Embedding models for supervised automatic extraction and classification of named entities in scientific acknowledgements

Acknowledgments in scientific papers may give an insight into aspects of the scientific community, such as reward systems, collaboration patterns, and hidden research trends. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the performance of different embedding models for the task of automatic extraction and classification of acknowledged entities from the acknowledgment text in scientific papers. We trained and implemented a named entity recognition (NER) task using the flair NLP framework. The training was conducted using three default Flair NER models with four differently-sized corpora and different versions of the flair NLP framework. The Flair Embeddings model trained on the medium corpus with the latest FLAIR version showed the best accuracy of 0.79. Expanding the size of a training corpus from very small to medium size massively increased the accuracy of all training algorithms, but further expansion of the training corpus did not bring further improvement. Moreover, the performance of the model slightly deteriorated. Our model is able to recognize six entity types: funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation, and miscellaneous. The model works more precisely for some entity types than for others; thus, individuals and grant numbers showed a very good F1-Score over 0.9. Most of the previous works on acknowledgment analysis were limited by the manual evaluation of data and therefore by the amount of processed data. This model can be applied for the comprehensive analysis of acknowledgment texts and may potentially make a great contribution to the field of automated acknowledgment analysis.Danksagungen in wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten können einen Einblick in Aspekte der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft geben, wie z.B. Belohnungssysteme, Kooperationsmuster und versteckte Forschungstrends. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Leistung verschiedener Einbettungsmodelle für die Aufgabe der automatischen Extraktion und Klassifizierung von anerkannten Entitäten aus dem Danksagungstext in wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zu bewerten

Improved Named Entity Recognition Through SVM-Based Combination

Named Entity Extraction (NER) consists in identifying specific textual expressions, which represent various types of concepts: persons, locations, organizations, etc. It is an important part of natural language processing, because it is often used when building more advanced text-based tools, especially in the context of information extraction. Consequently, many NER tools are now available, designed to handle various sorts of texts, languages and entity types. A recent study on biographical texts showed the overall indices used to assess the performance of these tools hide the fact they can behave rather differently depending on the textual context, and could actually be complementary. In this work, we check this assumption by proposing two methods allowing to combine several NER tools: one relies on a voting process and the other is SVM-based. Both take advantage of a global text feature to guide the combination process. We extend an existing corpus to provide enough data for training and testing. We implement an open source flexible platform aiming at benchmarking NER tools. We apply our combination methods on a selection of NER tools, including state-of-the-art ones, as well as our custom tool specifically designed to process hyperlinked biographical texts. Our results show both proposed combination approaches outmatch the individual performance of all the considered standalone NER tools. Of the two, the SVM-based approach reaches the highest performance

Web knowledge bases

Knowledge is key to natural language understanding. References to specific people, places and things in text are crucial to resolving ambiguity and extracting meaning. Knowledge Bases (KBs) codify this information for automated systems — enabling applications such as entity-based search and question answering. This thesis explores the idea that sites on the web may act as a KB, even if that is not their primary intent. Dedicated kbs like Wikipedia are a rich source of entity information, but are built and maintained at an ongoing cost in human effort. As a result, they are generally limited in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge they index about entities. Web knowledge bases offer a distributed solution to the problem of aggregating entity knowledge. Social networks aggregate content about people, news sites describe events with tags for organizations and locations, and a diverse assortment of web directories aggregate statistics and summaries for long-tail entities notable within niche movie, musical and sporting domains. We aim to develop the potential of these resources for both web-centric entity Information Extraction (IE) and structured KB population. We first investigate the problem of Named Entity Linking (NEL), where systems must resolve ambiguous mentions of entities in text to their corresponding node in a structured KB. We demonstrate that entity disambiguation models derived from inbound web links to Wikipedia are able to complement and in some cases completely replace the role of resources typically derived from the KB. Building on this work, we observe that any page on the web which reliably disambiguates inbound web links may act as an aggregation point for entity knowledge. To uncover these resources, we formalize the task of Web Knowledge Base Discovery (KBD) and develop a system to automatically infer the existence of KB-like endpoints on the web. While extending our framework to multiple KBs increases the breadth of available entity knowledge, we must still consolidate references to the same entity across different web KBs. We investigate this task of Cross-KB Coreference Resolution (KB-Coref) and develop models for efficiently clustering coreferent endpoints across web-scale document collections. Finally, assessing the gap between unstructured web knowledge resources and those of a typical KB, we develop a neural machine translation approach which transforms entity knowledge between unstructured textual mentions and traditional KB structures. The web has great potential as a source of entity knowledge. In this thesis we aim to first discover, distill and finally transform this knowledge into forms which will ultimately be useful in downstream language understanding tasks

An overview of information extraction techniques for legal document analysis and processing

In an Indian law system, different courts publish their legal proceedings every month for future reference of legal experts and common people. Extensive manual labor and time are required to analyze and process the information stored in these lengthy complex legal documents. Automatic legal document processing is the solution to overcome drawbacks of manual processing and will be very helpful to the common man for a better understanding of a legal domain. In this paper, we are exploring the recent advances in the field of legal text processing and provide a comparative analysis of approaches used for it. In this work, we have divided the approaches into three classes NLP based, deep learning-based and, KBP based approaches. We have put special emphasis on the KBP approach as we strongly believe that this approach can handle the complexities of the legal domain well. We finally discuss some of the possible future research directions for legal document analysis and processing

Identification of monolingual and code-switch information from English-Kannada code-switch data

Code-switching is a very common occurrence in social media communication, predominantly found in multilingual countries like India. Using more than one language in communication is known as code-switching or code-mixing. Some of the important applications of code-switch are machine translation (MT), shallow parsing, dialog systems, and semantic parsing. Identifying code-switch and monolingual information is useful for better communication in online networking websites. In this paper, we performed a character level n-gram approach to identify monolingual and code-switch information from English-Kannada social media data. We paralleled various machine learning techniques such as naïve Bayes (NB), support vector classifier (SVC), logistic regression (LR) and neural network (NN) on English-Kannada code-switch (EKCS) data. From the proposed approach, it is observed that the character level n-gram approach provides 1.8% to 4.1% of improvement in terms of Accuracy and 1.6% to 3.8% of improvement in F1-score. Also observed that SVC and NN techniques are outperformed in terms of accuracy (97.9%) and F1-score (98%) with character level n-gram

Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity

This survey addresses the crucial issue of factuality in Large Language Models (LLMs). As LLMs find applications across diverse domains, the reliability and accuracy of their outputs become vital. We define the Factuality Issue as the probability of LLMs to produce content inconsistent with established facts. We first delve into the implications of these inaccuracies, highlighting the potential consequences and challenges posed by factual errors in LLM outputs. Subsequently, we analyze the mechanisms through which LLMs store and process facts, seeking the primary causes of factual errors. Our discussion then transitions to methodologies for evaluating LLM factuality, emphasizing key metrics, benchmarks, and studies. We further explore strategies for enhancing LLM factuality, including approaches tailored for specific domains. We focus two primary LLM configurations standalone LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented LLMs that utilizes external data, we detail their unique challenges and potential enhancements. Our survey offers a structured guide for researchers aiming to fortify the factual reliability of LLMs.Comment: 62 pages; 300+ reference