Document logical structuring aims to extract the underlying hierarchical structure of documents, which is crucial for document intelligence.Traditional approaches often fall short in handling the complexity and the variability of lengthy documents.To address these issues, we introduce SEG2ACT, an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring, revisiting logical structure extraction as an action generation task.Specifically, given the text segments of a document, SEG2ACT iteratively generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model, and simultaneously updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions.Experiments on ChCa-tExt and HierDoc datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SEG2ACT in both supervised and transfer learning settings 1 .

Procedural text understanding requires machines to reason about entity states within the dynamical narratives. Current procedural text understanding approaches are commonly entity-wise, which separately track each entity and independently predict different states of each entity. Such an entity-wise paradigm does not consider the interaction between entities and their states. In this paper, we propose a new scene-wise paradigm for procedural text understanding, which jointly tracks states of all entities in a scene-by-scene manner. Based on this paradigm, we propose Scene Graph Reasoner (SGR), which introduces a series of dynamically evolving scene graphs to jointly formulate the evolution of entities, states and their associations throughout the narrative. In this way, the deep interactions between all entities and states can be jointly captured and simultaneously derived from scene graphs. Experiments show that SGR not only achieves the new state-of-the-art performance but also significantly accelerates the speed of reasoning.

Enhancers are small regions of DNA that bind to proteins, which enhance the transcription of genes. The enhancer may be located upstream or downstream of the gene. It is not necessarily close to the gene to be acted on, because the entanglement structure of chromatin allows the positions far apart in the sequence to have the opportunity to contact each other. Therefore, identifying enhancers and their strength is a complex and challenging task. In this article, a new prediction method based on deep learning is proposed to identify enhancers and enhancer strength, called iEnhancer-DCLA. Firstly, we use word2vec to convert k-mers into number vectors to construct an input matrix. Secondly, we use convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory network to extract sequence features, and finally use the attention mechanism to extract relatively important features. In the task of predicting enhancers and their strengths, this method has improved to a certain extent in most evaluation indexes. In summary, we believe that this method provides new ideas in the analysis of enhancers.

Succinct event description based on multiple documents is critical to news systems as well as search engines. Different from existing summarization or event tasks, Multi-document Event Summarization (MES) aims at the query-level event sequence generation, which has extra constraints on event expression and conciseness. Identifying and summarizing the key event from a set of related articles is a challenging task that has not been sufficiently studied, mainly because online articles exhibit characteristics of redundancy and sparsity, and a perfect event summarization needs high level information fusion among diverse sentences and articles. To address these challenges, we propose a two-phase framework for the MES task, that first performs event semantic graph construction and dominant event detection via graph-sequence matching, then summarizes the extracted key event by an event-aware pointer generator. For experiments in the new task, we construct two large-scale real-world datasets for training and assessment. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the related baseline methods, with the most dominant event of the articles effectively identified and correctly summarized.

Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jin Xu, Xianpei Han, Jialong Tang, Annan Li, Le Sun, Meng Liao, Shaoyi Chen. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Boxi Cao, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Lingyong Yan, Meng Liao, Tong Xue, Jin Xu. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Jialong Tang, Hongyu Lin, Meng Liao, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weijian Xie, Jin Xu. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

This paper presents the design and analysis of a data science competition on a problem of time series regression from aeronautics data. For the purpose of performing predictive maintenance, aviation companies seek to create aircraft “numerical twins”, which are programs capable of accurately predicting strains at strategic positions in various body parts of the aircraft. Given a number of input parameters (sensor data) recorded in sequence during the flight, the competition participants had to predict output values (gauges), also recorded sequentially during test flights, but not recorded during regular flights. The competition data included hundreds of complete flights. It was a code submission competition with complete blind testing of algorithms. The results indicate that such a problem can be effectively solved with gradient boosted trees, after preprocessing and feature engineering. Deep learning methods did not prove as efficient.

This paper explores a succinct kernel model for Group-Sparse Projections Learning (GSPL), to handle multiview feature selection task completely. Compared to previous works, our model has the following useful properties: 1) Strictness: GSPL innovatively learns group-sparse projections strictly on multiview data via ‘2;0-norm constraint, which is different with previous works that encourage group-sparse projections softly. 2) Adaptivity: In GSPL model, when the total number of selected features is given, the numbers of selected features of different views can be determined adaptively, which avoids artificial settings. Besides, GSPL can capture the differences among multiple views adaptively, which handles the inconsistent problem among different views. 3) Succinctness: Except for the intrinsic parameters of projection-based feature selection task, GSPL does not bring extra parameters, which guarantees the applicability in practice. To solve the optimization problem involved in GSPL, a novel iterative algorithm is proposed with rigorously theoretical guarantees. Experimental results demonstrate the superb performance of GSPL on synthetic and real datasets.

Labeling a text document is usually time consuming because it requires the annotator to read the whole document and check its relevance with each possible class label. It thus becomes rather expensive to train an effective model for text classification when it involves a large dataset of long documents. In this paper, we propose an active learning approach for text classification with lower annotation cost. Instead of scanning all the examples in the unlabeled data pool to select the best one for query, the proposed method automatically generates the most informative examples based on the classification model, and thus can be applied to tasks with large scale or even infinite unlabeled data. Furthermore, we propose to approximate the generated example with a few summary words by sparse reconstruction, which allows the annotators to easily assign the class label by reading a few words rather than the long document. Experiments on different datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively improve the classification performance while significantly reduce the annotation cost.