In Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU), recent advances of incorporating layout and image features into the pre-training language models have achieved significant progress. Existing methods usually developed complicated dedicated architectures based on pre-trained models and fine-tuned them with costly high-quality data to eliminate the inconsistency of knowledge distribution between the pre-training task and specialized downstream tasks. However, due to their huge data demands, these methods are not suitable for few-shot settings, which are essential for quick applications with limited resources but few previous works are presented. To solve these problems, we propose a unified Knowledge-aware prompt-tuning framework for Visual-rich Document Understanding (KnowVrDU) to enable broad utilization for diverse concrete applications and reduce data requirements. To model heterogeneous VrDU structures without designing task-specific architectures, we propose to reformulate various VrDU tasks into a single question-answering format with task-specific prompts and train the pre-trained model with the parameter-efficient prompt tuning method. To bridge the knowledge gap between the pre-training task and specialized VrDU tasks without additional annotations, we propose a prompt knowledge integration mechanism to leverage external open-source knowledge bases. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets in few-shot settings and the results validate the effectiveness of our method.

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve correct answers from large-scale knowledge bases. Existing attempts primarily focus on entity representation and final answer reasoning, which results in limited supervision for this task. Moreover, the relations, which empirically determine the reasoning path selection, are not fully considered in recent advancements. In this study, we propose a novel framework, RE-KBQA, that utilizes relations in the knowledge base to enhance entity representation and introduce additional supervision. We explore guidance from relations in three aspects, including (1) distinguishing similar entities by employing a variational graph auto-encoder to learn relation importance; (2) exploring extra supervision by predicting relation distributions as soft labels with a multi-task scheme; (3) designing a relation-guided re-ranking algorithm for post-processing. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework, improving the F1 score by 5.8% from 40.5 to 46.3 on CWQ and 5.7% from 62.8 to 68.5 on WebQSP, better or on par with state-of-the-art methods.

The Biological Text Mining Unit at BSC and CNIO organized the first shared task on chemical & drug mention recognition from Spanish medical texts called PharmaCoNER (Pharmacological Substances, Compounds and proteins and Named Entity Recognition track) in 2019, which includes two tracks: one for NER offset and entity classification (track 1) and the other one for concept indexing (track 2). We developed a pipeline system based on deep learning methods for this shared task, specifically, a subsystem based on BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) for NER offset and entity classification and a subsystem based on Bpool (Bi-LSTM with max/mean pooling) for concept indexing. Evaluation conducted on the shared task data showed that our system achieves a micro-average F1-score of 0.9105 on track 1 and a micro-average F1-score of 0.8391 on track 2.

This is the system description of the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen (HITSZ) team for the first and second subtasks of the fourth Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task in 2019. The two subtasks are automatic classification and extraction of adverse effect mentions in tweets. The systems for the two subtasks are based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), and achieves promising results. Among the systems we developed for subtask1, the best F1-score was 0.6457, for subtask2, the best relaxed F1-score and the best strict F1-score were 0.614 and 0.407 respectively. Our system ranks first among all systems on subtask1.