We present an open-source Python library for building and using datasets where inputs are clusters of textual data, and outputs are sequences of real values representing one or more timeseries signals. The news-signals library supports diverse data science and NLP problem settings related to the prediction of time series behaviour using textual data feeds. For example, in the news domain, inputs are document clusters corresponding to daily news articles about a particular entity, and targets are explicitly associated real-valued timeseries: the volume of news about a particular person or company, or the number of pageviews of specific Wikimedia pages. Despite many industry and research usecases for this class of problem settings, to the best of our knowledge, News Signals is the only open-source library designed specifically to facilitate data science and research settings with natural language inputs and timeseries targets. In addition to the core codebase for building and interacting with datasets, we also conduct a suite of experiments using several popular Machine Learning libraries, which are used to establish baselines for timeseries anomaly prediction using textual inputs.

Sentence compression reduces the length of text by removing non-essential content while preserving important facts and grammaticality. Unsupervised objective driven methods for sentence compression can be used to create customized models without the need for ground-truth training data, while allowing flexibility in the objective function(s) that are used for learning and inference. Recent unsupervised sentence compression approaches use custom objectives to guide discrete search; however, guided search is expensive at inference time. In this work, we explore the use of reinforcement learning to train effective sentence compression models that are also fast when generating predictions. In particular, we cast the task as binary sequence labelling and fine-tune a pre-trained transformer using a simple policy gradient approach. Our approach outperforms other unsupervised models while also being more efficient at inference time.