Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular way of distributing view-only documents with a rich visual markup. This presents a challenge to NLP practitioners who wish to use the information contained within PDF documents for training models or data analysis, because annotating these documents is difficult. In this paper, we present PDF Annotation with Labels and Structure (PAWLS), a new annotation tool designed specifically for the PDF document format. PAWLS is particularly suited for mixed-mode annotation and scenarios in which annotators require extended context to annotate accurately. PAWLS supports span-based textual annotation, N-ary relations and freeform, non-textual bounding boxes, all of which can be exported in convenient formats for training multi-modal machine learning models. A read-only PAWLS server is available at https://pawls.apps.allenai.org/, and the source code is available at https://github.com/allenai/pawls.

We present a rule-based sentence boundary disambiguation Python package that works out-of-the-box for 22 languages. We aim to provide a realistic segmenter which can provide logical sentences even when the format and domain of the input text is unknown. In our work, we adapt the Golden Rules Set (a language specific set of sentence boundary exemplars) originally implemented as a ruby gem pragmatic segmenter which we ported to Python with additional improvements and functionality. PySBD passes 97.92% of the Golden Rule Set examplars for English, an improvement of 25% over the next best open source Python tool.

We introduce S2ORC, a large corpus of 81.1M English-language academic papers spanning many academic disciplines. The corpus consists of rich metadata, paper abstracts, resolved bibliographic references, as well as structured full text for 8.1M open access papers. Full text is annotated with automatically-detected inline mentions of citations, figures, and tables, each linked to their corresponding paper objects. In S2ORC, we aggregate papers from hundreds of academic publishers and digital archives into a unified source, and create the largest publicly-available collection of machine-readable academic text to date. We hope this resource will facilitate research and development of tools and tasks for text mining over academic text.

Contextual word representations, typically trained on unstructured, unlabeled text, do not contain any explicit grounding to real world entities and are often unable to remember facts about those entities. We propose a general method to embed multiple knowledge bases (KBs) into large scale models, and thereby enhance their representations with structured, human-curated knowledge. For each KB, we first use an integrated entity linker to retrieve relevant entity embeddings, then update contextual word representations via a form of word-to-entity attention. In contrast to previous approaches, the entity linkers and self-supervised language modeling objective are jointly trained end-to-end in a multitask setting that combines a small amount of entity linking supervision with a large amount of raw text. After integrating WordNet and a subset of Wikipedia into BERT, the knowledge enhanced BERT (KnowBert) demonstrates improved perplexity, ability to recall facts as measured in a probing task and downstream performance on relationship extraction, entity typing, and word sense disambiguation. KnowBert’s runtime is comparable to BERT’s and it scales to large KBs.

Despite recent advances in natural language processing, many statistical models for processing text perform extremely poorly under domain shift. Processing biomedical and clinical text is a critically important application area of natural language processing, for which there are few robust, practical, publicly available models. This paper describes scispaCy, a new Python library and models for practical biomedical/scientific text processing, which heavily leverages the spaCy library. We detail the performance of two packages of models released in scispaCy and demonstrate their robustness on several tasks and datasets. Models and code are available at https://allenai.github.io/scispacy/.

We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pre-trained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals.

Ontology alignment is the task of identifying semantically equivalent entities from two given ontologies. Different ontologies have different representations of the same entity, resulting in a need to de-duplicate entities when merging ontologies. We propose a method for enriching entities in an ontology with external definition and context information, and use this additional information for ontology alignment. We develop a neural architecture capable of encoding the additional information when available, and show that the addition of external data results in an F1-score of 0.69 on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) largebio SNOMED-NCI subtask, comparable with the entity-level matchers in a SOTA system.

Modern natural language processing (NLP) research requires writing code. Ideally this code would provide a precise definition of the approach, easy repeatability of results, and a basis for extending the research. However, many research codebases bury high-level parameters under implementation details, are challenging to run and debug, and are difficult enough to extend that they are more likely to be rewritten. This paper describes AllenNLP, a library for applying deep learning methods to NLP research that addresses these issues with easy-to-use command-line tools, declarative configuration-driven experiments, and modular NLP abstractions. AllenNLP has already increased the rate of research experimentation and the sharing of NLP components at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and we are working to have the same impact across the field.

Contextual word representations derived from pre-trained bidirectional language models (biLMs) have recently been shown to provide significant improvements to the state of the art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, many questions remain as to how and why these models are so effective. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study of how the choice of neural architecture (e.g. LSTM, CNN, or self attention) influences both end task accuracy and qualitative properties of the representations that are learned. We show there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, but all architectures learn high quality contextual representations that outperform word embeddings for four challenging NLP tasks. Additionally, all architectures learn representations that vary with network depth, from exclusively morphological based at the word embedding layer through local syntax based in the lower contextual layers to longer range semantics such coreference at the upper layers. Together, these results suggest that unsupervised biLMs, independent of architecture, are learning much more about the structure of language than previously appreciated.

Doing modern NLP research requires writing code. Good code enables fast prototyping, easy debugging, controlled experiments, and accessible visualizations that help researchers understand what a model is doing. Bad code leads to research that is at best hard to reproduce and extend, and at worst simply incorrect. Indeed, there is a growing recognition of the importance of having good tools to assist good research in our field, as the upcoming workshop on open source software for NLP demonstrates. This tutorial aims to share best practices for writing code for NLP research, drawing on the instructors' experience designing the recently-released AllenNLP toolkit, a PyTorch-based library for deep learning NLP research. We will explain how a library with the right abstractions and components enables better code and better science, using models implemented in AllenNLP as examples. Participants will learn how to write research code in a way that facilitates good science and easy experimentation, regardless of what framework they use.