An Empirical Study on Finding Spans

Weiwei Gu, Boyuan Zheng, Yunmo Chen, Tongfei Chen, Benjamin Van Durme


Abstract
We present an empirical study on methods for span finding, the selection of consecutive tokens in text for some downstream tasks. We focus on approaches that can be employed in training end-to-end information extraction systems, and find there is no definitive solution without considering task properties, and provide our observations to help with future design choices: 1) a tagging approach often yields higher precision while span enumeration and boundary prediction provide higher recall; 2) span type information can benefit a boundary prediction approach; 3) additional contextualization does not help span finding in most cases.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.264
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3976–3983
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.264
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.264
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weiwei Gu, Boyuan Zheng, Yunmo Chen, Tongfei Chen, and Benjamin Van Durme. 2022. An Empirical Study on Finding Spans. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3976–3983, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Study on Finding Spans (Gu et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.264.pdf