The output structure of database-like tables, consisting of values structured in horizontal rows and vertical columns identifiable by name, can cover a wide range of NLP tasks. Following this constatation, we propose a framework for text-to-table neural models applicable to problems such as extraction of line items, joint entity and relation extraction, or knowledge base population. The permutation-based decoder of our proposal is a generalized sequential method that comprehends information from all cells in the table. The training maximizes the expected log-likelihood for a table’s content across all random permutations of the factorization order. During the content inference, we exploit the model’s ability to generate cells in any order by searching over possible orderings to maximize the model’s confidence and avoid substantial error accumulation, which other sequential models are prone to. Experiments demonstrate a high practical value of the framework, which establishes state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets, outperforming previous solutions by up to 15\\%.

We propose a new shared task of semantic retrieval from legal texts, in which a so-called contract discovery is to be performed – where legal clauses are extracted from documents, given a few examples of similar clauses from other legal acts. The task differs substantially from conventional NLI and shared tasks on legal information extraction (e.g., one has to identify text span instead of a single document, page, or paragraph). The specification of the proposed task is followed by an evaluation of multiple solutions within the unified framework proposed for this branch of methods. It is shown that state-of-the-art pretrained encoders fail to provide satisfactory results on the task proposed. In contrast, Language Model-based solutions perform better, especially when unsupervised fine-tuning is applied. Besides the ablation studies, we addressed questions regarding detection accuracy for relevant text fragments depending on the number of examples available. In addition to the dataset and reference results, LMs specialized in the legal domain were made publicly available.

This paper presents the winning system for the propaganda Technique Classification (TC) task and the second-placed system for the propaganda Span Identification (SI) task. The purpose of TC task was to identify an applied propaganda technique given propaganda text fragment. The goal of SI task was to find specific text fragments which contain at least one propaganda technique. Both of the developed solutions used semi-supervised learning technique of self-training. Interestingly, although CRF is barely used with transformer-based language models, the SI task was approached with RoBERTa-CRF architecture. An ensemble of RoBERTa-based models was proposed for the TC task, with one of them making use of Span CLS layers we introduce in the present paper. In addition to describing the submitted systems, an impact of architectural decisions and training schemes is investigated along with remarks regarding training models of the same or better quality with lower computational budget. Finally, the results of error analysis are presented.