Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) KPIs assess an organization's performance on issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, waste management, human rights, diversity, and policies. ESG reports convey this valuable quantitative information through tables. Unfortunately, extracting this information is difficult due to high variability in the table structure as well as content. We propose Statements, a novel domain agnostic data structure for extracting quantitative facts and related information. We propose translating tables to statements as a new supervised deep-learning universal information extraction task. We introduce SemTabNet - a dataset of over 100K annotated tables. Investigating a family of T5-based Statement Extraction Models, our best model generates statements which are 82% similar to the ground-truth (compared to baseline of 21%). We demonstrate the advantages of statements by applying our model to over 2700 tables from ESG reports. The homogeneous nature of statements permits exploratory data analysis on expansive information found in large collections of ESG reports.
We present a novel method for relation extraction (RE) from a single sentence, mapping the sentence and two given entities to a canonical fact in a knowledge graph (KG). Especially in this presumed sentential RE setting, the context of a single sentence is often sparse. This paper introduces the KGPool method to address this sparsity, dynamically expanding the context with additional facts from the KG. It learns the representation of these facts (entity alias, entity descriptions, etc.) using neural methods, supplementing the sentential context. Unlike existing methods that statically use all expanded facts, KGPool conditions this expansion on the sentence. We study the efficacy of KGPool by evaluating it with different neural models and KGs (Wikidata and NYT Freebase). Our experimental evaluation on standard datasets shows that by feeding the KGPool representation into a Graph Neural Network, the overall method is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.
Label noise and long-tailed distributions are two major challenges in distantly supervised relation extraction. Recent studies have shown great progress on denoising, but paid little attention to the problem of long-tailed relations. In this paper, we introduce a constraint graph to model the dependencies between relation labels. On top of that, we further propose a novel constraint graph-based relation extraction framework(CGRE) to handle the two challenges simultaneously. CGRE employs graph convolution networks to propagate information from data-rich relation nodes to data-poor relation nodes, and thus boosts the representation learning of long-tailed relations. To further improve the noise immunity, a constraint-aware attention module is designed in CGRE to integrate the constraint information. Extensive experimental results indicate that CGRE achieves significant improvements over the previous methods for both denoising and long-tailed relation extraction. The pre-processed datasets and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/tmliang/CGRE.
Distantly-supervised relation extraction (RE) is an effective method to scale RE to large corpora but suffers from noisy labels. Existing approaches try to alleviate noise through multi-instance learning and by providing additional information, but manage to recognize mainly the top frequent relations, neglecting those in the long-tail. We propose REDSandT (Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision and Transformers), a novel distantly-supervised transformer-based RE method, that manages to capture a wider set of relations through highly informative instance and label embeddings for RE, by exploiting BERT's pre-trained model, and the relationship between labels and entities, respectively. We guide REDSandT to focus solely on relational tokens by fine-tuning BERT on a structured input, including the sub-tree connecting an entity pair and the entities' types. Using the extracted informative vectors, we shape label embeddings, which we also use as attention mechanism over instances to further reduce noise. Finally, we represent sentences by concatenating relation and instance embeddings. Experiments in the NYT-10 dataset show that REDSandT captures a broader set of relations with higher confidence, achieving state-of-the-art AUC (0.424).
Distant supervision (DS) is a promising approach for relation extraction but often suffers from the noisy label problem. Traditional DS methods usually represent an entity pair as a bag of sentences and denoise labels using multi-instance learning techniques. The bag-based paradigm, however, fails to leverage the inter-sentence-level and the entity-level evidence for relation extraction, and their denoising algorithms are often specialized and complicated. In this paper, we propose a new DS paradigm--document-based distant supervision, which models relation extraction as a document-based machine reading comprehension (MRC) task. By re-organizing all sentences about an entity as a document and extracting relations via querying the document with relation-specific questions, the document-based DS paradigm can simultaneously encode and exploit all sentence-level, inter-sentence-level, and entity-level evidence. Furthermore, we design a new loss function--DSLoss (distant supervision loss), which can effectively train MRC models using only $\langle$document, question, answer$\rangle$ tuples, therefore noisy label problem can be inherently resolved. Experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art DS performance.
In this paper, we present a novel method named RECON, that automatically identifies relations in a sentence (sentential relation extraction) and aligns to a knowledge graph (KG). RECON uses a graph neural network to learn representations of both the sentence as well as facts stored in a KG, improving the overall extraction quality. These facts, including entity attributes (label, alias, description, instance-of) and factual triples, have not been collectively used in the state of the art methods. We evaluate the effect of various forms of representing the KG context on the performance of RECON. The empirical evaluation on two standard relation extraction datasets shows that RECON significantly outperforms all state of the art methods on NYT Freebase and Wikidata datasets. RECON reports 87.23 F1 score (Vs 82.29 baseline) on Wikidata dataset whereas on NYT Freebase, reported values are 87.5(P@10) and 74.1(P@30) compared to the previous baseline scores of 81.3(P@10) and 63.1(P@30).
Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction (RE) methods train an extractor by automatically aligning relation instances in a Knowledge Base (KB) with unstructured text. In addition to relation instances, KBs often contain other relevant side information, such as aliases of relations (e.g., founded and co-founded are aliases for the relation founderOfCompany). RE models usually ignore such readily available side information. In this paper, we propose RESIDE, a distantly-supervised neural relation extraction method which utilizes additional side information from KBs for improved relation extraction. It uses entity type and relation alias information for imposing soft constraints while predicting relations. RESIDE employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode syntactic information from text and improves performance even when limited side information is available. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate RESIDE's effectiveness. We have made RESIDE's source code available to encourage reproducible research.
Extracting relations is critical for knowledge base completion and construction in which distant supervised methods are widely used to extract relational facts automatically with the existing knowledge bases. However, the automatically constructed datasets comprise amounts of low-quality sentences containing noisy words, which is neglected by current distant supervised methods resulting in unacceptable precisions. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel word-level distant supervised approach for relation extraction. We first build Sub-Tree Parse(STP) to remove noisy words that are irrelevant to relations. Then we construct a neural network inputting the sub-tree while applying the entity-wise attention to identify the important semantic features of relational words in each instance. To make our model more robust against noisy words, we initialize our network with a priori knowledge learned from the relevant task of entity classification by transfer learning. We conduct extensive experiments using the corpora of New York Times(NYT) and Freebase. Experiments show that our approach is effective and improves the area of Precision/Recall(PR) from 0.35 to 0.39 over the state-of-the-art work.
The Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF) project was used to extract important information from medical texts by building a system for the purpose of clinical research, evidence-based healthcare and genotype-meets-phenotype informatics. The system is divided into two parts, one part concerns with the identification of relationships between clinically important entities in the text. The full parses and domain-specific grammars had been used to apply many approaches to extract the relationship. In the second part of the system, statistical machine learning (ML) approaches are applied to extract relationship. A corpus of oncology narratives that hand annotated with clinical relationships can be used to train and test a system that has been designed and implemented by supervised machine learning (ML) approaches. Many features can be extracted from these texts that are used to build a model by the classifier. Multiple supervised machine learning algorithms can be applied for relationship extraction. Effects of adding the features, changing the size of the corpus, and changing the type of the algorithm on relationship extraction are examined. Keywords: Text mining; information extraction; NLP; entities; and relations.
The problem of spatiotemporal event visualization based on reports entails subtasks ranging from named entity recognition to relationship extraction and mapping of events. We present an approach to event extraction that is driven by data mining and visualization goals, particularly thematic mapping and trend analysis. This paper focuses on bridging the information extraction and visualization tasks and investigates topic modeling approaches. We develop a static, finite topic model and examine the potential benefits and feasibility of extending this to dynamic topic modeling with a large number of topics and continuous time. We describe an experimental test bed for event mapping that uses this end-to-end information retrieval system, and report preliminary results on a geoinformatics problem: tracking of methamphetamine lab seizure events across time and space.
The number of scientific papers grows exponentially in many disciplines. The share of online available papers grows as well. At the same time, the period of time for a paper to loose at chance to be cited anymore shortens. The decay of the citing rate shows similarity to ultradiffusional processes as for other online contents in social networks. The distribution of papers per author shows similarity to the distribution of posts per user in social networks. The rate of uncited papers for online available papers grows while some papers 'go viral' in terms of being cited. Summarized, the practice of scientific publishing moves towards the domain of social networks. The goal of this project is to create a text engineering tool, which can semi-automatically categorize a paper according to its type of contribution and extract relationships between them into an ontological database. Semi-automatic categorization means that the mistakes made by automatic pre-categorization and relationship-extraction will be corrected through a wikipedia-like front-end by volunteers from general public. This tool should not only help researchers and the general public to find relevant supplementary material and peers faster, but also provide more information for research funding agencies.
Relation extraction is the problem of classifying the relationship between two entities in a given sentence. Distant Supervision (DS) is a popular technique for developing relation extractors starting with limited supervision. We note that most of the sentences in the distant supervision relation extraction setting are very long and may benefit from word attention for better sentence representation. Our contributions in this paper are threefold. Firstly, we propose two novel word attention models for distantly- supervised relation extraction: (1) a Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) based word attention model (BGWA), (2) an entity-centric attention model (EA), and (3) a combination model which combines multiple complementary models using weighted voting method for improved relation extraction. Secondly, we introduce GDS, a new distant supervision dataset for relation extraction. GDS removes test data noise present in all previous distant- supervision benchmark datasets, making credible automatic evaluation possible. Thirdly, through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Semi-supervised bootstrapping techniques for relationship extraction from text iteratively expand a set of initial seed instances. Due to the lack of labeled data, a key challenge in bootstrapping is semantic drift: if a false positive instance is added during an iteration, then all following iterations are contaminated. We introduce BREX, a new bootstrapping method that protects against such contamination by highly effective confidence assessment. This is achieved by using entity and template seeds jointly (as opposed to just one as in previous work), by expanding entities and templates in parallel and in a mutually constraining fashion in each iteration and by introducing higherquality similarity measures for templates. Experimental results show that BREX achieves an F1 that is 0.13 (0.87 vs. 0.74) better than the state of the art for four relationships.