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Medical named entity recognition (NER) and normalization (NEN) are fundamental for constructing knowledge graphs and building QA systems. Existing implementations for medical NER and NEN are suffered from the error propagation between the two tasks. The mispredicted mentions from NER will directly influence the results of NEN. Therefore, the NER module is the bottleneck of the whole system. Besides, the learnable features for both tasks are beneficial to improving the model performance. To avoid the disadvantages of existing models and exploit the generalized representation across the two tasks, we design an end-to-end progressive multi-task learning model for jointly modeling medical NER and NEN in an effective way. There are three level tasks with progressive difficulty in the framework. The progressive tasks can reduce the error propagation with the incremental task settings which implies the lower level tasks gain the supervised signals other than errors from the higher level tasks to improve their performances. Besides, the context features are exploited to enrich the semantic information of entity mentions extracted by NER. The performance of NEN profits from the enhanced entity mention features. The standard entities from knowledge bases are introduced into the NER module for extracting corresponding entity mentions correctly. The empirical results on two publicly available medical literature datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over nine typical methods.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

An End-to-End Progressive Multi-Task Learning Framework for Medical Named Entity Recognition and Normalization

named entity normalization

named entity recognition

multi-task learning

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

A neural multimodal machine translation (MMT) system is one that aims to perform better translation by extending conventional text-only translation models with multimodal information. Many recent studies report improvements when equipping their models with the multimodal module, despite the controversy of whether such improvements indeed come from the multimodal part. We revisit the contribution of multimodal information in MMT by devising two interpretable MMT models. To our surprise, although our models replicate similar gains as recently developed multimodal-integrated systems achieved, 
our models learn to ignore the multimodal information. Upon further investigation, we discover that the improvements achieved by the multimodal models over text-only counterparts are in fact results of the regularization effect. 
We report empirical findings that highlight the importance of MMT models' interpretability, and discuss how our findings will benefit future research.

Good for Misconceived Reasons: An Empirical Revisiting on the Need for Visual Context in Multimodal Machine Translation

Video Question Answering is a task which requires an AI agent to answer questions grounded in video. This task entails three key challenges: (1) understand the intention of various questions, (2) capturing various elements of the input video (e.g., object, action, causality), and (3) cross-modal grounding between language and vision information. We propose Motion-Appearance Synergistic Networks (MASN), which embed two cross-modal features grounded on motion and appearance information and selectively utilize them depending on the question's intentions. 
MASN consists of a motion module, an appearance module, and a motion-appearance fusion module. The motion module computes the action-oriented cross-modal joint representations, while the appearance module focuses on the appearance aspect of the input video. Finally, the motion-appearance fusion module takes each output of the motion module and the appearance module as input, and performs question-guided fusion. As a result, MASN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the TGIF-QA and MSVD-QA datasets. We also conduct qualitative analysis by visualizing the inference results of MASN.

Attend What You Need: Motion-Appearance Synergistic Networks for Video Question Answering

Recently multimodal transformer models have gained popularity because their performance on language and vision tasks suggest they learn rich visual-linguistic representations. Focusing on zero-shot image retrieval tasks, we study three important factors which can impact the quality of learned representations: pretraining data, the attention mechanism, and loss functions. By pretraining models on six datasets, we observe that dataset noise and language similarity to our downstream task are important indicators of model performance. Through architectural analysis, we learn that models with a multimodal attention mechanism can outperform deeper models with modality specific attention mechanisms. Finally, we show that successful contrastive losses used in the self-supervised learning literature do not yield similar performance gains when used in multimodal transformers.

Decoupling the Role of Data, Attention, and Losses in Multimodal Transformers

We study the problem of learning a named entity recognition (NER) tagger using noisy labels from multiple weak supervision sources. Though cheap to obtain, the labels from weak supervision sources are often incomplete, inaccurate, and contradictory, making it difficult to learn an accurate NER model. To address this challenge, we propose a conditional hidden Markov model (CHMM), which can effectively infer true labels from multi-source noisy labels in an unsupervised way. CHMM enhances the classic hidden Markov model with the contextual representation power of pre-trained language models. Specifically, CHMM learns token-wise transition and emission probabilities from the BERT embeddings of the input tokens to infer the latent true labels from noisy observations. We further refine CHMM with an alternate-training approach (CHMM-ALT). It fine-tunes a BERT-NER model with the labels inferred by CHMM, and this BERT-NER's output is regarded as an additional weak source to train the CHMM in return. Experiments on four NER benchmarks from various domains show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised NER models by wide margins.

