In recent years, the plentiful information contained in Chinese legal documents has attracted a great deal of attention because of the large-scale release of the judgment documents on China Judgments Online. It is in great need of enabling machines to understand the semantic information stored in the documents which are transcribed in the form of natural language. The technique of information extraction provides a way of mining the valuable information implied in the unstructured judgment documents. We propose a Legal Triplet Extraction System for drug-related criminal judgment documents. The system extracts the entities and the semantic relations jointly and benefits from the proposed legal lexicon feature and multi-task learning framework. Furthermore, we manually annotate a dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction in Chinese legal domain, which contributes to training supervised triplet extraction models and evaluating the model performance. Our experimental results show that the legal feature introduction and multi-task learning framework are feasible and effective for the Legal Triplet Extraction System. The F1 score of triplet extraction finally reaches 0.836 on the legal dataset.

To date, a large amount of biomedical content has been published in non-English texts, especially for clinical documents. Therefore, it is of considerable significance to conduct Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in non-English literature. PharmaCoNER is the first Named Entity Recognition (NER) task to recognize chemical and protein entities from Spanish biomedical texts. Since there have been abundant resources in the NLP field, how to exploit these existing resources to a new task to obtain competitive performance is a meaningful study. Inspired by the success of transfer learning with language models, we introduce the BERT benchmark to facilitate the research of PharmaCoNER task. In this paper, we evaluate two baselines based on Multilingual BERT and BioBERT on the PharmaCoNER corpus. Experimental results show that transferring the knowledge learned from source large-scale datasets to the target domain offers an effective solution for the PharmaCoNER task.

Homographic puns have a long history in human writing, widely used in written and spoken literature, which usually occur in a certain syntactic or stylistic structure. How to recognize homographic puns is an important research. However, homographic pun recognition does not solve very well in existing work. In this work, we first use WordNet to understand and expand word embedding for settling the polysemy of homographic puns, and then propose a WordNet-Encoded Collocation-Attention network model (WECA) which combined with the context weights for recognizing the puns. Our experiments on the SemEval2017 Task7 and Pun of the Day demonstrate that the proposed model is able to distinguish between homographic pun and non-homographic pun texts. We show the effectiveness of the model to present the capability of choosing qualitatively informative words. The results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on homographic puns recognition.