Event coreference resolution (ECR) is a critical task in information extraction of natural language processing, aiming to identify and link event mentions across multiple documents. Despite recent progress, existing datasets for ECR primarily focus on within-document event coreference and English text, lacking cross-document ECR datasets for multiple languages beyond English. To address this issue, this work presents the first multiligual dataset for cross-document ECR, called MCECR (Multilingual Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution), that manually annotates a diverse collection of documents for event mentions and coreference in five languages, i.e., English, Spanish, Hindi, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Using sampled articles from Wikinews over various topics as the seeds, our dataset fetches related news articles from the Google search engine to increase the number of non-singleton event clusters. In total, we annotate 5,802 news articles, providing a substantial and varied dataset for multilingual ECR in both within-document and cross-document scenarios. Extensive analysis of the proposed dataset reveals the challenging nature of multilingual event coreference resolution tasks, promoting MCECR as a strong benchmark dataset for future research in this area.

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to our professional workflows and daily lives. Nevertheless, these machine companions of ours have a critical flaw: the huge amount of data which endows them with vast and diverse knowledge, also exposes them to the inevitable toxicity and bias. While most LLMs incorporate defense mechanisms to prevent the generation of harmful content, these safeguards can be easily bypassed with minimal prompt engineering. In this paper, we introduce the new Thoroughly Engineered Toxicity (TET) dataset, comprising manually crafted prompts designed to nullify the protective layers of such models. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate the pivotal role of TET in providing a rigorous benchmark for evaluation of toxicity awareness in several popular LLMs: it highlights the toxicity in the LLMs that might remain hidden when using normal prompts, thus revealing subtler issues in their behavior.

Continual event detection is a cornerstone in uncovering valuable patterns in many dynamic practical applications, where novel events emerge daily. Existing state-of-the-art approaches with replay buffers still suffer from catastrophic forgetting, partially due to overly simplistic objective aggregation. This oversight disregards complex trade-offs and leads to sub-optimal gradient updates, resulting in performance deterioration across objectives. While there are successful, widely cited multi-objective optimization frameworks for multi-task learning, they lack mechanisms to address data imbalance and evaluate whether a Pareto-optimal solution can effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting, rendering them unsuitable for direct application to continual learning. To address these challenges, we propose **SharpSeq**, a novel continual learning paradigm leveraging sharpness-aware minimization combined with a generative model to balance training data distribution. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of SharpSeq in continual event detection, proving the importance of our approach in mitigating catastrophic forgetting in continual event detection.

In this paper, we address the Event Detection task under a zero-shot cross-lingual setting where a model is trained on a source language but evaluated on a distinct target language for which there is no labeled data available. Most recent efforts in this field follow a direct transfer approach in which the model is trained using language-invariant features and then directly applied to the target language. However, we argue that these methods fail to take advantage of the benefits of the data transfer approach where a cross-lingual model is trained on target-language data and is able to learn task-specific information from syntactical features or word-label relations in the target language. As such, we propose a hybrid knowledge-transfer approach that leverages a teacher-student framework where the teacher and student networks are trained following the direct and data transfer approaches, respectively. Our method is complemented by a hierarchical training-sample selection scheme designed to address the issue of noisy labels being generated by the teacher model. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on 9 morphologically-diverse target languages across 3 distinct datasets, highlighting the importance of exploiting the benefits of hybrid transfer.

We study the problem of cross-lingual transfer learning for event detection (ED) where models trained on a source language are expected to perform well on data for a new target language. Among a few recent works for this problem, the main approaches involve representation matching (e.g., adversarial training) that aims to eliminate language-specific features from the representations to achieve the language-invariant representations. However, due to the mix of language-specific features with event-discriminative context, representation matching methods might also remove important features for event prediction, thus hindering the performance for ED. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach for cross-lingual ED where representations are augmented with additional context (i.e., not eliminating) to bridge the gap between languages while enriching the contextual information to facilitate ED. At the core of our method involves a retrieval model that retrieves relevant sentences in the target language for an input sentence to compute augmentation representations. Experiments on three languages demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our model for cross-lingual ED.

