Visually Guided Generative Text-Layout Pre-training for Document Intelligence

Prior study shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU), which typically requires models to gain abilities to perceive and reason both document texts and layouts (e.g., locations of texts and table-cells). To this end, we propose visually guided generative text-layout pre-training, named ViTLP. Given a document image, the model optimizes hierarchical language and layout modeling objectives to generate the interleaved text and layout sequence. In addition, to address the limitation of processing long documents by Transformers, we introduce a straightforward yet effective multi-segment generative pre-training scheme, facilitating ViTLP to process word-intensive documents of any length. ViTLP can function as a native OCR model to localize and recognize texts of document images. Besides, ViTLP can be effectively applied to various downstream VDU tasks. Extensive experiments show that ViTLP achieves competitive performance over existing baselines on benchmark VDU tasks, including information extraction, document classification, and document question answering.

On the use of Silver Standard Data for Zero-shot Classification Tasks in Information Extraction

The superior performance of supervised classification methods in the information extraction (IE) area heavily relies on a large amount of gold standard data. Recent zero-shot classification methods converted the task to other NLP tasks (e.g., textual entailment) and used off-the-shelf models of these NLP tasks to directly perform inference on the test data without using a large amount of IE annotation data. A potentially valuable by-product of these methods is the large-scale silver standard data, i.e., pseudo-labeled data by the off-the-shelf models of other NLP tasks. However, there is no further investigation into the use of these data. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Clean-LaVe, which aims to utilize silver standard data to enhance the zero-shot performance. Clean-LaVe includes four phases: (1) Obtaining silver data; (2) Identifying relatively clean data from silver data; (3) Finetuning the off-the-shelf model using clean data; (4) Inference on the test data. The experimental results show that Clean-LaVe can outperform the baseline by 5% and 6% on TACRED and Wiki80 dataset in the zero-shot relation classification task, and by 3%-7% on Smile (Korean and Polish) in the zero-shot cross-lingual relation classification task, and by 8% on ACE05-E+ in the zero-shot event argument classification task. The code is share in https://github.com/wjw136/Clean_LaVe.git.

Event Grounded Criminal Court View Generation withCooperative (Large) Language Models

With the development of legal intelligence, Criminal Court View Generation has attracted much attention as a crucial task of legal intelligence, which aims to generate concise and coherent texts that summarize case facts and provide explanations for verdicts. Existing researches explore the key information in case facts to yield the court views. Most of them employ a coarse-grained approach that partitions the facts into broad segments (e.g., verdict-related sentences) to make predictions. However, this approach fails to capture the complex details present in the case facts, such as various criminal elements and legal events. To this end, in this paper, we propose an Event Grounded Generation (EGG) method for criminal court view generation with cooperative (Large) Language Models, which introduces the fine-grained event information into the generation. Specifically, we first design a LLMs-based extraction method that can extract events in case facts without massive annotated events. Then, we incorporate the extracted events into court view generation by merging case facts and events. Besides, considering the computational burden posed by the use of LLMs in the extraction phase of EGG, we propose a LLMs-free EGG method that can eliminate the requirement for event extraction using LLMs in the inference phase. Extensive experimental results on a real-world dataset clearly validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Embedded Named Entity Recognition using Probing Classifiers

Extracting semantic information from generated text is a useful tool for applications such as automated fact checking or retrieval augmented generation. Currently, this requires either separate models during inference, which increases computational cost, or destructive fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, we propose directly embedding information extraction capabilities into pre-trained language models using probing classifiers, enabling efficient simultaneous text generation and information extraction. For this, we introduce an approach called EMBER and show that it enables named entity recognition in decoder-only language models without fine-tuning them and while incurring minimal additional computational cost at inference time. Specifically, our experiments using GPT-2 show that EMBER maintains high token generation rates during streaming text generation, with only a negligible decrease in speed of around 1% compared to a 43.64% slowdown measured for a baseline using a separate NER model. Code and data are available at https://github.com/nicpopovic/EMBER.

LLMs in HCI Data Work: Bridging the Gap Between Information Retrieval and Responsible Research Practices

Efficient and accurate information extraction from scientific papers is significant in the rapidly developing human-computer interaction research in the literature review process. Our paper introduces and analyses a new information retrieval system using state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with structured text analysis techniques to extract experimental data from HCI literature, emphasizing key elements. Then We analyze the challenges and risks of using LLMs in the world of research. We performed a comprehensive analysis on our conducted dataset, which contained the specified information of 300 CHI 2020-2022 papers, to evaluate the performance of the two large language models, GPT-3.5 (text-davinci-003) and Llama-2-70b, paired with structured text analysis techniques. The GPT-3.5 model gains an accuracy of 58\% and a mean absolute error of 7.00. In contrast, the Llama2 model indicates an accuracy of 56\% with a mean absolute error of 7.63. The ability to answer questions was also included in the system in order to work with streamlined data. By evaluating the risks and opportunities presented by LLMs, our work contributes to the ongoing dialogue on establishing methodological validity and ethical guidelines for LLM use in HCI data work.

