A Survey of Document-Level Information Extraction

Document-level information extraction (IE) is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP). This paper conducts a systematic review of recent document-level IE literature. In addition, we conduct a thorough error analysis with current state-of-the-art algorithms and identify their limitations as well as the remaining challenges for the task of document-level IE. According to our findings, labeling noises, entity coreference resolution, and lack of reasoning, severely affect the performance of document-level IE. The objective of this survey paper is to provide more insights and help NLP researchers to further enhance document-level IE performance.

Mastering the Task of Open Information Extraction with Large Language Models and Consistent Reasoning Environment

Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract objective structured knowledge from natural texts, which has attracted growing attention to build dedicated models with human experience. As the large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable in-context learning capabilities, a question arises as to whether the task of OIE can be effectively tackled with this paradigm? In this paper, we explore solving the OIE problem by constructing an appropriate reasoning environment for LLMs. Specifically, we first propose a method to effectively estimate the discrepancy of syntactic distribution between a LLM and test samples, which can serve as correlation evidence for preparing positive demonstrations. Upon the evidence, we introduce a simple yet effective mechanism to establish the reasoning environment for LLMs on specific tasks. Without bells and whistles, experimental results on the standard CaRB benchmark demonstrate that our $6$-shot approach outperforms state-of-the-art supervised method, achieving an $55.3$ $F_1$ score. Further experiments on TACRED and ACE05 show that our method can naturally generalize to other information extraction tasks, resulting in improvements of $5.7$ and $6.8$ $F_1$ scores, respectively.

An Autoregressive Text-to-Graph Framework for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

In this paper, we propose a novel method for joint entity and relation extraction from unstructured text by framing it as a conditional sequence generation problem. In contrast to conventional generative information extraction models that are left-to-right token-level generators, our approach is \textit{span-based}. It generates a linearized graph where nodes represent text spans and edges represent relation triplets. Our method employs a transformer encoder-decoder architecture with pointing mechanism on a dynamic vocabulary of spans and relation types. Our model can capture the structural characteristics and boundaries of entities and relations through span representations while simultaneously grounding the generated output in the original text thanks to the pointing mechanism. Evaluation on benchmark datasets validates the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating competitive results. Code is available at https://github.com/urchade/ATG.

Open Information Extraction: A Review of Baseline Techniques, Approaches, and Applications

With the abundant amount of available online and offline text data, there arises a crucial need to extract the relation between phrases and summarize the main content of each document in a few words. For this purpose, there have been many studies recently in Open Information Extraction (OIE). OIE improves upon relation extraction techniques by analyzing relations across different domains and avoids requiring hand-labeling pre-specified relations in sentences. This paper surveys recent approaches of OIE and its applications on Knowledge Graph (KG), text summarization, and Question Answering (QA). Moreover, the paper describes OIE basis methods in relation extraction. It briefly discusses the main approaches and the pros and cons of each method. Finally, it gives an overview about challenges, open issues, and future work opportunities for OIE, relation extraction, and OIE applications.

Multimodal Question Answering for Unified Information Extraction

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) aims to extract structured information from unstructured multimedia content. Due to the diversity of tasks and settings, most current MIE models are task-specific and data-intensive, which limits their generalization to real-world scenarios with diverse task requirements and limited labeled data. To address these issues, we propose a novel multimodal question answering (MQA) framework to unify three MIE tasks by reformulating them into a unified span extraction and multi-choice QA pipeline. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that: 1) Our MQA framework consistently and significantly improves the performances of various off-the-shelf large multimodal models (LMM) on MIE tasks, compared to vanilla prompting. 2) In the zero-shot setting, MQA outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin. In addition, the effectiveness of our framework can successfully transfer to the few-shot setting, enhancing LMMs on a scale of 10B parameters to be competitive or outperform much larger language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our MQA framework can serve as a general principle of utilizing LMMs to better solve MIE and potentially other downstream multimodal tasks.

LongFin: A Multimodal Document Understanding Model for Long Financial Domain Documents

Document AI is a growing research field that focuses on the comprehension and extraction of information from scanned and digital documents to make everyday business operations more efficient. Numerous downstream tasks and datasets have been introduced to facilitate the training of AI models capable of parsing and extracting information from various document types such as receipts and scanned forms. Despite these advancements, both existing datasets and models fail to address critical challenges that arise in industrial contexts. Existing datasets primarily comprise short documents consisting of a single page, while existing models are constrained by a limited maximum length, often set at 512 tokens. Consequently, the practical application of these methods in financial services, where documents can span multiple pages, is severely impeded. To overcome these challenges, we introduce LongFin, a multimodal document AI model capable of encoding up to 4K tokens. We also propose the LongForms dataset, a comprehensive financial dataset that encapsulates several industrial challenges in financial documents. Through an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the LongFin model on the LongForms dataset, surpassing the performance of existing public models while maintaining comparable results on existing single-page benchmarks.