Event argument extraction (EAE) is a sub-task of event extraction where the goal is to identify roles of entity mentions for events in text. The current state-of-the-art approaches for this problem explore prompt-based methods to prompt pre-trained language models for arguments over input context. However, existing prompt-based methods mainly rely on discrete and manually-designed prompts that cannot exploit specific context for each example to improve customization for optimal performance. In addition, the discrete nature of current prompts prevents the incorporation of relevant context from multiple external documents to enrich prompts for EAE. To this end, we propose a novel prompt-based method for EAE that introduces soft prompts to facilitate the encoding of individual example context and multiple relevant documents to boost EAE. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on benchmark datasets for EAE to demonstrate its benefits with state-of-the-art performance.

Relation Extraction (RE) is the task of identifying semantic relation between real-world entities mentioned in text. Despite significant progress in RE research, a remaining challenge for RE concerns the lack of training data for data-hungry deep learning models. Cost of annotation and difficulty of the task are among hindrance to collect a large-scale RE dataset in different domains. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework to automatically generate labeled data for RE. Our framework presents the pre-trained language model GPT-2 for data generation. In addition, to optimize the generated samples for an RE model, we introduce a meta learning approach to allow the GPT-2 model to be updated during the training process for RE. In particular, to leverage the feedback from the RE model to improve the data generation from GPT-2, we propose a novel reward function to update the GPT-2 model with REINFORCE, seeking to promote the similarity of the RE loss function’s gradients computed for generated data and a meta development set. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets to produce state-of-the-art performance for RE.

Continual Relation Extraction (CRE) aims to continuously train a model to learn new relations while preserving its ability on previously learned relations. Similar to other continual learning problems, in CRE, models experience representation shift, where learned deep space changes in the continual learning process, which leads to the downgrade in the performance of the old tasks. In this work, we will provide an insight into this phenomenon under the spectral viewpoint. Our key argument is that, for each class shape, if its eigenvectors (or spectral components) do not change much, the shape is well-preserved. We then conduct a spectral experiment and show that, for the shape of each class, the eigenvectors with larger eigenvalue are more preserved after learning new tasks which means these vectors are good at keeping class shapes. Based on this analysis, we propose a simple yet effective class-wise regularization that improve the eigenvalues in the representation learning. We observe that our proposed regularization leads to an increase in the eigenvalues. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, FewRel and TACRED, show the effectiveness of our proposed method with significant improvement in performance compared to the state-of-the-art models. Further analyses also verify our hypothesis that larger eigenvalues lead to better performance and vice versa.

Cross-lingual transfer learning (CLTL) for event detection (ED) aims to develop models in high-resource source languages that can be directly applied to produce effective performance for lower-resource target languages. Previous research in this area has focused on representation matching methods to develop a language-universal representation space into which source- and target-language example representations can be mapped to achieve cross-lingual transfer. However, as this approach modifies the representations for the source-language examples, the models might lose discriminative features for ED that are learned over training data of the source language to prevent effective predictions. To this end, our work introduces a novel approach for cross-lingual ED where we only aim to transition the representations for the target-language examples into the source-language space, thus preserving the representations in the source language and their discriminative information. Our method introduces Langevin Dynamics to perform representation transition and a semantic preservation framework to retain event type features during the transition process. Extensive experiments over three languages demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance for ED in CLTL.

A key technology for large language models (LLMs) involves instruction tuning that helps align the models’ responses with human expectations to realize impressive learning abilities. Two major approaches for instruction tuning characterize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which are applied to produce the best commercial LLMs. To improve the accessibility of LLMs, various instruction-tuned open-source LLMs have also been introduced recently. However, existing open-source LLMs have only been instruction-tuned for English and a few popular languages, thus hindering their accessibility to many other languages in the world. In addition, SFT has been used as the only approach to instruction-tune open-source LLMs for multiple languages. This has left a significant gap for fine-tuned LLMs based on RLHF in diverse languages and raised important questions on how RLHF can boost the performance of multilingual instruction tuning. To overcome this issue, we present Okapi, the first system with instruction-tuned LLMs based on RLHF for multiple languages. Okapi introduces instruction and response-ranked data in 26 diverse languages to facilitate the experiments and development of future multilingual LLM research. We also present benchmark datasets to enable the evaluation of generative LLMs in multiple languages. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of RLHF for multilingual instruction over SFT for different base models and datasets. Our framework with created resources, fine-tuned LLMs, interaction scripts are released at https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/Okapi. A demo video to show our framework can also be found at: https://youtu.be/QFV2fkPwvi0.

