Joshua Fasching


2019

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Rapid Customization for Event Extraction
Yee Seng Chan | Joshua Fasching | Haoling Qiu | Bonan Min
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Extracting events in the form of who is involved in what at when and where from text, is one of the core information extraction tasks that has many applications such as web search and question answering. We present a system for rapidly customizing event extraction capability to find new event types (what happened) and their arguments (who, when, and where). To enable extracting events of new types, we develop a novel approach to allow a user to find, expand and filter event triggers by exploring an unannotated development corpus. The system will then generate mention level event annotation automatically and train a neural network model for finding the corresponding events. To enable extracting arguments for new event types, the system makes novel use of the ACE annotation dataset to train a generic argument attachment model for extracting Actor, Place, and Time. We demonstrate that with less than 10 minutes of human effort per event type, the system achieves good performance for 67 novel event types. Experiments also show that the generic argument attachment model performs well on the novel event types. Our system (code, UI, documentation, demonstration video) is released as open source.

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Towards Machine Reading for Interventions from Humanitarian-Assistance Program Literature
Bonan Min | Yee Seng Chan | Haoling Qiu | Joshua Fasching
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Solving long-lasting problems such as food insecurity requires a comprehensive understanding of interventions applied by governments and international humanitarian assistance organizations, and their results and consequences. Towards achieving this grand goal, a crucial first step is to extract past interventions and when and where they have been applied, from hundreds of thousands of reports automatically. In this paper, we developed a corpus annotated with interventions to foster research, and developed an information extraction system for extracting interventions and their location and time from text. We demonstrate early, very encouraging results on extracting interventions.