To Schedule or not to Schedule: Extracting Task Specific Temporal Entities and Associated Negation Constraints

Barun Patra, Chala Fufa, Pamela Bhattacharya, Charles Lee


Abstract
State of the art research for date-time entity extraction from text is task agnostic. Consequently, while the methods proposed in literature perform well for generic date-time extraction from texts, they don’t fare as well on task specific date-time entity extraction where only a subset of the date-time entities present in the text are pertinent to solving the task. Furthermore, some tasks require identifying negation constraints associated with the date-time entities to correctly reason over time. We showcase a novel model for extracting task-specific date-time entities along with their negation constraints. We show the efficacy of our method on the task of date-time understanding in the context of scheduling meetings for an email-based digital AI scheduling assistant. Our method achieves an absolute gain of 19% f-score points compared to baseline methods in detecting the date-time entities relevant to scheduling meetings and a 4% improvement over baseline methods for detecting negation constraints over date-time entities.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.678
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8445–8455
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.emnlp-main.678/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.678
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Barun Patra, Chala Fufa, Pamela Bhattacharya, and Charles Lee. 2020. To Schedule or not to Schedule: Extracting Task Specific Temporal Entities and Associated Negation Constraints. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8445–8455, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
To Schedule or not to Schedule: Extracting Task Specific Temporal Entities and Associated Negation Constraints (Patra et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.emnlp-main.678.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939368