Underpinning much of the recent progress in deep learning is the transformer architecture, which takes as input a sequence of embeddings E and emits an updated sequence of embeddings E’. A special [CLS] embedding is often included in this sequence, serving as a description of the sequence once processed and used as the basis for subsequent sequence-level tasks. The processed [CLS] embedding loses utility, however, when the model is presented with a multi-entity sequence and asked to perform an entity-specific task. When processing a multi-speaker dialogue, for example, the [CLS] embedding describes the entire dialogue, not any individual utterance/speaker. Existing methods toward entity-specific prediction involve redundant computation or post-processing outside of the transformer. We present a novel methodology for deriving entity-specific embeddings from a multi-entity sequence completely within the transformer, with a loose definition of entity amenable to many problem spaces. To show the generic applicability of our method, we apply it to widely different tasks: emotion recognition in conversation and player performance projection in baseball and show that it can be used to achieve SOTA in both. Code can be found at https://github.com/c-heat16/EntitySpecificEmbeddings.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an established task with the objective of identifying the text present in an image. While many off-the-shelf OCR models exist, they are often trained for either scientific (e.g., formulae) or generic printed English text. Extracting text from chemistry publications requires an OCR model that is capable in both realms. Nougat, a recent tool, exhibits strong ability to parse academic documents, but is unable to parse tables in PubMed articles, which comprises a significant part of the academic community and is the focus of this work. To mitigate this gap, we present the Printed English and Chemical Equations (PEaCE) dataset, containing both synthetic and real-world records, and evaluate the efficacy of transformer-based OCR models when trained on this resource. Given that real-world records contain artifacts not present in synthetic records, we propose transformations that mimic such qualities. We perform a suite of experiments to explore the impact of patch size, multi-domain training, and our proposed transformations, ultimately finding that models with a small patch size trained on multiple domains using the proposed transformations yield the best performance. Our dataset and code is available at https://github.com/ZN1010/PEaCE.