training. Moreover, we introduce the novel spatially modulated attention and progressive refinement for further improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves advanced performance in flat and nested NER, achieving a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 80.74 on the GENIA dataset and 72.38 on the WeiboNER dataset.
REFinD: Relation Extraction Financial Dataset
Kaur, Simerjot, Smiley, Charese, Gupta, Akshat, Sain, Joy, Wang, Dongsheng, Siddagangappa, Suchetha, Aguda, Toyin, Shah, Sameena
A number of datasets for Relation Extraction (RE) have been created The exponential progress of AI across multiple domains can largely to aide downstream tasks such as information retrieval, semantic be attributed to the availability of large datasets coupled with an search, question answering and textual entailment. However, increase in available compute power. Relation extraction (RE) from these datasets fail to capture financial-domain specific challenges text is a fundamental problem in NLP and information retrieval, since most of these datasets are compiled using general knowledge which facilitates various tasks like knowledge graph construction, sources, hindering real-life progress and adoption within the financial question answering and semantic search. It has seen significant world. To address this limitation, we propose REFinD, the progress in recent years, thanks to advanced machine learning techniques first large-scale annotated dataset of relations, with 29K instances and the availability of large-scale relation extraction datasets.
A Symbolic Framework for Systematic Evaluation of Mathematical Reasoning with Transformers
Meadows, Jordan, Valentino, Marco, Teney, Damien, Freitas, Andre
Whether Transformers can learn to apply symbolic rules and generalise to out-of-distribution examples is an open research question. In this paper, we devise a data generation method for producing intricate mathematical derivations, and systematically perturb them with respect to syntax, structure, and semantics. Our task-agnostic approach generates equations, annotations, and inter-equation dependencies, employing symbolic algebra for scalable data production and augmentation. We then instantiate a general experimental framework on next-equation prediction, assessing systematic mathematical reasoning and generalisation of Transformer encoders on a total of 200K examples. The experiments reveal that perturbations heavily affect performance and can reduce F1 scores of $97\%$ to below $17\%$, suggesting that inference is dominated by surface-level patterns unrelated to a deeper understanding of mathematical operators. These findings underscore the importance of rigorous, large-scale evaluation frameworks for revealing fundamental limitations of existing models.
SHINE: Syntax-augmented Hierarchical Interactive Encoder for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Information Extraction
Ma, Jun-Yu, Gu, Jia-Chen, Ling, Zhen-Hua, Liu, Quan, Liu, Cong, Hu, Guoping
Zero-shot cross-lingual information extraction(IE) aims at constructing an IE model for some low-resource target languages, given annotations exclusively in some rich-resource languages. Recent studies based on language-universal features have shown their effectiveness and are attracting increasing attention. However, prior work has neither explored the potential of establishing interactions between language-universal features and contextual representations nor incorporated features that can effectively model constituent span attributes and relationships between multiple spans. In this study, a syntax-augmented hierarchical interactive encoder (SHINE) is proposed to transfer cross-lingual IE knowledge. The proposed encoder is capable of interactively capturing complementary information between features and contextual information, to derive language-agnostic representations for various IE tasks. Concretely, a multi-level interaction network is designed to hierarchically interact the complementary information to strengthen domain adaptability. Besides, in addition to the well-studied syntax features of part-of-speech and dependency relation, a new syntax feature of constituency structure is introduced to model the constituent span information which is crucial for IE. Experiments across seven languages on three IE tasks and four benchmarks verify the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method.
PromptNER: A Prompting Method for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via k Nearest Neighbor Search
Zhang, Mozhi, Yan, Hang, Zhou, Yaqian, Qiu, Xipeng
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a task aiming to identify named entities via limited annotated samples. Recently, prototypical networks have shown promising performance in few-shot NER. Most of prototypical networks will utilize the entities from the support set to construct label prototypes and use the query set to compute span-level similarities and optimize these label prototype representations. However, these methods are usually unsuitable for fine-tuning in the target domain, where only the support set is available. In this paper, we propose PromptNER: a novel prompting method for few-shot NER via k nearest neighbor search. We use prompts that contains entity category information to construct label prototypes, which enables our model to fine-tune with only the support set. Our approach achieves excellent transfer learning ability, and extensive experiments on the Few-NERD and CrossNER datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.