LRNet: Change detection of high-resolution remote sensing imagery via strategy of localization-then-refinement

Change detection, as a research hotspot in the field of remote sensing, has witnessed continuous development and progress. However, the discrimination of boundary details remains a significant bottleneck due to the complexity of surrounding elements between change areas and backgrounds. Discriminating the boundaries of large change areas results in misalignment, while connecting boundaries occurs for small change targets. To address the above issues, a novel network based on the localization-then-refinement strategy is proposed in this paper, namely LRNet. LRNet consists of two stages: localization and refinement. In the localization stage, a three-branch encoder simultaneously extracts original image features and their differential features for interactive localization of the position of each change area. To minimize information loss during feature extraction, learnable optimal pooling (LOP) is proposed to replace the widely used max-pooling. Additionally, this process is trainable and contributes to the overall optimization of the network. To effectively interact features from different branches and accurately locate change areas of various sizes, change alignment attention (C2A) and hierarchical change alignment module (HCA) are proposed. In the refinement stage, the localization results from the localization stage are corrected by constraining the change areas and change edges through the edge-area alignment module (E2A). Subsequently, the decoder, combined with the difference features strengthened by C2A in the localization phase, refines change areas of different sizes, ultimately achieving accurate boundary discrimination of change areas. The proposed LRNet outperforms 13 other state-of-the-art methods in terms of comprehensive evaluation metrics and provides the most precise boundary discrimination results on the LEVIR-CD and WHU-CD datasets.

Causality Extraction from Nuclear Licensee Event Reports Using a Hybrid Framework

Industry-wide nuclear power plant operating experience is a critical source of raw data for performing parameter estimations in reliability and risk models. Much operating experience information pertains to failure events and is stored as reports containing unstructured data, such as narratives. Event reports are essential for understanding how failures are initiated and propagated, including the numerous causal relations involved. Causal relation extraction using deep learning represents a significant frontier in the field of natural language processing (NLP), and is crucial since it enables the interpretation of intricate narratives and connections contained within vast amounts of written information. This paper proposed a hybrid framework for causality detection and extraction from nuclear licensee event reports. The main contributions include: (1) we compiled an LER corpus with 20,129 text samples for causality analysis, (2) developed an interactive tool for labeling cause effect pairs, (3) built a deep-learning-based approach for causal relation detection, and (4) developed a knowledge based cause-effect extraction approach.

MRC-based Nested Medical NER with Co-prediction and Adaptive Pre-training

In medical information extraction, medical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is indispensable, playing a crucial role in developing medical knowledge graphs, enhancing medical question-answering systems, and analyzing electronic medical records. The challenge in medical NER arises from the complex nested structures and sophisticated medical terminologies, distinguishing it from its counterparts in traditional domains. In response to these complexities, we propose a medical NER model based on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which uses a task-adaptive pre-training strategy to improve the model's capability in the medical field. Meanwhile, our model introduces multiple word-pair embeddings and multi-granularity dilated convolution to enhance the model's representation ability and uses a combined predictor of Biaffine and MLP to improve the model's recognition performance. Experimental evaluations conducted on the CMeEE, a benchmark for Chinese nested medical NER, demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the compared state-of-the-art (SOTA) models.

KC-GenRe: A Knowledge-constrained Generative Re-ranking Method Based on Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion

The goal of knowledge graph completion (KGC) is to predict missing facts among entities. Previous methods for KGC re-ranking are mostly built on non-generative language models to obtain the probability of each candidate. Recently, generative large language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance on several tasks such as information extraction and dialog systems. Leveraging them for KGC re-ranking is beneficial for leveraging the extensive pre-trained knowledge and powerful generative capabilities. However, it may encounter new problems when accomplishing the task, namely mismatch, misordering and omission. To this end, we introduce KC-GenRe, a knowledge-constrained generative re-ranking method based on LLMs for KGC. To overcome the mismatch issue, we formulate the KGC re-ranking task as a candidate identifier sorting generation problem implemented by generative LLMs. To tackle the misordering issue, we develop a knowledge-guided interactive training method that enhances the identification and ranking of candidates. To address the omission issue, we design a knowledge-augmented constrained inference method that enables contextual prompting and controlled generation, so as to obtain valid rankings. Experimental results show that KG-GenRe achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets, with gains of up to 6.7% and 7.7% in the MRR and Hits@1 metric compared to previous methods, and 9.0% and 11.1% compared to that without re-ranking. Extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of components in KG-GenRe.

Automating the Information Extraction from Semi-Structured Interview Transcripts

This paper explores the development and application of an automated system designed to extract information from semi-structured interview transcripts. Given the labor-intensive nature of traditional qualitative analysis methods, such as coding, there exists a significant demand for tools that can facilitate the analysis process. Our research investigates various topic modeling techniques and concludes that the best model for analyzing interview texts is a combination of BERT embeddings and HDBSCAN clustering. We present a user-friendly software prototype that enables researchers, including those without programming skills, to efficiently process and visualize the thematic structure of interview data. This tool not only facilitates the initial stages of qualitative analysis but also offers insights into the interconnectedness of topics revealed, thereby enhancing the depth of qualitative analysis.