Temporal Knowledge Graphs have emerged as a powerful way of not only modeling static relationships between entities but also the dynamics of how relations evolve over time. As these informational structures can be used to store information from a real-world setting, such as a news flow, predicting future graph components to a certain extent equates predicting real-world events. Most of the research in this field focuses on embedding-based methods, often leveraging convolutional neural net architectures. These solutions act as black boxes, limiting insight. In this paper, we explore an extension to an established rule-based framework, TLogic, that yields a high accuracy in combination with explainable predictions. This offers transparency and allows the end-user to critically evaluate the rules applied at the end of the prediction stage. The new rule format incorporates entity category as a key component with the purpose of limiting rule application only to relevant entities. When categories are unknown for building the graph, we propose a data-driven method to generate them with an LLM-based approach. Additionally, we investigate the choice of aggregation method for scores of retrieved entities when performing category prediction.

In recent years, research has mainly focused on the general NER task. There still have some challenges with nested NER task in the specific domains. Specifically, the scenarios of low resource and class imbalance impede the wide application for biomedical and industrial domains. In this study, we design a novel loss EIoU-EMC, by enhancing the implement of Intersection over Union loss and Multiclass loss. Our proposed method specially leverages the information of entity boundary and entity classification, thereby enhancing the model's capacity to learn from a limited number of data samples. To validate the performance of this innovative method in enhancing NER task, we conducted experiments on three distinct biomedical NER datasets and one dataset constructed by ourselves from industrial complex equipment maintenance documents. Comparing to strong baselines, our method demonstrates the competitive performance across all datasets. During the experimental analysis, our proposed method exhibits significant advancements in entity boundary recognition and entity classification. Our code are available here.

Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of cross-lingual variation in image descriptions. Using a multimodal dataset with 31 languages and images from diverse locations, we develop a method to accurately identify entities mentioned in captions and present in the images, then measure how they vary across languages. Our analysis reveals that pairs of languages that are geographically or genetically closer tend to mention the same entities more frequently. We also identify entity categories whose saliency is universally high (such as animate beings), low (clothing accessories) or displaying high variance across languages (landscape). In a case study, we measure the differences in a specific language pair (e.g., Japanese mentions clothing far more frequently than English). Furthermore, our method corroborates previous small-scale studies, including 1) Rosch et al. (1976)'s theory of basic-level categories, demonstrating a preference for entities that are neither too generic nor too specific, and 2) Miyamoto et al. (2006)'s hypothesis that environments afford patterns of perception, such as entity counts. Overall, our work reveals the presence of both universal and culture-specific patterns in entity mentions.

Key Information Extraction (KIE) is a challenging multimodal task that aims to extract structured value semantic entities from visually rich documents. Although significant progress has been made, there are still two major challenges that need to be addressed. Firstly, the layout of existing datasets is relatively fixed and limited in the number of semantic entity categories, creating a significant gap between these datasets and the complex real-world scenarios. Secondly, existing methods follow a two-stage pipeline strategy, which may lead to the error propagation problem. Additionally, they are difficult to apply in situations where unseen semantic entity categories emerge. To address the first challenge, we propose a new large-scale human-annotated dataset named Complex Layout form for key information EXtraction (CLEX), which consists of 5,860 images with 1,162 semantic entity categories. To solve the second challenge, we introduce Parallel Pointer-based Network (PPN), an end-to-end model that can be applied in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. PPN leverages the implicit clues between semantic entities to assist extracting, and its parallel extraction mechanism allows it to extract multiple results simultaneously and efficiently. Experiments on the CLEX dataset demonstrate that PPN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods while also offering a much faster inference speed.

This preprint specifies and defines all the Terms, Properties, and Relationships of NFRsTDO (Non-Functional Requirements Top-Domain Ontology). NFRsTDO v1.2, whose UML conceptualization is shown in Figure 1 is a slightly updated version of its predecessor, namely NFRsTDO v1.1. NFRsTDO is an ontology mainly devoted to quality (non-functional) requirements and quality/cost views, which is placed at the top-domain level in the context of a multilayer ontological architecture called FCD-OntoArch (Foundational, Core, Domain, and instance Ontological Architecture for sciences). Figure 2 depicts its five tiers, which entail Foundational, Core, Top-Domain, Low-Domain, and Instance. Each level is populated with ontological components or, in other words, ontologies. Ontologies at the same level can be related to each other, except at the foundational level, where only ThingFO (Thing Foundational Ontology) is found. In addition, ontologies' terms and relationships at lower levels can be semantically enriched by ontologies' terms and relationships from the higher levels. NFRsTDO's terms and relationships are mainly extended/reused from ThingFO, SituationCO (Situation Core Ontology), ProcessCO (Process Core Ontology), and FRsTDO (Functional Requirements Top-Domain Ontology). Stereotypes are the used mechanism for enriching NFRsTDO terms. Note that annotations of updates from the previous version (NFRsTDO v1.1) to the current one (v1.2) can be found in Appendix A.

While Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a widely studied task, making inferences of entities with only a few labeled data has been challenging, especially for entities with nested structures. Unlike flat entities, entities and their nested entities are more likely to have similar semantic feature representations, drastically increasing difficulties in classifying different entity categories in the few-shot setting. Although prior work has briefly discussed nested structures in the context of few-shot learning, to our best knowledge, this paper is the first one specifically dedicated to studying the few-shot nested NER task. Leveraging contextual dependency to distinguish nested entities, we propose a Biaffine-based Contrastive Learning (BCL) framework. We first design a Biaffine span representation module for learning the contextual span dependency representation for each entity span rather than only learning its semantic representation. We then merge these two representations by the residual connection to distinguish nested entities. Finally, we build a contrastive learning framework to adjust the representation distribution for larger margin boundaries and more generalized domain transfer learning ability. We conducted experimental studies on three English, German, and Russian nested NER datasets. The results show that the BCL outperformed three baseline models on the 1-shot and 5-shot tasks in terms of F1 score.

Most Named Entity Recognition (NER) models operate under the assumption that training datasets are fully labelled. While it is valid for established datasets like CoNLL 2003 and OntoNotes, sometimes it is not feasible to obtain the complete dataset annotation. These situations may occur, for instance, after selective annotation of entities for cost reduction. This work presents an approach to finetuning BERT on such partially labelled datasets using self-supervision and label preprocessing. Our approach outperforms the previous LSTM-based label preprocessing baseline, significantly improving the performance on poorly labelled datasets. We demonstrate that following our approach while finetuning RoBERTa on CoNLL 2003 dataset with only 10% of total entities labelled is enough to reach the performance of the baseline trained on the same dataset with 50% of the entities labelled.

Recognizing useful named entities plays a vital role in medical information processing, which helps drive the development of medical area research. Deep learning methods have achieved good results in medical named entity recognition (NER). However, we find that existing methods face great challenges when dealing with the nested named entities. In this work, we propose a novel method, referred to as ASAC, to solve the dilemma caused by the nested phenomenon, in which the core idea is to model the dependency between different categories of entity recognition. The proposed method contains two key modules: the adaptive shared (AS) part and the attentive conditional random field (ACRF) module. The former part automatically assigns adaptive weights across each task to achieve optimal recognition accuracy in the multi-layer network. The latter module employs the attention operation to model the dependency between different entities. In this way, our model could learn better entity representations by capturing the implicit distinctions and relationships between different categories of entities. Extensive experiments on public datasets verify the effectiveness of our method. Besides, we also perform ablation analyses to deeply understand our methods.

Being able to train Named Entity Recognition (NER) models for emerging topics is crucial for many real-world applications especially in the medical domain where new topics are continuously evolving out of the scope of existing models and datasets. For a realistic evaluation setup, we introduce a novel COVID-19 news NER dataset (COVIDNEWS-NER) and release 3000 entries of hand annotated strongly labelled sentences and 13000 auto-generated weakly labelled sentences. Besides the dataset, we propose CONTROSTER, a recipe to strategically combine weak and strong labels in improving NER in an emerging topic through transfer learning. We show the effectiveness of CONTROSTER on COVIDNEWS-NER while providing analysis on combining weak and strong labels for training. Our key findings are: (1) Using weak data to formulate an initial backbone before tuning on strong data outperforms methods trained on only strong or weak data. (2) A combination of out-of-domain and in-domain weak label training is crucial and can overcome saturation when being training on weak labels from a single source.

Most NER methods rely on extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in the low-resource scenarios with limited training data. Existing dominant approaches usually suffer from the challenge that the target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain, which can be concluded as class transfer and domain transfer. In this paper, we propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting (LightNER). Specifically, we construct the unified learnable verbalizer of entity categories to generate the entity span sequence and entity categories without any label-specific classifiers, thus addressing the class transfer issue. We further propose a pluggable guidance module by incorporating learnable parameters into the self-attention layer as guidance, which can re-modulate the attention and adapt pre-trained weights. Note that we only tune those inserted module with the whole parameter of the pre-trained language model fixed, thus, making our approach lightweight and flexible for low-resource scenarios and can better transfer knowledge across domains. Experimental results show that LightNER can obtain comparable performance in the standard supervised setting and outperform strong baselines in low-resource settings. Code is in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/ner/few-shot.