Pei Chen


2022

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Crossroads, Buildings and Neighborhoods: A Dataset for Fine-grained Location Recognition
Pei Chen | Haotian Xu | Cheng Zhang | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

General domain Named Entity Recognition (NER) datasets like CoNLL-2003 mostly annotate coarse-grained location entities such as a country or a city. But many applications require identifying fine-grained locations from texts and mapping them precisely to geographic sites, e.g., a crossroad, an apartment building, or a grocery store. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset HarveyNER with fine-grained locations annotated in tweets. This dataset presents unique challenges and characterizes many complex and long location mentions in informal descriptions. We built strong baseline models using Curriculum Learning and experimented with different heuristic curricula to better recognize difficult location mentions. Experimental results show that the simple curricula can improve the system’s performance on hard cases and its overall performance, and outperform several other baseline systems. The dataset and the baseline models can be found at https://github.com/brickee/HarveyNER.

2021

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Probing into the Root: A Dataset for Reason Extraction of Structural Events from Financial Documents
Pei Chen | Kang Liu | Yubo Chen | Taifeng Wang | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

This paper proposes a new task regarding event reason extraction from document-level texts. Unlike the previous causality detection task, we do not assign target events in the text, but only provide structural event descriptions, and such settings accord more with practice scenarios. Moreover, we annotate a large dataset FinReason for evaluation, which provides Reasons annotation for Financial events in company announcements. This task is challenging because the cases of multiple-events, multiple-reasons, and implicit-reasons are included. In total, FinReason contains 8,794 documents, 12,861 financial events and 11,006 reason spans. We also provide the performance of existing canonical methods in event extraction and machine reading comprehension on this task. The results show a 7 percentage point F1 score gap between the best model and human performance, and existing methods are far from resolving this problem.

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Explicitly Capturing Relations between Entity Mentions via Graph Neural Networks for Domain-specific Named Entity Recognition
Pei Chen | Haibo Ding | Jun Araki | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Named entity recognition (NER) is well studied for the general domain, and recent systems have achieved human-level performance for identifying common entity types. However, the NER performance is still moderate for specialized domains that tend to feature complicated contexts and jargonistic entity types. To address these challenges, we propose explicitly connecting entity mentions based on both global coreference relations and local dependency relations for building better entity mention representations. In our experiments, we incorporate entity mention relations by Graph Neural Networks and show that our system noticeably improves the NER performance on two datasets from different domains. We further show that the proposed lightweight system can effectively elevate the NER performance to a higher level even when only a tiny amount of labeled data is available, which is desirable for domain-specific NER.

2020

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Reconstructing Event Regions for Event Extraction via Graph Attention Networks
Pei Chen | Hang Yang | Kang Liu | Ruihong Huang | Yubo Chen | Taifeng Wang | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Event information is usually scattered across multiple sentences within a document. The local sentence-level event extractors often yield many noisy event role filler extractions in the absence of a broader view of the document-level context. Filtering spurious extractions and aggregating event information in a document remains a challenging problem. Following the observation that a document has several relevant event regions densely populated with event role fillers, we build graphs with candidate role filler extractions enriched by sentential embeddings as nodes, and use graph attention networks to identify event regions in a document and aggregate event information. We characterize edges between candidate extractions in a graph into rich vector representations to facilitate event region identification. The experimental results on two datasets of two languages show that our approach yields new state-of-the-art performance for the challenging event extraction task.