Material science literature is a rich source of factual information about various categories of entities (like materials and compositions) and various relations between these entities, such as conductivity, voltage, etc. Automatically extracting this information to generate a material science knowledge base is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose MatSciRE (Material Science Relation Extractor), a Pointer Network-based encoder-decoder framework, to jointly extract entities and relations from material science articles as a triplet ($entity1, relation, entity2$). Specifically, we target the battery materials and identify five relations to work on - conductivity, coulombic efficiency, capacity, voltage, and energy. Our proposed approach achieved a much better F1-score (0.771) than a previous attempt using ChemDataExtractor (0.716). The overall graphical framework of MatSciRE is shown in Fig 1. The material information is extracted from material science literature in the form of entity-relation triplets using MatSciRE.

Pre-trained Generative models such as BART, T5, etc. have gained prominence as a preferred method for text generation in various natural language processing tasks, including abstractive long-form question answering (QA) and summarization. However, the potential of generative models in extractive QA tasks, where discriminative models are commonly employed, remains largely unexplored. Discriminative models often encounter challenges associated with label sparsity, particularly when only a small portion of the context contains the answer. The challenge is more pronounced for multi-span answers. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that uses the power of pre-trained generative models to address extractive QA tasks by generating indexes corresponding to context tokens or sentences that form part of the answer. Through comprehensive evaluations on multiple extractive QA datasets, including MultiSpanQA, BioASQ, MASHQA, and WikiQA, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach compared to existing state-of-the-art models.

Extracting relational triples from text is a crucial task for constructing knowledge bases. Recent advancements in joint entity and relation extraction models have demonstrated remarkable F1 scores ($\ge 90\%$) in accurately extracting relational triples from free text. However, these models have been evaluated under restrictive experimental settings and unrealistic datasets. They overlook sentences with zero triples (zero-cardinality), thereby simplifying the task. In this paper, we present a benchmark study of state-of-the-art joint entity and relation extraction models under a more realistic setting. We include sentences that lack any triples in our experiments, providing a comprehensive evaluation. Our findings reveal a significant decline (approximately 10-15\% in one dataset and 6-14\% in another dataset) in the models' F1 scores within this realistic experimental setup. Furthermore, we propose a two-step modeling approach that utilizes a simple BERT-based classifier. This approach leads to overall performance improvement in these models within the realistic experimental setting.

Natural language serves as the primary mode of communication when an intelligent agent with a physical presence engages with human beings. While a plethora of research focuses on natural language understanding (NLU), encompassing endeavors such as sentiment analysis, intent prediction, question answering, and summarization, the scope of NLU directed at situations necessitating tangible actions by an embodied agent remains limited. The inherent ambiguity and incompleteness inherent in natural language present challenges for intelligent agents striving to decipher human intention. To tackle this predicament head-on, we introduce a novel system known as task and argument grounding for Embodied agents (tagE). At its core, our system employs an inventive neural network model designed to extract a series of tasks from complex task instructions expressed in natural language. Our proposed model adopts an encoder-decoder framework enriched with nested decoding to effectively extract tasks and their corresponding arguments from these intricate instructions. These extracted tasks are then mapped (or grounded) to the robot's established collection of skills, while the arguments find grounding in objects present within the environment. To facilitate the training and evaluation of our system, we have curated a dataset featuring complex instructions. The results of our experiments underscore the prowess of our approach, as it outperforms robust baseline models.

Two distinct approaches have been proposed for relational triple extraction - pipeline and joint. Joint models, which capture interactions across triples, are the more recent development, and have been shown to outperform pipeline models for sentence-level extraction tasks. Document-level extraction is a more challenging setting where interactions across triples can be long-range, and individual triples can also span across sentences. Joint models have not been applied for document-level tasks so far. In this paper, we benchmark state-of-the-art pipeline and joint extraction models on sentence-level as well as document-level datasets. Our experiments show that while joint models outperform pipeline models significantly for sentence-level extraction, their performance drops sharply below that of pipeline models for the document-level dataset.

Relation extraction models trained on a source domain cannot be applied on a different target domain due to the mismatch between relation sets. In the current literature, there is no extensive open-source relation extraction dataset specific to the finance domain. In this paper, we release FinRED, a relation extraction dataset curated from financial news and earning call transcripts containing relations from the finance domain. FinRED has been created by mapping Wikidata triplets using distance supervision method. We manually annotate the test data to ensure proper evaluation. We also experiment with various state-of-the-art relation extraction models on this dataset to create the benchmark. We see a significant drop in their performance on FinRED compared to the general relation extraction datasets which tells that we need better models for financial relation extraction.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is the task of extracting triplets of aspect terms, their associated sentiments, and the opinion terms that provide evidence for the expressed sentiments. Previous approaches to ASTE usually simultaneously extract all three components or first identify the aspect and opinion terms, then pair them up to predict their sentiment polarities. In this work, we present a novel paradigm, ASTE-RL, by regarding the aspect and opinion terms as arguments of the expressed sentiment in a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework. We first focus on sentiments expressed in a sentence, then identify the target aspect and opinion terms for that sentiment. This takes into account the mutual interactions among the triplet's components while improving exploration and sample efficiency. Furthermore, this hierarchical RLsetup enables us to deal with multiple and overlapping triplets. In our experiments, we evaluate our model on existing datasets from laptop and restaurant domains and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. The implementation of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/ASTE-RL.