Tailoring structured financial reports from companies' earnings releases is crucial for understanding financial performance and has been widely adopted in real-world analytics. However, existing summarization methods often generate broad, high-level summaries, which may lack the precision and detail required for financial reports that typically focus on specific, structured sections. While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise, generating reports adhering to predefined multi-section templates remains challenging. This paper investigates two LLM-based approaches popular in industry for generating templated financial reports: an agentic information retrieval (IR) framework and a decomposed IR approach, namely AgenticIR and DecomposedIR. The AgenticIR utilizes collaborative agents prompted with the full template. In contrast, the DecomposedIR approach applies a prompt chaining workflow to break down the template and reframe each section as a query answered by the LLM using the earnings release. To quantitatively assess the generated reports, we evaluated both methods in two scenarios: one using a financial dataset without direct human references, and another with a weather-domain dataset featuring expert-written reports. Experimental results show that while AgenticIR may excel in orchestrating tasks and generating concise reports through agent collaboration, DecomposedIR statistically significantly outperforms AgenticIR approach in providing broader and more detailed coverage in both scenarios, offering reflection on the utilization of the agentic framework in real-world applications.

People often struggle to remember specific details of past experiences, which can lead to the need to revisit these memories. Consequently, lifelog retrieval has emerged as a crucial application. Various studies have explored methods to facilitate rapid access to personal lifelogs for memory recall assistance. In this paper, we propose a Captioning-Integrated Visual Lifelog (CIVIL) Retrieval System for extracting specific images from a user’s visual lifelog based on textual queries. Unlike traditional embedding-based methods, our system first generates captions for visual lifelogs and then utilizes a text embedding model to project both the captions and user queries into a shared vector space. Visual lifelogs, captured through wearable cameras, provide a first-person viewpoint, necessitating the interpretation of the activities of the individual behind the camera rather than merely describing the scene. To address this, we introduce three distinct approaches: the single caption method, the collective caption method, and the merged caption method, each designed to interpret the life experiences of lifeloggers. Experimental results show that our method effectively describes first-person visual images, enhancing the outcomes of lifelog retrieval. Furthermore, we construct a textual dataset that converts visual lifelogs into captions, thereby reconstructing personal life experiences.

The popularization of networks fosters the convenience of communication. People can easily share their life experiences and thoughts with relatives and friends via instant messaging software. As time passes, individuals may forget certain details of life events, leading to difficulties in effectively communicating with others. The propensity of individuals to forget or mix up life events highlights the importance of services aimed at retrieving information about past experiences. This paper presents a conversational information recall system, ConvLogRecaller, which proactively supports real-time memory recall assistance during online conversations. Given a conversation of the user with others, ConvLogRecaller suggests a message if the user forgets the details of the life experiences. The services provided by our system can avoid hesitations or memory lapses that might hinder the efficiency of a conversation.

Contributions are essentially the core of every scientific research, highlighting their key values to the academic community. Systems that are capable of identifying the contributions from scientific papers precisely and organizing them into well-structured summaries can facilitate both text processing and human comprehension. In this paper, we present ContributionSum, a dataset consisting of 24K computer science papers with contributions explicitly listed by the authors, which are further classified into different contribution types based on a newly-proposed annotation scheme. In addition, we study the task of generating disentangled contributions that summarize the values of scientific papers into key points. We propose a fine-grained post-training strategy tailored to our task and leverage salient information of different contribution types in the papers. To assess the coherency and coverage of each contribution aspect, we perform summary-level and contribution-level evaluations for our task. Experimental results show that our method improves upon mainstream baselines.

As the significant growth of scientific publications in recent years, an efficient way to extract scholarly knowledge and organize the relationship among literature is necessitated. Previous works constructed scientific knowledge graph with authors, papers, citations, and scientific entities. To assist researchers to grasp the research context comprehensively, this paper constructs a fine-grained citation graph in which citation intents and their supporting evidence are labeled between citing and cited papers instead. We propose a model with a Transformer encoder to encode the long-lengthy paper. To capture the coreference relations of words and sentences in a paper, a coreference graph is created by utilizing Gated Graph Convolution Network (GGCN). We further propose a graph modification mechanism to dynamically update the coreference links. Experimental results show that our model achieves promising results on identifying multiple citation intents in sentences.

Peer review is an essential part of the scientific process in which the research papers are assessed by several reviewers. The author rebuttal phase, which is held at most top conferences, provides an opportunity for the authors to defend their work against the arguments made by the reviewers. The strengths and the weaknesses pointed out by the reviewers, as well as the authors' responses, will be evaluated by the area chair. The final decisions generally accompany meta-reviews regarding the reason for acceptance/rejection. Previous research has studied the generation of meta-review using transformer-based summarization models. However, few of them consider the rebuttals' content and the interaction between reviews and rebuttals' arguments, where the argumentation persuasiveness plays an important role in affecting the final decision. To generate a comprehensive meta-review that well organizes reviewers' opinions and authors' responses, we present a novel generation model that is capable of explicitly modeling the complicated argumentation structure from not only arguments between the reviewers and the authors but also the inter-reviewer discussions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms baselines in terms of both automatic evaluation and human evaluation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Handling unanswerable questions in knowledge base question answering (KBQA) has been a focus in recent years. However, how to explain why a given question is unanswerable is rarely discussed. In this work, we seek not only to correct unanswerable questions based on a personal knowledge base, but also to explain the reason of the correction. We argue that different types of questions need heterogeneous subgraphs with different types of connections. We thus propose a heterogeneous subgraph aggregation network with a two-level attention mechanism to detect important entities and relations in subgraphs and attend to informative subgraphs for different questions. We conduct comprehensive experiments on five subgraphs and their combinations, with results that attest the effectiveness of incorporating heterogeneous subgraphs.

