Acronym extraction aims to find acronyms (i.e., short-forms) and their meanings (i.e., long-forms) from the documents, which is important for scientific document understanding (SDU@AAAI-22) tasks. Previous works are devoted to modeling this task as a paragraph-level sequence labeling problem. However, it lacks the effective use of the external knowledge, especially when the datasets are in a low-resource setting. Recently, the prompt-based method with the vast pre-trained language model can significantly enhance the performance of the low-resourced downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a Prompt-based Sequence Generation (PSG) method for the acronym extraction task. Specifically, we design a template for prompting the extracted acronym texts with auto-regression. A position extraction algorithm is designed for extracting the position of the generated answers. The results on the acronym extraction of Vietnamese and Persian in a low-resource setting show that the proposed method outperforms all other competitive state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
Acronym disambiguation means finding the correct meaning of an ambiguous acronym from the dictionary in a given sentence, which is one of the key points for scientific document understanding (SDU@AAAI-22). Recently, many attempts have tried to solve this problem via fine-tuning the pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) in order to obtain a better acronym representation. However, the acronym meaning is varied under different contexts, whose corresponding phrase representation mapped in different directions lacks discrimination in the entire vector space. Thus, the original representations of the pre-trained MLMs are not ideal for the acronym disambiguation task. In this paper, we propose a Simple framework for Contrastive Learning of Acronym Disambiguation (SimCLAD) method to better understand the acronym meanings. Specifically, we design a continual contrastive pre-training method that enhances the pre-trained model's generalization ability by learning the phrase-level contrastive distributions between true meaning and ambiguous phrases. The results on the acronym disambiguation of the scientific domain in English show that the proposed method outperforms all other competitive state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
Scientific documents often contain a large number of acronyms. Disambiguation of these acronyms will help researchers better understand the meaning of vocabulary in the documents. In the past, thanks to large amounts of data from English literature, acronym task was mainly applied in English literature. However, for other low-resource languages, this task is difficult to obtain good performance and receives less attention due to the lack of large amount of annotation data. To address the above issue, this paper proposes an new method for acronym disambiguation, named as ADBCMM, which can significantly improve the performance of low-resource languages by building counterfactuals and multilingual mixing. Specifically, by balancing data bias in low-resource langauge, ADBCMM will able to improve the test performance outside the data set. In SDU@AAAI-22 - Shared Task 2: Acronym Disambiguation, the proposed method won first place in French and Spanish. You can repeat our results here https://github.com/WENGSYX/ADBCMM.