YOIO: You Only Iterate Once by mining and fusing multiple necessary global information in the optical flow estimation

Occlusions pose a significant challenge to optical flow algorithms that even rely on global evidences. We consider an occluded point to be one that is imaged in the reference frame but not in the next. Estimating the motion of these points is extremely difficult, particularly in the two-frame setting. Previous work only used the current frame as the only input, which could not guarantee providing correct global reference information for occluded points, and had problems such as long calculation time and poor accuracy in predicting optical flow at occluded points. To enable both high accuracy and efficiency, We fully mine and utilize the spatiotemporal information provided by the frame pair, design a loopback judgment algorithm to ensure that correct global reference information is obtained, mine multiple necessary global information, and design an efficient refinement module that fuses these global information. Specifically, we propose a YOIO framework, which consists of three main components: an initial flow estimator, a multiple global information extraction module, and a unified refinement module. We demonstrate that optical flow estimates in the occluded regions can be significantly improved in only one iteration without damaging the performance in non-occluded regions. Compared with GMA, the optical flow prediction accuracy of this method in the occluded area is improved by more than 10%, and the occ_out area exceeds 15%, while the calculation time is 27% shorter. This approach, running up to 18.9fps with 436*1024 image resolution, obtains new state-of-the-art results on the challenging Sintel dataset among all published and unpublished approaches that can run in real-time, suggesting a new paradigm for accurate and efficient optical flow estimation.

Semantic Information Extraction for Text Data with Probability Graph

In this paper, the problem of semantic information extraction for resource constrained text data transmission is studied. In the considered model, a sequence of text data need to be transmitted within a communication resource-constrained network, which only allows limited data transmission. Thus, at the transmitter, the original text data is extracted with natural language processing techniques. Then, the extracted semantic information is captured in a knowledge graph. An additional probability dimension is introduced in this graph to capture the importance of each information. This semantic information extraction problem is posed as an optimization framework whose goal is to extract most important semantic information for transmission. To find an optimal solution for this problem, a Floyd's algorithm based solution coupled with an efficient sorting mechanism is proposed. Numerical results testify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with regards to two novel performance metrics including semantic uncertainty and semantic similarity.

Concurrent Brainstorming & Hypothesis Satisfying: An Iterative Framework for Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (R2CBR3H-SR)

Addressing the complexity of comprehensive information retrieval, this study introduces an innovative, iterative retrieval-augmented generation system. Our approach uniquely integrates a vector-space driven re-ranking mechanism with concurrent brainstorming to expedite the retrieval of highly relevant documents, thereby streamlining the generation of potential queries. This sets the stage for our novel hybrid process, which synergistically combines hypothesis formulation with satisfying decision-making strategy to determine content adequacy, leveraging a chain of thought-based prompting technique. This unified hypothesize-satisfied phase intelligently distills information to ascertain whether user queries have been satisfactorily addressed. Upon reaching this criterion, the system refines its output into a concise representation, maximizing conceptual density with minimal verbosity. The iterative nature of the workflow enhances process efficiency and accuracy. Crucially, the concurrency within the brainstorming phase significantly accelerates recursive operations, facilitating rapid convergence to solution satisfaction. Compared to conventional methods, our system demonstrates a marked improvement in computational time and cost-effectiveness. This research advances the state-of-the-art in intelligent retrieval systems, setting a new benchmark for resource-efficient information extraction and abstraction in knowledge-intensive applications.

Efficient Data Learning for Open Information Extraction with Pre-trained Language Models

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is a fundamental yet challenging task in Natural Language Processing, which involves extracting all triples (subject, predicate, object) from a given sentence. While labeling-based methods have their merits, generation-based techniques offer unique advantages, such as the ability to generate tokens not present in the original sentence. However, these generation-based methods often require a significant amount of training data to learn the task form of OpenIE and substantial training time to overcome slow model convergence due to the order penalty. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, OK-IE, that ingeniously transforms the task form of OpenIE into the pre-training task form of the T5 model, thereby reducing the need for extensive training data. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative concept of Anchor to control the sequence of model outputs, effectively eliminating the impact of order penalty on model convergence and significantly reducing training time. Experimental results indicate that, compared to previous SOTA methods, OK-IE requires only 1/100 of the training data (900 instances) and 1/120 of the training time (3 minutes) to achieve comparable results.