We present KaaPa (Knowledge Aware Answers from Pdf Analysis), an integrated solution for machine reading comprehension over both text and tables extracted from PDFs. KaaPa enables interactive question refinement using facets generated from an automatically induced Knowledge Graph. In addition it provides a concise summary of the supporting evidence for the provided answers by aggregating information across multiple sources. KaaPa can be applied consistently to any collection of documents in English with zero domain adaptation effort. We showcase the use of KaaPa for QA on scientific literature using the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset.

Michael Glass, Mustafa Canim, Alfio Gliozzo, Saneem Chemmengath, Vishwajeet Kumar, Rishav Chakravarti, Avi Sil, Feifei Pan, Samarth Bharadwaj, Nicolas Rodolfo Fauceglia. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

This paper introduces Strict Partial Order Networks (SPON), a novel neural network architecture designed to enforce asymmetry and transitive properties as soft constraints. We apply it to induce hypernymy relations by training with is-a pairs. We also present an augmented variant of SPON that can generalize type information learned for in-vocabulary terms to previously unseen ones. An extensive evaluation over eleven benchmarks across different tasks shows that SPON consistently either outperforms or attains the state of the art on all but one of these benchmarks.

Analogy is a fundamental component of the way we think and process thought. Solving a word analogy problem, such as mason is to stone as carpenter is to wood, requires capabilities in recognizing the implicit relations between the two word pairs. In this paper, we describe the analogy problem from a computational linguistics point of view and explore its use to address relation extraction tasks. We extend a relational model that has been shown to be effective in solving word analogies and adapt it to the relation extraction problem. Our experiments show that this approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on a relation extraction dataset, opening up a new research direction in discovering implicit relations in text through analogical reasoning.

Previous studies have highlighted the necessity for entity linking systems to capture the local entity-mention similarities and the global topical coherence. We introduce a novel framework based on convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to simultaneously model the local and global features for entity linking. The proposed model benefits from the capacity of convolutional neural networks to induce the underlying representations for local contexts and the advantage of recurrent neural networks to adaptively compress variable length sequences of predictions for global constraints. Our evaluation on multiple datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the model and yields the state-of-the-art performance on such datasets. In addition, we examine the entity linking systems on the domain adaptation setting that further demonstrates the cross-domain robustness of the proposed model.