Quantitative information plays a crucial role in understanding and interpreting the content of documents. Many user queries contain quantities and cannot be resolved without understanding their semantics, e.g., “car that costs less than $10k”. Yet, modern search engines apply the same ranking mechanisms for both words and quantities, overlooking magnitude and unit information. In this paper, we introduce two quantity-aware ranking techniques designed to rank both the quantity and textual content either jointly or independently. These techniques incorporate quantity information in available retrieval systems and can address queries with numerical conditions equal, greater than, and less than. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed models, we introduce two novel quantity-aware benchmark datasets in the domains of finance and medicine and compare our method against various lexical and neural models. The code and data are available under https://github.com/satya77/QuantityAwareRankers.

Quantities are essential in documents to describe factual information. They are ubiquitous in application domains such as finance, business, medicine, and science in general. Compared to other information extraction approaches, interestingly only a few works exist that describe methods for a proper extraction and representation of quantities in text. In this paper, we present such a comprehensive quantity extraction framework from text data. It efficiently detects combinations of values and units, the behavior of a quantity (e.g., rising or falling), and the concept a quantity is associated with. Our framework makes use of dependency parsing and a dictionary of units, and it provides for a proper normalization and standardization of detected quantities. Using a novel dataset for evaluation, we show that our open source framework outperforms other systems and – to the best of our knowledge – is the first to detect concepts associated with identified quantities. The code and data underlying our framework are available at https://github.com/vivkaz/CQE.

This work presents the entry by the team from Heidelberg University in the CL-SciSumm 2020 shared task at the Scholarly Document Processing workshop at EMNLP 2020. As in its previous iterations, the task is to highlight relevant parts in a reference paper, depending on a citance text excerpt from a citing paper. We participated in tasks 1A (citation identification) and 1B (citation context classification). Contrary to most previous works, we frame Task 1A as a search relevance problem, and introduce a 2-step re-ranking approach, which consists of a preselection based on BM25 in addition to positional document features, and a top-k re-ranking with BERT. For Task 1B, we follow previous submissions in applying methods that deal well with low resources and imbalanced classes.