IKDSumm: Incorporating Key-phrases into BERT for extractive Disaster Tweet Summarization
Garg, Piyush Kumar, Chakraborty, Roshni, Gupta, Srishti, Dandapat, Sourav Kumar
Online social media platforms, such as Twitter, are one of the most valuable sources of information during disaster events. Therefore, humanitarian organizations, government agencies, and volunteers rely on a summary of this information, i.e., tweets, for effective disaster management. Although there are several existing supervised and unsupervised approaches for automated tweet summary approaches, these approaches either require extensive labeled information or do not incorporate specific domain knowledge of disasters. Additionally, the most recent approaches to disaster summarization have proposed BERT-based models to enhance the summary quality. However, for further improved performance, we introduce the utilization of domain-specific knowledge without any human efforts to understand the importance (salience) of a tweet which further aids in summary creation and improves summary quality. In this paper, we propose a disaster-specific tweet summarization framework, IKDSumm, which initially identifies the crucial and important information from each tweet related to a disaster through key-phrases of that tweet. We identify these key-phrases by utilizing the domain knowledge (using existing ontology) of disasters without any human intervention. Further, we utilize these key-phrases to automatically generate a summary of the tweets. Therefore, given tweets related to a disaster, IKDSumm ensures fulfillment of the summarization key objectives, such as information coverage, relevance, and diversity in summary without any human intervention. We evaluate the performance of IKDSumm with 8 state-of-the-art techniques on 12 disaster datasets. The evaluation results show that IKDSumm outperforms existing techniques by approximately 2-79% in terms of ROUGE-N F1-score.
Inference-time Re-ranker Relevance Feedback for Neural Information Retrieval
Reddy, Revanth Gangi, Dasigi, Pradeep, Sultan, Md Arafat, Cohan, Arman, Sil, Avirup, Ji, Heng, Hajishirzi, Hannaneh
Neural information retrieval often adopts a retrieve-and-rerank framework: a bi-encoder network first retrieves K (e.g., 100) candidates that are then re-ranked using a more powerful cross-encoder model to rank the better candidates higher. The re-ranker generally produces better candidate scores than the retriever, but is limited to seeing only the top K retrieved candidates, thus providing no improvements in retrieval performance as measured by Recall@K. In this work, we leverage the re-ranker to also improve retrieval by providing inference-time relevance feedback to the retriever. Concretely, we update the retriever's query representation for a test instance using a lightweight inference-time distillation of the re-ranker's prediction for that instance. The distillation loss is designed to bring the retriever's candidate scores closer to those of the re-ranker. A second retrieval step is then performed with the updated query vector. We empirically show that our approach, which can serve arbitrary retrieve-and-rerank pipelines, significantly improves retrieval recall in multiple domains, languages, and modalities.
How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?
Pradeep, Ronak, Hui, Kai, Gupta, Jai, Lelkes, Adam D., Zhuang, Honglei, Lin, Jimmy, Metzler, Donald, Tran, Vinh Q.
Popularized by the Differentiable Search Index, the emerging paradigm of generative retrieval re-frames the classic information retrieval problem into a sequence-to-sequence modeling task, forgoing external indices and encoding an entire document corpus within a single Transformer. Although many different approaches have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of generative retrieval, they have only been evaluated on document corpora on the order of 100k in size. We conduct the first empirical study of generative retrieval techniques across various corpus scales, ultimately scaling up to the entire MS MARCO passage ranking task with a corpus of 8.8M passages and evaluating model sizes up to 11B parameters. We uncover several findings about scaling generative retrieval to millions of passages; notably, the central importance of using synthetic queries as document representations during indexing, the ineffectiveness of existing proposed architecture modifications when accounting for compute cost, and the limits of naively scaling model parameters with respect to retrieval performance. While we find that generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, scaling to millions of passages remains an important and unsolved challenge. We believe these findings will be valuable for the community to clarify the current state of generative retrieval, highlight the unique challenges, and inspire new research directions.
Searching by Code: a New SearchBySnippet Dataset and SnippeR Retrieval Model for Searching by Code Snippets
Sedykh, Ivan, Abulkhanov, Dmitry, Sorokin, Nikita, Nikolenko, Sergey, Malykh, Valentin
Code search is an important task that has seen many developments in recent years. However, previous attempts have mostly considered the problem of searching for code by a text query. We argue that using a code snippet (and possibly an associated traceback) as a query and looking for answers with bugfixing instructions and code samples is a natural use case that is not covered by existing approaches. Moreover, existing datasets use comments extracted from code rather than full-text descriptions as text, making them unsuitable for this use case. We present a new SearchBySnippet dataset implementing the search-by-code use case based on StackOverflow data; it turns out that in this setting, existing architectures fall short of the simplest BM25 baseline even after fine-tuning. We present a new single encoder model SnippeR that outperforms several strong baselines on the SearchBySnippet dataset with a result of 0.451 Recall@10; we propose the SearchBySnippet dataset and SnippeR as a new important benchmark for code search evaluation.