Event Detection (ED) is the task of identifying and classifying trigger words of event mentions in text. Despite considerable research efforts in recent years for English text, the task of ED in other languages has been significantly less explored. Switching to non-English languages, important research questions for ED include how well existing ED models perform on different languages, how challenging ED is in other languages, and how well ED knowledge and annotation can be transferred across languages. To answer those questions, it is crucial to obtain multilingual ED datasets that provide consistent event annotation for multiple languages. There exist some multilingual ED datasets; however, they tend to cover a handful of languages and mainly focus on popular ones. Many languages are not covered in existing multilingual ED datasets. In addition, the current datasets are often small and not accessible to the public. To overcome those shortcomings, we introduce a new large-scale multilingual dataset for ED (called MINION) that consistently annotates events for 8 different languages; 5 of them have not been supported by existing multilingual datasets. We also perform extensive experiments and analysis to demonstrate the challenges and transferability of ED across languages in MINION that in all call for more research effort in this area. We will release the dataset to promote future research on multilingual ED.

Event trigger detection, entity mention recognition, event argument extraction, and relation extraction are the four important tasks in information extraction that have been performed jointly (Joint Information Extraction - JointIE) to avoid error propagation and leverage dependencies between the task instances (i.e., event triggers, entity mentions, relations, and event arguments). However, previous JointIE models often assume heuristic manually-designed dependency between the task instances and mean-field factorization for the joint distribution of instance labels, thus unable to capture optimal dependencies among instances and labels to improve representation learning and IE performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose to induce a dependency graph among task instances from data to boost representation learning. To better capture dependencies between instance labels, we propose to directly estimate their joint distribution via Conditional Random Fields. Noise Contrastive Estimation is introduced to address the maximization of the intractable joint likelihood for model training. Finally, to improve the decoding with greedy or beam search in prior work, we present Simulated Annealing to better find the globally optimal assignment for instance labels at decoding time. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms previous models on multiple IE tasks across 5 datasets and 2 languages.

In this work, we focus on Cross-Lingual Event Detection where a model is trained on data from a source language but its performance is evaluated on data from a second, target, language. Most recent works in this area have harnessed the language-invariant qualities displayed by pre-trained Multi-lingual Language Models. Their performance, however, reveals there is room for improvement as the cross-lingual setting entails particular challenges. We employ Adversarial Language Adaptation to train a Language Discriminator to discern between the source and target languages using unlabeled data. The discriminator is trained in an adversarial manner so that the encoder learns to produce refined, language-invariant representations that lead to improved performance. More importantly, we optimize the adversarial training process by only presenting the discriminator with the most informative samples. We base our intuition about what makes a sample informative on two disparate metrics: sample similarity and event presence. Thus, we propose leveraging Optimal Transport as a solution to naturally combine these two distinct information sources into the selection process. Extensive experiments on 8 different language pairs, using 4 languages from unrelated families, show the flexibility and effectiveness of our model that achieves state-of-the-art results.

This paper presents FAMIE, a comprehensive and efficient active learning (AL) toolkit for multilingual information extraction. FAMIE is designed to address a fundamental problem in existing AL frameworks where annotators need to wait for a long time between annotation batches due to the time-consuming nature of model training and data selection at each AL iteration. This hinders the engagement, productivity, and efficiency of annotators. Based on the idea of using a small proxy network for fast data selection, we introduce a novel knowledge distillation mechanism to synchronize the proxy network with the main large model (i.e., BERT-based) to ensure the appropriateness of the selected annotation examples for the main model. Our AL framework can support multiple languages. The experiments demonstrate the advantages of FAMIE in terms of competitive performance and time efficiency for sequence labeling with AL. We publicly release our code (https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/famie) and demo website (http://nlp.uoregon.edu:9000/). A demo video for FAMIE is provided at: https://youtu.be/I2i8n_jAyrY

Machine translation (MT) is an important task in natural language processing, which aims to translate a sentence in a source language to another sentence with the same/similar semantics in a target language. Despite the huge effort on building MT systems for different language pairs, most previous work focuses on formal-language settings, where text to be translated come from written sources such as books and news articles. As a result, such MT systems could fail to translate livestreaming video transcripts, where text is often shorter and might be grammatically incorrect. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel MT corpus - BehanceMT for livestreaming video transcript translation. Our corpus contains parallel transcripts for 3 language pairs, where English is the source language and Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic are the target languages. Experimental results show that finetuning a pretrained MT model on BehanceMT significantly improves the performance of the model in translating video transcripts across 3 language pairs. In addition, the finetuned MT model outperforms GoogleTranslate in 2 out of 3 language pairs, further demonstrating the usefulness of our proposed dataset for video transcript translation. BehanceMT will be publicly released upon the acceptance of the paper.