In a debate, two debaters with opposite stances put forward arguments to fight for their viewpoints. Debaters organize their arguments to support their proposition and attack opponents’ points. The common purpose of debating is to persuade the opponents and the audiences to agree with the mentioned propositions. Previous works have investigated the issue of identifying which debater is more persuasive. However, modeling the interaction of arguments between rounds is rarely discussed. In this paper, we focus on assessing the overall performance of debaters in a multi-round debate on online forums. To predict the winner in a multi-round debate, we propose a novel neural model that is aimed at capturing the interaction of arguments by exploiting raw text, structure information, argumentative discourse units (ADUs), and the relations among ADUs. Experimental results show that our model achieves competitive performance compared with the existing models, and is capable of extracting essential argument relations during a multi-round debate by leveraging argumentative structure and attention mechanism.

Filming video blogs, which is shortened to vlog, becomes a popular way for people to record their life experiences in recent years. In this work, we present a novel task that is aimed at extracting life events from videos and constructing personal knowledge bases of individuals. In contrast to most existing researches in the field of computer vision that focus on identifying low-level script-like activities such as moving boxes, our goal is to extract life events where high-level activities like moving into a new house are recorded. The challenges to be tackled include: (1) identifying which objects in a given scene related to the life events of the protagonist we concern, and (2) determining the association between an extracted visual concept and a more high-level description of a video clip. To address the research issues, we construct a video life event extraction dataset VidLife by exploiting videos from the TV series The Big Bang Theory, in which the plot is around the daily lives of several characters. A pilot multitask learning model is proposed to extract life events given video clips and subtitles for storing in the personal knowledge base.

With the passage of time, people often have misty memories of their past experiences. Information recall support for people by collecting personal lifelogs is emerging. Recently, people tend to record their daily life via filming Video Weblog (VLog), which contains visual and audio data. These large scale multimodal data can be used to support information recall service that enables users to query their past experiences. The challenging issue is the semantic gap between the visual concept and the textual query. In this paper, we aim to extract personal life events from vlogs shared on YouTube and construct a personal knowledge base (PKB) for individuals. A multitask learning model is proposed to extract the components of personal life events, such as subjects, predicates and objects. The evaluation is performed on a video collection from three YouTubers who are English native speakers. Experimental results show our model achieves promising performance.

With the advance of science and technology, people are used to recording their daily life events via writing blogs, uploading social media posts, taking photos, or filming videos. Such rich repository personal information is useful for supporting human living assistance, such as information recall service. The main challenges are how to store and manage personal knowledge from various sources, and how to provide support for people who may have difficulty recalling past experiences. In this position paper, we propose a research agenda on personal knowledge mining from various sources of lifelogs, personal knowledge base construction, and information recall for assisting people to recall their experiences. Ten research questions are formulated.

The advance in wearable technology has made lifelogging more feasible and more popular. Visual lifelogs collected by wearable cameras capture every single detail of individual's life experience, offering a promising data source for deeper lifestyle analysis and better memory recall assistance. However, building a system for organizing and accessing visual lifelogs is a challenging task due to the semantic gap between visual data and semantic descriptions of life events. In this paper, we introduce semantic knowledge to reduce such a semantic gap for daily activity recognition and lifestyle understanding. We incorporate the semantic knowledge derived from external resources to enrich the training data for the proposed supervised learning model. Experimental results show that incorporating external semantic knowledge is beneficial for improving the performance of recognizing life events.

Previous work on lifelogging focuses on life event extraction from image, audio, and video data via wearable sensors. In contrast to wearing an extra camera to record daily life, people are used to log their life on social media platforms. In this paper, we aim to extract life events from textual data shared on Twitter and construct personal knowledge bases of individuals. The issues to be tackled include (1) not all text descriptions are related to life events, (2) life events in a text description can be expressed explicitly or implicitly, (3) the predicates in the implicit events are often absent, and (4) the mapping from natural language predicates to knowledge base relations may be ambiguous. A joint learning approach is proposed to detect life events in tweets and extract event components including subjects, predicates, objects, and time expressions. Finally, the extracted information is transformed to knowledge base facts. The evaluation is performed on a collection of lifelogs from 18 Twitter users. Experimental results show our proposed system is effective in life event extraction, and the constructed personal knowledge bases are expected to be useful to memory recall applications.

This paper analyzes the lexical semantics of domain-specific terms based on various pre-trained specific domain and general domain word vectors, and addresses the semantic drift between domains. To capture lexical semantics in the specific domain, we propose a bridge mechanism to introduce domain-specific data into general data, and re-train word vectors. We find that even a small-scale fusion can result in the similar lexical semantics learned by using the large-scale domain-specific dataset. Experiments on sentiment analysis and outlier detection show that application of word embedding by the fusion dataset has the better performance than applications of word embeddings by pure large domain-specific and pure large general datasets. The simple, but effective methodology facilitates the domain adaptation of distributed word representations.