A Reasoning Paradigm for Named Entity Recognition

Generative LLMs typically improve Named Entity Recognition (NER) performance through instruction tuning. They excel at generating entities by semantic pattern matching but lack an explicit, verifiable reasoning mechanism. This "cognitive shortcutting" leads to suboptimal performance and brittle generalization, especially in zero-shot and lowresource scenarios where reasoning from limited contextual cues is crucial. To address this issue, a reasoning framework is proposed for NER, which shifts the extraction paradigm from implicit pattern matching to explicit reasoning. This framework consists of three stages: Chain of Thought (CoT) generation, CoT tuning, and reasoning enhancement. First, a dataset annotated with NER-oriented CoTs is generated, which contain task-relevant reasoning chains. Then, they are used to tune the NER model to generate coherent rationales before deriving the final answer. Finally, a reasoning enhancement stage is implemented to optimize the reasoning process using a comprehensive reward signal. This stage ensures explicit and verifiable extractions. Experiments show that ReasoningNER demonstrates impressive cognitive ability in the NER task, achieving competitive performance. In zero-shot settings, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming GPT-4 by 12.3 percentage points on the F1 score. Analytical results also demonstrate its great potential to advance research in reasoningoriented information extraction. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HuiResearch/ReasoningIE.

A Two Dimensional Feature Engineering Method for Relation Extraction

Transforming a sentence into a two-dimensional (2D) representation (e.g., the table filling) has the ability to unfold a semantic plane, where an element of the plane is a word-pair representation of a sentence which may denote a possible relation representation composed of two named entities. The 2D representation is effective in resolving overlapped relation instances. However, in related works, the representation is directly transformed from a raw input. It is weak to utilize prior knowledge, which is important to support the relation extraction task. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional feature engineering method in the 2D sentence representation for relation extraction. Our proposed method is evaluated on three public datasets (ACE05 Chinese, ACE05 English, and SanWen) and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The results indicate that two-dimensional feature engineering can take advantage of a two-dimensional sentence representation and make full use of prior knowledge in traditional feature engineering. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Wang-ck123/A-Two-Dimensional-Feature-Engineering-Method-for-Entity-Relation-Extraction

A Bi-consolidating Model for Joint Relational Triple Extraction

Current methods to extract relational triples directly make a prediction based on a possible entity pair in a raw sentence without depending on entity recognition. The task suffers from a serious semantic overlapping problem, in which several relation triples may share one or two entities in a sentence. It is weak to learn discriminative semantic features relevant to a relation triple. In this paper, based on a two-dimensional sentence representation, a bi-consolidating model is proposed to address this problem by simultaneously reinforcing the local and global semantic features relevant to a relation triple. This model consists of a local consolidation component and a global consolidation component. The first component uses a pixel difference convolution to enhance semantic information of a possible triple representation from adjacent regions and mitigate noise in neighbouring neighbours. The second component strengthens the triple representation based a channel attention and a spatial attention, which has the advantage to learn remote semantic dependencies in a sentence. They are helpful to improve the performance of both entity identification and relation type classification in relation triple extraction. After evaluated on several publish datasets, it achieves competitive performance. Analytical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for relational triple extraction and give motivation for other natural language processing tasks.

CausalCellSegmenter: Causal Inference inspired Diversified Aggregation Convolution for Pathology Image Segmentation

Deep learning models have shown promising performance for cell nucleus segmentation in the field of pathology image analysis. However, training a robust model from multiple domains remains a great challenge for cell nucleus segmentation. Additionally, the shortcomings of background noise, highly overlapping between cell nucleus, and blurred edges often lead to poor performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed CausalCellSegmenter, which combines Causal Inference Module (CIM) with Diversified Aggregation Convolution (DAC) techniques. The DAC module is designed which incorporates diverse downsampling features through a simple, parameter-free attention module (SimAM), aiming to overcome the problems of false-positive identification and edge blurring. Furthermore, we introduce CIM to leverage sample weighting by directly removing the spurious correlations between features for every input sample and concentrating more on the correlation between features and labels. Extensive experiments on the MoNuSeg-2018 dataset achieves promising results, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods, where the mIoU and DSC scores growing by 3.6% and 2.65%.