Extracting entities, events, event arguments, and relations (i.e., task instances) from text represents four main challenging tasks in information extraction (IE), which have been solved jointly (JointIE) to boost the overall performance for IE. As such, previous work often leverages two types of dependencies between the tasks, i.e., cross-instance and cross-type dependencies representing relatedness between task instances and correlations between information types of the tasks. However, the cross-task dependencies in prior work are not optimal as they are only designed manually according to some task heuristics. To address this issue, we propose a novel model for JointIE that aims to learn cross-task dependencies from data. In particular, we treat each task instance as a node in a dependency graph where edges between the instances are inferred through information from different layers of a pretrained language model (e.g., BERT). Furthermore, we utilize the Chow-Liu algorithm to learn a dependency tree between information types for JointIE by seeking to approximate the joint distribution of the types from data. Finally, the Chow-Liu dependency tree is used to generate cross-type patterns, serving as anchor knowledge to guide the learning of representations and dependencies between instances for JointIE. Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms strong JointIE baselines over four datasets with different languages.

Event Extraction (EE) is one of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction (IE) that aims to recognize event mentions and their arguments (i.e., participants) from text. Due to its importance, extensive methods and resources have been developed for Event Extraction. However, one limitation of current research for EE involves the under-exploration for non-English languages in which the lack of high-quality multilingual EE datasets for model training and evaluation has been the main hindrance. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Multilingual Event Extraction dataset (MEE) that provides annotation for more than 50K event mentions in 8 typologically different languages. MEE comprehensively annotates data for entity mentions, event triggers and event arguments. We conduct extensive experiments on the proposed dataset to reveal challenges and opportunities for multilingual EE. To foster future research in this direction, our dataset will be publicly available.

Entity linking (EL) on short text is crucial for a variety of industrial applications. Compared with general long-text EL, short-text EL poses particular challenges as the limited context restricts the clues one can leverage to disambiguate textual mentions. On the other hand, existing studies mostly focus on black-box neural methods and thus lack interpretability, which is critical to industrial applications in certain areas. In this study, we extend upon LNN-EL, a monolingual short-text EL method based on interpretable first-order logic, by incorporating three sets of multilingual features to enable disambiguating mentions written in languages other than English. More specifically, we use multilingual autoencoding language models (i.e., mBERT) to capture the similarities between the mention with its context and the candidate entity; we use multilingual sequence-to-sequence language models (i.e., mBART and mT5) to represent the likelihood of the text given the candidate entity. We also propose a word-level context feature to capture the semantic evidence of the co-occurring mentions. We evaluate the proposed xLNN-EL approach on the QALD-9-multilingual dataset and demonstrate the cross-linguality of the model and the effectiveness of the features.

Toxic span detection is the task of recognizing offensive spans in a text snippet. Although there has been prior work on classifying text snippets as offensive or not, the task of recognizing spans responsible for the toxicity of a text is not explored yet. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-task framework for toxic span detection in which the model seeks to simultaneously predict offensive words and opinion phrases to leverage their inter-dependencies and improve the performance. Moreover, we introduce a novel regularization mechanism to encourage the consistency of the model predictions across similar inputs for toxic span detection. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model compared to strong baselines.

Event Argument Extraction (EAE) is one of the sub-tasks of event extraction, aiming to recognize the role of each entity mention toward a specific event trigger. Despite the success of prior works in sentence-level EAE, the document-level setting is less explored. In particular, whereas syntactic structures of sentences have been shown to be effective for sentence-level EAE, prior document-level EAE models totally ignore syntactic structures for documents. Hence, in this work, we study the importance of syntactic structures in document-level EAE. Specifically, we propose to employ Optimal Transport (OT) to induce structures of documents based on sentence-level syntactic structures and tailored to EAE task. Furthermore, we propose a novel regularization technique to explicitly constrain the contributions of unrelated context words in the final prediction for EAE. We perform extensive experiments on the benchmark document-level EAE dataset RAMS that leads to the state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, our experiments on the ACE 2005 dataset reveals the effectiveness of the proposed model in the sentence-level EAE by establishing new state-of-the-art results.

