Saber A. Akhondi

Also published as: Saber A Akhondi


2021

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ChEMU-Ref: A Corpus for Modeling Anaphora Resolution in the Chemical Domain
Biaoyan Fang | Christian Druckenbrodt | Saber A Akhondi | Jiayuan He | Timothy Baldwin | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Chemical patents contain rich coreference and bridging links, which are the target of this research. Specially, we introduce a novel annotation scheme, based on which we create the ChEMU-Ref dataset from reaction description snippets in English-language chemical patents. We propose a neural approach to anaphora resolution, which we show to achieve strong results, especially when jointly trained over coreference and bridging links.

2020

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CORA: A Deep Active Learning Covid-19 Relevancy Algorithm to Identify Core Scientific Articles
Zubair Afzal | Vikrant Yadav | Olga Fedorova | Vaishnavi Kandala | Janneke van de Loo | Saber A. Akhondi | Pascal Coupet | George Tsatsaronis
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the academic and scientific research community, as well as industry and governments around the world have joined forces in an unprecedented manner to fight the threat. Clinicians, biologists, chemists, bioinformaticians, nurses, data scientists, and all of the affiliated relevant disciplines have been mobilized to help discover efficient treatments for the infected population, as well as a vaccine solution to prevent further the virus spread. In this combat against the virus responsible for the pandemic, key for any advancements is the timely, accurate, peer-reviewed, and efficient communication of any novel research findings. In this paper we present a novel framework to address the information need of filtering efficiently the scientific bibliography for relevant literature around COVID-19. The contributions of the paper are summarized in the following: we define and describe the information need that encompasses the major requirements for COVID-19 articles relevancy, we present and release an expert-curated benchmark set for the task, and we analyze the performance of several state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers that may distinguish the relevant from the non-relevant COVID-19 literature.

2019

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Detecting Chemical Reactions in Patents
Hiyori Yoshikawa | Dat Quoc Nguyen | Zenan Zhai | Christian Druckenbrodt | Camilo Thorne | Saber A. Akhondi | Timothy Baldwin | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Extracting chemical reactions from patents is a crucial task for chemists working on chemical exploration. In this paper we introduce the novel task of detecting the textual spans that describe or refer to chemical reactions within patents. We formulate this task as a paragraph-level sequence tagging problem, where the system is required to return a sequence of paragraphs which contain a description of a reaction. To address this new task, we construct an annotated dataset from an existing proprietary database of chemical reactions manually extracted from patents. We introduce several baseline methods for the task and evaluate them over our dataset. Through error analysis, we discuss what makes the task complex and challenging, and suggest possible directions for future research.