Annotation of Chinese Predicate Heads and Relevant Elements

A predicate head is a verbal expression that plays a role as the structural center of a sentence. Identifying predicate heads is critical to understanding a sentence. It plays the leading role in organizing the relevant syntactic elements in a sentence, including subject elements, adverbial elements, etc. For some languages, such as English, word morphologies are valuable for identifying predicate heads. However, Chinese offers no morphological information to indicate words` grammatical roles. A Chinese sentence often contains several verbal expressions; identifying the expression that plays the role of the predicate head is not an easy task. Furthermore, Chinese sentences are inattentive to structure and provide no delimitation between words. Therefore, identifying Chinese predicate heads involves significant challenges. In Chinese information extraction, little work has been performed in predicate head recognition. No generally accepted evaluation dataset supports work in this important area. This paper presents the first attempt to develop an annotation guideline for Chinese predicate heads and their relevant syntactic elements. This annotation guideline emphasizes the role of the predicate as the structural center of a sentence. The design of relevant syntactic element annotation also follows this principle. Many considerations are proposed to achieve this goal, e.g., patterns of predicate heads, a flattened annotation structure, and a simpler syntactic unit type. Based on the proposed annotation guideline, more than 1,500 documents were manually annotated. The corpus will be available online for public access. With this guideline and annotated corpus, our goal is to broadly impact and advance the research in the area of Chinese information extraction and to provide the research community with a critical resource that has been lacking for a long time.

A Boundary Regression Model for Nested Named Entity Recognition

Recognizing named entities (NEs) is commonly conducted as a classification problem that predicts a class tag for an NE candidate in a sentence. In shallow structures, categorized features are weighted to support the prediction. Recent developments in neural networks have adopted deep structures that map categorized features into continuous representations. This approach unfolds a dense space saturated with high-order abstract semantic information, where the prediction is based on distributed feature representations. In this paper, the regression operation is introduced to locate NEs in a sentence. In this approach, a deep network is first designed to transform an input sentence into recurrent feature maps. Bounding boxes are generated from the feature maps, where a box is an abstract representation of an NE candidate. In addition to the class tag, each bounding box has two parameters denoting the start position and the length of an NE candidate. In the training process, the location offset between a bounding box and a true NE are learned to minimize the location loss. Based on this motivation, a multiobjective learning framework is designed to simultaneously locate entities and predict the class probability. By sharing parameters for locating and predicting, the framework can take full advantage of annotated data and enable more potent nonlinear function approximators to enhance model discriminability. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for nested named entities\footnote{Our codes will be available at: \url{https://github.com/wuyuefei3/BR}}.

An Event Network for Exploring Open Information

In this paper, an event network is presented for exploring open information, where linguistic units about an event are organized for analysing. The process is divided into three steps: document event detection, event network construction and event network analysis. First, by implementing event detection or tracking, documents are retrospectively (or on-line) organized into document events. Secondly, for each of the document event, linguistic units are extracted and combined into event networks. Thirdly, various analytic methods are proposed for event network analysis. In our application methodologies are presented for exploring open information.

Flying Insect Classification with Inexpensive Sensors

The ability to use inexpensive, noninvasive sensors to accurately classify flying insects would have significant implications for entomological research, and allow for the development of many useful applications in vector control for both medical and agricultural entomology. Given this, the last sixty years have seen many research efforts on this task. To date, however, none of this research has had a lasting impact. In this work, we explain this lack of progress. We attribute the stagnation on this problem to several factors, including the use of acoustic sensing devices, the over-reliance on the single feature of wingbeat frequency, and the attempts to learn complex models with relatively little data. In contrast, we show that pseudo-acoustic optical sensors can produce vastly superior data, that we can exploit additional features, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the insect's flight behavior, and that a Bayesian classification approach allows us to efficiently learn classification models that are very robust to over-fitting. We demonstrate our findings with large scale experiments that dwarf all previous works combined, as measured by the number of insects and the number of species considered.