BERTifying the Hidden Markov Model for Multi-Source Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Distant supervision for relation extraction provides uniform bag labels for each sentence inside the bag, while accurate sentence labels are important for downstream applications that need the exact relation type. Directly using bag labels for sentence-level training will introduce much noise, thus severely degrading performance. In this work, we propose the use of negative training (NT), in which a model is trained using complementary labels regarding that ``the instance does not belong to these complementary labels". Since the probability of selecting a true label as a complementary label is low, NT provides less noisy information. Furthermore, the model trained with NT is able to separate the noisy data from the training data. Based on NT, we propose a sentence-level framework, SENT, for distant relation extraction. SENT not only filters the noisy data to construct a cleaner dataset, but also performs a re-labeling process to transform the noisy data into useful training data, thus further benefiting the model's performance. Experimental results show the significant improvement of the proposed method over previous methods on sentence-level evaluation and de-noise effect.

SENT: Sentence-level Distant Relation Extraction via Negative Training

Understanding tables is an important and relevant task that involves understanding table structure as well as being able to compare and contrast information within cells. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting a new dataset and tasks that addresses this goal in a shared task in SemEval 2020 Task 9: Fact Verification and Evidence Finding for Tabular Data in Scientific Documents (SEM-TAB-FACTS). Our dataset contains 981 manually-generated tables and an auto-generated dataset of 1980 tables providing over 180K statement and over 16M evidence annotations. SEM-TAB-FACTS featured two sub-tasks. In sub-task A, the goal was to determine if a statement is supported, refuted or unknown in relation to a table. In sub-task B, the focus was on identifying the specific cells of a table that provide evidence for the statement. 69 teams signed up to participate in the task with 19 successful submissions to subtask A and 12 successful submissions to subtask B. We present our results and main findings from the competition.

SemEval-2021 Task 9: Fact Verification and Evidence Finding for Tabular Data in Scientific Documents (SEM-TAB-FACTS)

This paper presents a technical report of our submission to the 4th task of SemEval-2021, titled: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning. In this task, we want to predict the correct answer based on a question given
a context. Usually, contexts are very lengthy and require a large receptive field from the model. Thus, common contextualized language models like BERT miss fine representation and performance due to the limited capacity of the input tokens. To tackle this problem, we used the longformer model to better process the sequences. Furthermore, we utilized the method proposed in the longformer benchmark on wikihop dataset which improved the accuracy on our task data from (23.01% and 22.95%) achieved by the baselines for subtask 1 and 2, respectively, to (70.30% and 64.38%).

Machine Reading Comprehension using Long Document Transformer

In this task, we applied a two-phase training on RoBERTa model. Phase One pre-trains RoBERTa on LIME labeled Reddit Comments. Phase Two fine-tunes the model on organizer-provided data (Gold Dataset)

Investigating Toxic Span Detection Using RoBERTa Pre-training

We describe MeasEval, a SemEval task of extracting counts, measurements, and related context from scientific documents, which is of significant importance to the creation of Knowledge Graphs that distill information from the scientific literature. This is a new task in 2021, for which over 75 submissions from 25 participants were received. We expect the data developed for this task and the findings reported to be valuable to the scientific knowledge extraction, metrology, and automated knowledge base construction communities.

SemEval-2021 Task 8: MeasEval – Extracting Counts and Measurements and their Related Contexts

There is currently a gap between the natural language expression of scholarly publications and their structured semantic content modeling to enable intelligent content search. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, a search feature operating over semantically structured content is compelling. The SemEval-2021 Shared Task NLPContributionGraph (a.k.a. 'the NCG task') tasks participants to develop automated systems that structure contributions from NLP scholarly articles in the English language. Being the first-of-its-kind in the SemEval series, the task released structured data from NLP scholarly articles at three levels of information granularity, i.e. at sentence-level, phrase-level, and phrases organized as triples toward Knowledge Graph (KG) building. The sentence-level annotations comprised the few sentences about the article's contribution. The phrase-level annotations were scientific term and predicate phrases from the contribution sentences. Finally, the triples constituted the research overview KG. For the Shared Task, participating systems were then expected to automatically classify contribution sentences, extract scientific terms and relations from the sentences, and organize them as KG triples.

Overall, the task drew a strong participation demographic of seven teams and 27 participants. The best end-to-end task system classified contribution sentences at 57.27% F1, phrases at 46.41% F1, and triples at 22.28% F1. While the absolute performance to generate triples remains low, in the conclusion of this article, the difficulty of producing such data and as a consequence of modeling it is highlighted.

An End-to-End Progressive Multi-Task Learning Framework for Medical Named Entity Recognition and Normalization

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