An attentive neural architecture for joint segmentation and parsing and its application to real estate ads

In processing human produced text using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, two fundamental subtasks that arise are (i) segmentation of the plain text into meaningful subunits (e.g., entities), and (ii) dependency parsing, to establish relations between subunits. In this paper, we develop a relatively simple and effective neural joint model that performs both segmentation and dependency parsing together, instead of one after the other as in most state-of-the-art works. We will focus in particular on the real estate ad setting, aiming to convert an ad to a structured description, which we name property tree, comprising the tasks of (1) identifying important entities of a property (e.g., rooms) from classifieds and (2) structuring them into a tree format. In this work, we propose a new joint model that is able to tackle the two tasks simultaneously and construct the property tree by (i) avoiding the error propagation that would arise from the subtasks one after the other in a pipelined fashion, and (ii) exploiting the interactions between the subtasks. For this purpose, we perform an extensive comparative study of the pipeline methods and the new proposed joint model, reporting an improvement of over three percentage points in the overall edge F1 score of the property tree. Also, we propose attention methods, to encourage our model to focus on salient tokens during the construction of the property tree. Thus we experimentally demonstrate the usefulness of attentive neural architectures for the proposed joint model, showcasing a further improvement of two percentage points in edge F1 score for our application.Comment: Preprint - Accepted for publication in Expert Systems with Application

Information Extraction, Data Integration, and Uncertain Data Management: The State of The Art

Information Extraction, data Integration, and uncertain data management are different areas of research that got vast focus in the last two decades. Many researches tackled those areas of research individually. However, information extraction systems should have integrated with data integration methods to make use of the extracted information. Handling uncertainty in extraction and integration process is an important issue to enhance the quality of the data in such integrated systems. This article presents the state of the art of the mentioned areas of research and shows the common grounds and how to integrate information extraction and data integration under uncertainty management cover

Jointly Multiple Events Extraction via Attention-based Graph Information Aggregation

Event extraction is of practical utility in natural language processing. In the real world, it is a common phenomenon that multiple events existing in the same sentence, where extracting them are more difficult than extracting a single event. Previous works on modeling the associations between events by sequential modeling methods suffer a lot from the low efficiency in capturing very long-range dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel Jointly Multiple Events Extraction (JMEE) framework to jointly extract multiple event triggers and arguments by introducing syntactic shortcut arcs to enhance information flow and attention-based graph convolution networks to model graph information. The experiment results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods.Comment: accepted by EMNLP 201