Given the increasing number of livestreaming videos, automatic speech recognition and post-processing for livestreaming video transcripts are crucial for efficient data management as well as knowledge mining. A key step in this process is punctuation restoration which restores fundamental text structures such as phrase and sentence boundaries from the video transcripts. This work presents a new human-annotated corpus, called BehancePR, for punctuation restoration in livestreaming video transcripts. Our experiments on BehancePR demonstrate the challenges of punctuation restoration for this domain. Furthermore, we show that popular natural language processing toolkits like Stanford Stanza, Spacy, and Trankit underperform on detecting sentence boundary on non-punctuated transcripts of livestreaming videos. The dataset is publicly accessible at http://github.com/nlp-uoregon/behancepr.

Suicide is a serious problem in every society. Understanding life events of a potential patient is essential for successful suicide-risk assessment and prevention. In this work, we focus on the Event Detection (ED) task to identify event trigger words of suicide-related events in public posts of discussion forums. In particular, we introduce SuicideED: a new dataset for the ED task that features seven suicidal event types to comprehensively capture suicide actions and ideation, and general risk and protective factors. Our experiments with current state-of-the-art ED systems suggest that this domain poses meaningful challenges as there is significant room for improvement of ED models. We will release SuicideED to support future research in this important area.

In the past few years, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been widely adopted in different areas and have made fundamental improvements over a variety of downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Meanwhile, domain-specific variants of PLMs are being proposed to address the needs of domains that demonstrate a specific pattern of writing and vocabulary, e.g., BioBERT for the biomedical domain and ClinicalBERT for the clinical domain. Recently, generative language models like BART and T5 are gaining popularity with their competitive performance on text generation as well as on tasks cast as generative problems. However, in the clinical domain, such domain-specific generative variants are still underexplored. To address this need, our work introduces a T5-based text-to-text transformer model pre-trained on clinical text, i.e., ClinicalT5. We evaluate the proposed model both intrinsically and extrinsically over a diverse set of tasks across multiple datasets, and show that ClinicalT5 dramatically outperforms T5 in the domain-specific tasks and compares favorably with its close baselines.

Subevent Relation Extraction (SRE) is a task in Information Extraction that aims to recognize spatial and temporal containment relations between event mentions in text. Recent methods have utilized pre-trained language models to represent input texts for SRE. However, a key issue in existing SRE methods is the employment of sequential order of words in texts to feed into representation learning methods, thus unable to explicitly focus on important context words and their interactions to enhance representations. In this work, we introduce a new method for SRE that learns to induce effective graph structures for input texts to boost representation learning. Our method features a word alignment framework with dependency paths and optimal transport to identify important context words to form effective graph structures for SRE. In addition, to enable SRE research on non-English languages, we present a new multilingual SRE dataset for five typologically different languages. Extensive experiments reveal the state-of-the-art performance for our method on different datasets and languages.

Joint Information Extraction (JIE) aims to jointly solve multiple tasks in the Information Extraction pipeline (e.g., entity mention, event trigger, relation, and event argument extraction). Due to their ability to leverage task dependencies and avoid error propagation, JIE models have presented state-of-the-art performance for different IE tasks. However, an issue with current JIE methods is that they only focus on standard supervised learning setting where training and test data comes from the same domain. Cross-domain/domain adaptation learning with training and test data in different domains have not been explored for JIE, thus hindering the application of this technology to different domains in practice. To address this issue, our work introduces the first study to evaluate performance of JIE models in unsupervised domain adaptation setting. In addition, we present a novel method to induce domain-invariant representations for the tasks in JIE, called Domain Adaptation for Joint Information Extraction (DA4JIE). In DA4JIE, we propose an Instance-relational Domain Adaptation mechanism that seeks to align representations of task instances in JIE across domains through a generalized version of domain-adversarial learning approach. We further devise a Context-invariant Structure Learning technique to filter domain-specialized contextual information from induced representations to boost performance of JIE models in new domains. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that DA4JIE can significantly improve out-of-domain performance for current state-of-the-art JIE systems for all IE tasks.

Event Detection (ED) aims to identify mentions/triggers of real world events in text. In the literature, this task is modeled as a sequence-labeling or word-prediction problem. In this work, we present a novel formulation in which ED is modeled as a word-label alignment task. In particular, given the words in a sentence and possible event types, the objective is to infer an alignment matrix in which event trigger words are aligned with the most likely event types. Moreover, we show that this new perspective facilitates the incorporation of word-label alignment biases to improve alignment matrix for ED. Novel alignment biases and Optimal Transport are introduced to solve our alignment problem for ED. We conduct experiments on a benchmark dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for ED.

