We present Disease Network Constructor (DNC), a system that extracts and visualizes a disease network, in which nodes are entities such as diseases, proteins, and genes, and edges represent regulation relation. We focused on the disease network derived through regulation events found in scientific articles on idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). The front-end web-base user interface of DNC includes two-dimensional (2D) and 3D visualizations of the constructed disease network. The back-end system of DNC includes several natural language processing (NLP) techniques to process biomedical text including BERT-based tokenization on the basis of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), flat and nested named entity recognition (NER), candidate generation and candidate ranking for entity linking (EL) or, relation extraction (RE), and event extraction (EE) tasks. We evaluated the end-to-end EL and end-to-end nested EE systems to determine the DNC’s back-endimplementation performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that addresses neural NER, EL, RE, and EE tasks in an end-to-end manner that constructs a path-way visualization from events, which we name Disease Network Constructor. The demonstration video can be accessed from https://youtu.be/rFhWwAgcXE8. We release an online system for end users and the source code is available at https://github.com/aistairc/PRISM-APIs/.

Live commentaries are essential for enhancing spectators’ enjoyment and understanding during sports events or e-sports streams. We introduce a live audio commentator system designed specifically for a racing game, driven by the high demand in the e-sports field. While a player is playing a racing game, our system tracks real-time user play data including speed and steer rotations, and generates commentary to accompany the live stream. Human evaluation suggested that generated commentary enhances enjoyment and understanding of races compared to streams without commentary. Incorporating additional modules to improve diversity and detect irregular events, such as course-outs and collisions, further increases the preference for the output commentaries.

Domain-specific pretrained language models such as SciBERT are effective for various tasks involving text in specific domains. However, pretraining BERT requires a large-scale language resource, which is not necessarily available in fine-grained domains, especially in non-English languages. In this study, we focus on a setting with no available domain-specific text for pretraining. To this end, we propose a simple framework that trains a BERT on text in the target language automatically translated from a resource-rich language, e.g., English. In this paper, we particularly focus on the materials science domain in Japanese. Our experiments pertain to the task of entity and relation extraction for this domain and language. The experiments demonstrate that the various models pretrained on translated texts consistently perform better than the general BERT in terms of F1 scores although the domain-specific BERTs do not use any human-authored domain-specific text. These results imply that BERTs for various low-resource domains can be successfully trained on texts automatically translated from resource-rich languages.

Live commentary plays an important role in sports broadcasts and video games, making spectators more excited and immersed. In this context, though approaches for automatically generating such commentary have been proposed in the past, they have been generally concerned with specific fields, where it is possible to leverage domain-specific information. In light of this, we propose the task of generating video commentary in an open-domain fashion. We detail the construction of a new large-scale dataset of transcribed commentary aligned with videos containing various human actions in a variety of domains, and propose approaches based on well-known neural architectures to tackle the task. To understand the strengths and limitations of current approaches, we present an in-depth empirical study based on our data. Our results suggest clear trade-offs between textual and visual inputs for the models and highlight the importance of relying on external knowledge in this open-domain setting, resulting in a set of robust baselines for our task.

We present BiomedCurator1, a web application that extracts the structured data from scientific articles in PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov. BiomedCurator uses state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to fill the fields pre-selected by domain experts in the relevant biomedical area. The BiomedCurator web application includes: text generation based model for relation extraction, entity detection and recognition, text classification model for extracting several fields, information retrieval from external knowledge base to retrieve IDs, and a pattern-based extraction approach that can extract several fields using regular expressions over the PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov datasets. Evaluation results show that different approaches of BiomedCurator web application system are effective for automatic data curation in the biomedical domain.

We propose the task of automatically generating commentaries for races in a motor racing game, from vision, structured numerical, and textual data. Commentaries provide information to support spectators in understanding events in races. Commentary generation models need to interpret the race situation and generate the correct content at the right moment. We divide the task into two subtasks: utterance timing identification and utterance generation. Because existing datasets do not have such alignments of data in multiple modalities, this setting has not been explored in depth. In this study, we introduce a new large-scale dataset that contains aligned video data, structured numerical data, and transcribed commentaries that consist of 129,226 utterances in 1,389 races in a game. Our analysis reveals that the characteristics of commentaries change over time or from viewpoints. Our experiments on the subtasks show that it is still challenging for a state-of-the-art vision encoder to capture useful information from videos to generate accurate commentaries. We make the dataset and baseline implementation publicly available for further research.

We present a biomedical entity linking (EL) system BENNERD that detects named enti- ties in text and links them to the unified medical language system (UMLS) knowledge base (KB) entries to facilitate the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) research. BEN- NERD mainly covers biomedical domain, es- pecially new entity types (e.g., coronavirus, vi- ral proteins, immune responses) by address- ing CORD-NER dataset. It includes several NLP tools to process biomedical texts includ- ing tokenization, flat and nested entity recog- nition, and candidate generation and rank- ing for EL that have been pre-trained using the CORD-NER corpus. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that ad- dresses NER and EL on COVID-19-related entities, such as COVID-19 virus, potential vaccines, and spreading mechanism, that may benefit research on COVID-19. We release an online system to enable real-time entity annotation with linking for end users. We also release the manually annotated test set and CORD-NERD dataset for leveraging EL task. The BENNERD system is available at https://aistairc.github.io/BENNERD/.

In this paper, we evaluate the progress of our field toward solving simple factoid questions over a knowledge base, a practically important problem in natural language interface to database. As in other natural language understanding tasks, a common practice for this task is to train and evaluate a model on a single dataset, and recent studies suggest that SimpleQuestions, the most popular and largest dataset, is nearly solved under this setting. However, this common setting does not evaluate the robustness of the systems outside of the distribution of the used training data. We rigorously evaluate such robustness of existing systems using different datasets. Our analysis, including shifting of training and test datasets and training on a union of the datasets, suggests that our progress in solving SimpleQuestions dataset does not indicate the success of more general simple question answering. We discuss a possible future direction toward this goal.