We demonstrate that coreference resolution in procedural texts is significantly improved when performing transformation-based entity linking prior to coreference relation identification. When events in the text introduce changes to the state of participating entities, it is often impossible to accurately link entities in anaphoric and coreference relations without an understanding of the transformations those entities undergo. We show how adding event semantics helps to better model entity coreference. We argue that all transformation predicates, not just creation verbs, introduce a new entity into the discourse, as a kind of generalized Result Role, which is typically not textually mentioned. This allows us to model procedural texts as process graphs and to compute the coreference type for any two entities in the recipe. We present our annotation methodology and the corpus generated as well as describe experiments on coreference resolution of entity mentions under a process-oriented model of events.

Understanding inferences from text requires more than merely recovering surface arguments, adjuncts, or strings associated with the query terms. As humans, we interpret sentences as contextualized components of a narrative or discourse, by both filling in missing information, and reasoning about event consequences. In this paper, we define the process of rewriting a textual expression (lexeme or phrase) such that it reduces ambiguity while also making explicit the underlying semantics that is not (necessarily) expressed in the economy of sentence structure as Dense Paraphrasing (DP). We apply the DP techniques on the English procedural texts from the cooking recipe domain, and provide the scope and design of the application that involves creating a graph representation of events and generating hidden arguments through paraphrasing. We provide insights on how this DP process can enrich a source text by showing that the dense-paraphrased event graph is a good resource to large LLMs such as GPT-3 to generate reliable paraphrases; and by experimenting baselines for automaticDP generation. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the dataset and event graph structure by providing a case study on the out-of-domain modeling and different DP prompts and GPT models for paraphrasing.

This paper provides an overview of the xDD/LAPPS Grid framework and provides results of evaluating the AskMe retrievalengine using the BEIR benchmark datasets. Our primary goal is to determine a solid baseline of performance to guide furtherdevelopment of our retrieval capabilities. Beyond this, we aim to dig deeper to determine when and why certain approachesperform well (or badly) on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, an issue that has to date received relatively little attention.

In this task, we identify a challenge that is reflective of linguistic and cognitive competencies that humans have when speaking and reasoning. Particularly, given the intuition that textual and visual information mutually inform each other for semantic reasoning, we formulate a Competence-based Question Answering challenge, designed to involve rich semantic annotation and aligned text-video objects. The task is to answer questions from a collection of cooking recipes and videos, where each question belongs to a “question family” reflecting a specific reasoning competence. The data and task result is publicly available.

Models of natural language understanding often rely on question answering and logical inference benchmark challenges to evaluate the performance of a system. While informative, such task-oriented evaluations do not assess the broader semantic abilities that humans have as part of their linguistic competence when speaking and interpreting language. We define competence-based (CB) question generation, and focus on queries over lexical semantic knowledge involving implicit argument and subevent structure of verbs. We present a method to generate such questions and a dataset of English cooking recipes we use for implementing the generation method. Our primary experiment shows that even large pretrained language models perform poorly on CB questions until they are provided with additional contextualized semantic information. The data and the source code is available at: https: //github.com/brandeis-llc/CompQG.

To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in literature to understand the disease mechanism and the related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities, relations and events) from scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence. All of the data, KGs, reports.

We propose semantic visualization as a linguistic visual analytic method. It can enable exploration and discovery over large datasets of complex networks by exploiting the semantics of the relations in them. This involves extracting information, applying parameter reduction operations, building hierarchical data representation and designing visualization. We also present the accompanying COVID-SemViz a searchable and interactive visualization system for knowledge exploration of COVID-19 data to demonstrate the application of our proposed method. In the user studies, users found that semantic visualization-powered COVID-SemViz is helpful in terms of finding relevant information and discovering unknown associations.

We propose the Tough Mentions Recall (TMR) metrics to supplement traditional named entity recognition (NER) evaluation by examining recall on specific subsets of ”tough” mentions: unseen mentions, those whose tokens or token/type combination were not observed in training, and type-confusable mentions, token sequences with multiple entity types in the test data. We demonstrate the usefulness of these metrics by evaluating corpora of English, Spanish, and Dutch using five recent neural architectures. We identify subtle differences between the performance of BERT and Flair on two English NER corpora and identify a weak spot in the performance of current models in Spanish. We conclude that the TMR metrics enable differentiation between otherwise similar-scoring systems and identification of patterns in performance that would go unnoticed from overall precision, recall, and F1.

Within the natural language processing (NLP) community, shared tasks play an important role. They define a common goal and allowthe the comparison of different methods on the same data. SemEval-2018 Task 7 involves the identification and classification of relationsin abstracts from computational linguistics (CL) publications. In this paper we describe an attempt to reproduce the methods and resultsfrom the top performing system at for SemEval-2018 Task 7. We describe challenges we encountered in the process, report on the resultsof our system, and discuss the ways that our attempt at reproduction can inform best practices.