Mapping ongoing news headlines to event-related classes in a rich knowledge base can be an important component in a knowledge-based event analysis and forecasting solution. In this paper, we present a methodology for creating a benchmark dataset of news headlines mapped to event classes in Wikidata, and resources for the evaluation of methods that perform the mapping. We use the dataset to study two classes of unsupervised methods for this task: 1) adaptations of classic entity linking methods, and 2) methods that treat the problem as a zero-shot text classification problem. For the first approach, we evaluate off-the-shelf entity linking systems. For the second approach, we explore a) pre-trained natural language inference (NLI) models, and b) pre-trained large generative language models. We present the results of our evaluation, lessons learned, and directions for future work. The dataset and scripts for evaluation are made publicly available.

Understanding causal relationship is an importance part of natural language processing. We address the causal information extraction problem with different neural models built on top of pre-trained transformer-based language models for identifying Cause, Effect and Signal spans, from news data sets. We use the Causal News Corpus subtask 2 training data set to train span-based and sequence tagging models. Our span-based model based on pre-trained BERT base weights achieves an F1 score of 47.48 on the test set with an accuracy score of 36.87 and obtained 3rd place in the Causal News Corpus 2022 shared task.

Causal information extraction is an important task in natural language processing, particularly in finance domain. In this work, we develop several information extraction models using pre-trained transformer-based language models for identifying cause and effect text spans from financial documents. We use FinCausal 2021 and 2022 data sets to train span-based and sequence tagging models. Our ensemble of sequence tagging models based on the RoBERTa-Large pre-trained language model achieves an F1 score of 94.70 with Exact Match score of 85.85 and obtains the 1st place in the FinCausal 2022 competition.

Previous studies have highlighted the necessity for entity linking systems to capture the local entity-mention similarities and the global topical coherence. We introduce a novel framework based on convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to simultaneously model the local and global features for entity linking. The proposed model benefits from the capacity of convolutional neural networks to induce the underlying representations for local contexts and the advantage of recurrent neural networks to adaptively compress variable length sequences of predictions for global constraints. Our evaluation on multiple datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the model and yields the state-of-the-art performance on such datasets. In addition, we examine the entity linking systems on the domain adaptation setting that further demonstrates the cross-domain robustness of the proposed model.