An important problem of Information Extraction involves Event Causality Identification (ECI) that seeks to identify causal relation between pairs of event mentions. Prior models for ECI have mainly solved the problem using the classification framework that does not explore prediction/generation of important context words from input sentences for causal recognition. In this work, we consider the words along the dependency path between the two event mentions in the dependency tree as the important context words for ECI. We introduce dependency path generation as a complementary task for ECI, which can be solved jointly with causal label prediction to improve the performance. To facilitate the multi-task learning, we cast ECI into a generation problem that aims to generate both causal relation and dependency path words from input sentence. In addition, we propose to use the REINFORCE algorithm to train our generative model where novel reward functions are designed to capture both causal prediction accuracy and generation quality. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the proposed model for ECI.

Cross-Lingual Event Detection (CLED) models are capable of performing the Event Detection (ED) task in multiple languages. Such models are trained using data from a source language and then evaluated on data from a distinct target language. Training is usually performed in the standard supervised setting with labeled data available in the source language. The Few-Shot Learning (FSL) paradigm is yet to be explored for CLED despite its inherent advantage of allowing models to better generalize to unseen event types. As such, in this work, we study the CLED task under an FSL setting. Our contribution is threefold: first, we introduce a novel FSL classification method based on Optimal Transport (OT); second, we present a novel regularization term to incorporate the global distance between the support and query sets; and third, we adapt our approach to the cross-lingual setting by exploiting the alignment between source and target data. Our experiments on three, syntactically-different, target languages show the applicability of our approach and its effectiveness at improving the cross-lingual performance of few-shot models for event detection.

Livestreaming videos have become an effective broadcasting method for both video sharing and educational purposes. However, livestreaming videos contain a considerable amount of off-topic content (i.e., up to 50%) which introduces significant noises and data load to downstream applications. This paper presents BehanceCC, a new human-annotated benchmark dataset for off-topic detection (also called chitchat detection) in livestreaming video transcripts. In addition to describing the challenges of the dataset, our extensive experiments of various baselines reveal the complexity of chitchat detection for livestreaming videos and suggest potential future research directions for this task. The dataset will be made publicly available to foster research in this area.

Question-Answer (QA) is one of the effective methods for storing knowledge which can be used for future retrieval. As such, identifying mentions of questions and their answers in text is necessary for a knowledge construction and retrieval systems. In the literature, QA identification has been well studied in the NLP community. However, most of the prior works are restricted to formal written documents such as papers or websites. As such, Questions and Answers that are presented in informal/noisy documents have not been adequately studied. One of the domains that can significantly benefit from QA identification is the domain of livestreaming video transcripts that involve abundant QA pairs to provide valuable knowledge for future users and services. Since video transcripts are often transcribed automatically for scale, they are prone to errors. Combined with the informal nature of discussion in a video, prior QA identification systems might not be able to perform well in this domain. To enable comprehensive research in this domain, we present a large-scale QA identification dataset annotated by human over transcripts of 500 hours of streamed videos. We employ Behance.net to collect the videos and their automatically obtained transcripts. Furthermore, we conduct extensive analysis on the annotated dataset to understand the complexity of QA identification for livestreaming video transcripts. Our experiments show that the annotated dataset presents unique challenges for existing methods and more research is necessary to explore more effective methods. The dataset and the models developed in this work will be publicly released for future research.

We describe Symlink, a SemEval shared task of extracting mathematical symbols and their descriptions from LaTeX source of scientific documents. This is a new task in SemEval 2022, which attracted 180 individual registrations and 59 final submissions from 7 participant teams. We expect the data developed for this task and the findings reported to be valuable for the scientific knowledge extraction and automated knowledge base construction communities. The data used in this task is publicly accessible at https://github.com/nlp-oregon/symlink.

This paper presents our entry to the CreativeSumm 2022 shared task. Specifically tackling the problem of prime-time television screenplay summarization based on the SummScreen Forever Dreaming dataset. Our approach utilizes extended Longformers combined with sketch supervision including categories specifically for scene descriptions. Our system was able to produce the shortest summaries out of all submissions. While some problems with factual consistency still remain, the system was scoring highest among competitors in the ROUGE and BERTScore evaluation categories.