Events are considered as the fundamental building blocks of the world. Mining event-centric opinions can benefit decision making, people communication, and social good. Unfortunately, there is little literature addressing event-centric opinion mining, although which significantly diverges from the well-studied entity-centric opinion mining in connotation, structure, and expression. In this paper, we propose and formulate the task of event-centric opinion mining based on event-argument structure and expression categorizing theory. We also benchmark this task by constructing a pioneer corpus and designing a two-step benchmark framework. Experiment results show that event-centric opinion mining is feasible and challenging, and the proposed task, dataset, and baselines are beneficial for future studies.

Error correction is widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to post-process the generated sentence, and can further reduce the word error rate (WER). Although multiple candidates are generated by an ASR system through beam search, current error correction approaches can only correct one sentence at a time, failing to leverage the voting effect from multiple candidates to better detect and correct error tokens. In this work, we propose FastCorrect 2, an error correction model that takes multiple ASR candidates as input for better correction accuracy. FastCorrect 2 adopts non-autoregressive generation for fast inference, which consists of an encoder that processes multiple source sentences and a decoder that generates the target sentence in parallel from the adjusted source sentence, where the adjustment is based on the predicted duration of each source token. However, there are some issues when handling multiple source sentences. First, it is non-trivial to leverage the voting effect from multiple source sentences since they usually vary in length. Thus, we propose a novel alignment algorithm to maximize the degree of token alignment among multiple sentences in terms of token and pronunciation similarity. Second, the decoder can only take one adjusted source sentence as input, while there are multiple source sentences. Thus, we develop a candidate predictor to detect the most suitable candidate for the decoder. Experiments on our inhouse dataset and AISHELL-1 show that FastCorrect 2 can further reduce the WER over the previous correction model with single candidate by 3.2% and 2.6%, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging multiple candidates in ASR error correction. FastCorrect 2 achieves better performance than the cascaded re-scoring and correction pipeline and can serve as a unified post-processing module for ASR.

Current event-centric knowledge graphs highly rely on explicit connectives to mine relations between events. Unfortunately, due to the sparsity of connectives, these methods severely undermine the coverage of EventKGs. The lack of high-quality labelled corpora further exacerbates that problem. In this paper, we propose a knowledge projection paradigm for event relation extraction: projecting discourse knowledge to narratives by exploiting the commonalities between them. Specifically, we propose Multi-tier Knowledge Projection Network (MKPNet), which can leverage multi-tier discourse knowledge effectively for event relation extraction. In this way, the labelled data requirement is significantly reduced, and implicit event relations can be effectively extracted. Intrinsic experimental results show that MKPNet achieves the new state-of-the-art performance and extrinsic experimental results verify the value of the extracted event relations.

Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs over different extraction paradigms. By investigating the behaviors of MLMs, we find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts. Furthermore, incorporating illustrative cases and external contexts improve knowledge prediction mainly due to entity type guidance and golden answer leakage. Our findings shed light on the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs, and strongly question the previous conclusion that current MLMs can potentially serve as reliable factual knowledge bases.

Event extraction is challenging due to the complex structure of event records and the semantic gap between text and event. Traditional methods usually extract event records by decomposing the complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks. In this paper, we propose Text2Event, a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can directly extract events from the text in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we design a sequence-to-structure network for unified event extraction, a constrained decoding algorithm for event knowledge injection during inference, and a curriculum learning algorithm for efficient model learning. Experimental results show that, by uniformly modeling all tasks in a single model and universally predicting different labels, our method can achieve competitive performance using only record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings.

Copying mechanism has been commonly used in neural paraphrasing networks and other text generation tasks, in which some important words in the input sequence are preserved in the output sequence. Similarly, in machine translation, we notice that there are certain words or phrases appearing in all good translations of one source text, and these words tend to convey important semantic information. Therefore, in this work, we define words carrying important semantic meanings in sentences as semantic core words. Moreover, we propose an MT evaluation approach named Semantically Weighted Sentence Similarity (SWSS). It leverages the power of UCCA to identify semantic core words, and then calculates sentence similarity scores on the overlap of semantic core words. Experimental results show that SWSS can consistently improve the performance of popular MT evaluation metrics which are based on lexical similarity.