We present a cross-domain approach for automated measurement and context extraction based on pre-trained language models. We construct a multi-source, multi-domain corpus and train an end-to-end extraction pipeline. We then apply multi-source task-adaptive pre-training and fine-tuning to benchmark the cross-domain generalization capability of our model. Further, we conceptualize and apply a task-specific error analysis and derive insights for future work. Our results suggest that multi-source training leads to the best overall results, while single-source training yields the best results for the respective individual domain. While our setup is successful at extracting quantity values and units, more research is needed to improve the extraction of contextual entities. We make the cross-domain corpus used in this work available online.

Timeline summarization (TLS) creates an overview of long-running events via dated daily summaries for the most important dates. TLS differs from standard multi-document summarization (MDS) in the importance of date selection, interdependencies between summaries of different dates and by having very short summaries compared to the number of corpus documents. However, we show that MDS optimization models using submodular functions can be adapted to yield well-performing TLS models by designing objective functions and constraints that model the temporal dimension inherent in TLS. Importantly, these adaptations retain the elegance and advantages of the original MDS models (clear separation of features and inference, performance guarantees and scalability, little need for supervision) that current TLS-specific models lack.

Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and contextually generate their mentions. Our model is generative and flexible; it can model an arbitrary number of entities in context while generating each entity mention at an arbitrary length. In addition, it can be used for several different tasks such as language modeling, coreference resolution, and entity prediction. Experimental results with all these tasks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines and prior work.

Current evaluation metrics for timeline summarization either ignore the temporal aspect of the task or require strict date matching. We introduce variants of ROUGE that allow alignment of daily summaries via temporal distance or semantic similarity. We argue for the suitability of these variants in a theoretical analysis and demonstrate it in a battery of task-specific tests.

Machine learning approaches to coreference resolution vary greatly in the modeling of the problem: while early approaches operated on the mention pair level, current research focuses on ranking architectures and antecedent trees. We propose a unified representation of different approaches to coreference resolution in terms of the structure they operate on. We represent several coreference resolution approaches proposed in the literature in our framework and evaluate their performance. Finally, we conduct a systematic analysis of the output of these approaches, highlighting differences and similarities.