Barry Wang


2023

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Probing Representations for Document-level Event Extraction
Barry Wang | Xinya Du | Claire Cardie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

The probing classifiers framework has been employed for interpreting deep neural network models for a variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications. Studies, however, have largely focused on sentencelevel NLP tasks. This work is the first to apply the probing paradigm to representations learned for document-level information extraction (IE). We designed eight embedding probes to analyze surface, semantic, and event-understanding capabilities relevant to document-level event extraction. We apply them to the representations acquired by learning models from three different LLM-based document-level IE approaches on a standard dataset. We found that trained encoders from these models yield embeddings that can modestly improve argument detections and labeling but only slightly enhance event-level tasks, albeit trade-offs in information helpful for coherence and event-type prediction. We further found that encoder models struggle with document length and cross-sentence discourse.

2022

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Automatic Error Analysis for Document-level Information Extraction
Aliva Das | Xinya Du | Barry Wang | Kejian Shi | Jiayuan Gu | Thomas Porter | Claire Cardie
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Document-level information extraction (IE) tasks have recently begun to be revisited in earnest using the end-to-end neural network techniques that have been successful on their sentence-level IE counterparts. Evaluation of the approaches, however, has been limited in a number of dimensions. In particular, the precision/recall/F1 scores typically reported provide few insights on the range of errors the models make. We build on the work of Kummerfeld and Klein (2013) to propose a transformation-based framework for automating error analysis in document-level event and (N-ary) relation extraction. We employ our framework to compare two state-of-the-art document-level template-filling approaches on datasets from three domains; and then, to gauge progress in IE since its inception 30 years ago, vs. four systems from the MUC-4 (1992) evaluation.