Bayesian Information Extraction Network

Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) offer an elegant way to integrate various aspects of language in one model. Many existing algorithms developed for learning and inference in DBNs are applicable to probabilistic language modeling. To demonstrate the potential of DBNs for natural language processing, we employ a DBN in an information extraction task. We show how to assemble wealth of emerging linguistic instruments for shallow parsing, syntactic and semantic tagging, morphological decomposition, named entity recognition etc. in order to incrementally build a robust information extraction system. Our method outperforms previously published results on an established benchmark domain.Comment: 6 page

Semantically-Enhanced Information Extraction

Information Extraction using Natural Language Processing (NLP) produces entities along with some of the relationships that may exist among them. To be semantically useful, however, such discrete extractions must be put into context through some form of intelligent analysis. This paper1,2 offers a two-part architecture that employs the statistical methods of traditional NLP to extract discrete information elements in a relatively domain-agnostic manner, which are then injected into an inference-enabled environment where they can be semantically analyzed. Within this semantic environment, extractions are woven into the contextual fabric of a user-provided, domain-centric ontology where users together with user-provided logic can analyze these extractions within a more contextually complete picture. Our demonstration system infers the possibility of a terrorist plot by extracting key events and relationships from a collection of news articles and intelligence reports

Leveraging Open Information Extraction for More Robust Domain Transfer of Event Trigger Detection

Event detection is a crucial information extraction task in many domains, such as Wikipedia or news. The task typically relies on trigger detection (TD) -- identifying token spans in the text that evoke specific events. While the notion of triggers should ideally be universal across domains, domain transfer for TD from high- to low-resource domains results in significant performance drops. We address the problem of negative transfer in TD by coupling triggers between domains using subject-object relations obtained from a rule-based open information extraction (OIE) system. We demonstrate that OIE relations injected through multi-task training can act as mediators between triggers in different domains, enhancing zero- and few-shot TD domain transfer and reducing performance drops, in particular when transferring from a high-resource source domain (Wikipedia) to a low(er)-resource target domain (news). Additionally, we combine this improved transfer with masked language modeling on the target domain, observing further TD transfer gains. Finally, we demonstrate that the gains are robust to the choice of the OIE system.Comment: Accepted at EACL 2024 Finding

Validating Large Language Models with ReLM

Although large language models (LLMs) have been touted for their ability to generate natural-sounding text, there are growing concerns around possible negative effects of LLMs such as data memorization, bias, and inappropriate language. Unfortunately, the complexity and generation capacities of LLMs make validating (and correcting) such concerns difficult. In this work, we introduce ReLM, a system for validating and querying LLMs using standard regular expressions. ReLM formalizes and enables a broad range of language model evaluations, reducing complex evaluation rules to simple regular expression queries. Our results exploring queries surrounding memorization, gender bias, toxicity, and language understanding show that ReLM achieves up to 15x higher system efficiency, 2.5x data efficiency, and increased statistical and prompt-tuning coverage compared to state-of-the-art ad-hoc queries. ReLM offers a competitive and general baseline for the increasingly important problem of LLM validation

Inference of Regular Expressions for Text Extraction from Examples

A large class of entity extraction tasks from text that is either semistructured or fully unstructured may be addressed by regular expressions, because in many practical cases the relevant entities follow an underlying syntactical pattern and this pattern may be described by a regular expression. In this work we consider the long-standing problem of synthesizing such expressions automatically, based solely on examples of the desired behavior. We present the design and implementation of a system capable of addressing extraction tasks of realistic complexity. Our system is based on an evolutionary procedure carefully tailored to the specific needs of regular expression generation by examples. The procedure executes a search driven by a multiobjective optimization strategy aimed at simultaneously improving multiple performance indexes of candidate solutions while at the same time ensuring an adequate exploration of the huge solution space. We assess our proposal experimentally in great depth, on a number of challenging datasets. The accuracy of the obtained solutions seems to be adequate for practical usage and improves over earlier proposals significantly. Most importantly, our results are highly competitive even with respect to human operators. A prototype is available as a web application at http://regex.inginf.units.it