NumHG: A Dataset for Number-Focused Headline Generation

Headline generation, a key task in abstractive summarization, strives to condense a full-length article into a succinct, single line of text. Notably, while contemporary encoder-decoder models excel based on the ROUGE metric, they often falter when it comes to the precise generation of numerals in headlines. We identify the lack of datasets providing fine-grained annotations for accurate numeral generation as a major roadblock. To address this, we introduce a new dataset, the NumHG, and provide over 27,000 annotated numeral-rich news articles for detailed investigation. Further, we evaluate five well-performing models from previous headline generation tasks using human evaluation in terms of numerical accuracy, reasonableness, and readability. Our study reveals a need for improvement in numerical accuracy, demonstrating the potential of the NumHG dataset to drive progress in number-focused headline generation and stimulate further discussions in numeral-focused text generation.

ZARA: Improving Few-Shot Self-Rationalization for Small Language Models

Language models (LMs) that jointly generate end-task answers as well as free-text rationales are known as self-rationalization models. Recent works demonstrate great performance gain for self-rationalization by few-shot prompting LMs with rationale-augmented exemplars. However, the ability to benefit from explanations only emerges with large-scale LMs, which have poor accessibility. In this work, we explore the less-studied setting of leveraging explanations for small LMs to improve few-shot self-rationalization. We first revisit the relationship between rationales and answers. Inspired by the implicit mental process of how human beings assess explanations, we present a novel approach, Zero-shot Augmentation of Rationale-Answer pairs (ZARA), to automatically construct pseudo-parallel data for self-training by reducing the problem of plausibility judgement to natural language inference. Experimental results show ZARA achieves SOTA performance on the FEB benchmark, for both the task accuracy and the explanation metric. In addition, we conduct human and quantitative evaluation validating ZARA's ability to automatically identify plausible and accurate rationale-answer pairs.

LED: A Dataset for Life Event Extraction from Dialogs

Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel conversational life event extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the conversational life event extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed life event dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.

Entity-Aware Dual Co-Attention Network for Fake News Detection

Fake news and misinformation spread rapidly on the Internet. How to identify it and how to interpret the identification results have become important issues. In this paper, we propose a Dual Co-Attention Network (Dual-CAN) for fake news detection, which takes news content, social media replies, and external knowledge into consideration. Our experimental results support that the proposed Dual-CAN outperforms current representative models in two benchmark datasets. We further make in-depth discussions by comparing how models work in both datasets with empirical analysis of attention weights.

Fine-grained Financial Opinion Mining: A Survey and Research Agenda

Opinion mining is a prevalent research issue in many domains. In the financial domain, however, it is still in the early stages. Most of the researches on this topic only focus on the coarse-grained market sentiment analysis, i.e., 2-way classification for bullish/bearish. Thanks to the recent financial technology (FinTech) development, some interdisciplinary researchers start to involve in the in-depth analysis of investors' opinions. In this position paper, we first define the financial opinions from both coarse-grained and fine-grained points of views, and then provide an overview on the issues already tackled. In addition to listing research issues of the existing topics, we further propose a road map of fine-grained financial opinion mining for future researches, and point out several challenges yet to explore. Moreover, we provide possible directions to deal with the proposed research issues.

NLP in FinTech Applications: Past, Present and Future

Financial Technology (FinTech) is one of the worldwide rapidly-rising topics in the past five years according to the statistics of FinTech from Google Trends. In this position paper, we focus on the researches applying natural language processing (NLP) technologies in the finance domain. Our goal is to indicate the position we are now and provide the blueprint for future researches. We go through the application scenarios from three aspects including Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Product (KYP), and Satisfy Your Customer (SYC). Both formal documents and informal textual data are analyzed to understand corporate customers and personal customers. Furthermore, we talk over how to dynamically update the features of products from the prospect and the risk points of view. Finally, we discuss satisfying the customers in both B2C and C2C business models. After summarizing the past and the recent challenges, we highlight several promising future research directions in the trend of FinTech and the open finance tendency.

Numeral Understanding in Financial Tweets for Fine-grained Crowd-based Forecasting

Numerals that contain much information in financial documents are crucial for financial decision making. They play different roles in financial analysis processes. This paper is aimed at understanding the meanings of numerals in financial tweets for fine-grained crowd-based forecasting. We propose a taxonomy that classifies the numerals in financial tweets into 7 categories, and further extend some of these categories into several subcategories. Neural network-based models with word and character-level encoders are proposed for 7-way classification and 17-way classification. We perform backtest to confirm the effectiveness of the numeric opinions made by the crowd. This work is the first attempt to understand numerals in financial social media data, and we provide the first comparison of fine-grained opinion of individual investors and analysts based on their forecast price. The numeral corpus used in our experiments, called FinNum 1.0 , is available for research purposes.