Digitisation in the cultural heritage sector has produced large but fragmented repositories of museum collection data, spanning structured catalogue records, images, and unstructured descriptions. Existing museum information systems often make it difficult to integrate these sources into a unified, queryable representation that supports relation-aware exploration. We present MuseKG, an interactive knowledge graph system that organises heterogeneous museum data into a typed graph that links objects, people, organisations, images, image-derived labels, and extracted semantic entities within a coherent schema. MuseKG supports natural-language queries by grounding user questions to graph entities and retrieving a compact neighbourhood of evidence for answer generation. Through an interactive demonstration on real museum collections, we show that MuseKG supports common exploration tasks such as attribute lookup, relation exploration, and relation-aware retrieval, with answers that remain inspectable via explicit graph structures.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has rapidly emerged as a cornerstone for building trustworthy and efficient generative AI systems, spanning from unimodal question answering to complex multimodal reasoning. The 1st international workshop on retrieval-driven generative AI gathers researchers and practitioners focused on the applied side of RAG-particularly for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) where text, layout, and images intertwine. New in 2025, this workshop is co located with the ScienceON AI Challenge, an open competition benchmarking the reliability of AI generated summaries over ScienceON's public OpenAPI search results. By combining a research workshop with a hands on challenge, we provide a complete pipeline from algorithms to real world evaluation. The half day event features invited keynotes, peer reviewed papers, challenge finalist talks, and a poster/demo session, catalyzing collaboration toward robust, explainable, and domain adapted generativeAI.

Key information extraction (KIE) from visually rich documents, such as receipts and forms, involves a deep understanding of textual, visual, and layout feature information. Transformers fine-tuned for KIE achieve state-of-the-art performance but lack generality and portability across different domains. In contrast, vision large language models (VLLMs) offer higher flexibility and zero-shot capability but fall short with domain-specific layout relations unless performing a resource-demanding supervised fine-tuning. To reach the best compromise solution between lightweight models and VLLMs, we propose KIEPrompter, a cost-effective LLM-based KIE approach that leverages the predictions of lightweight models as external knowledge injected into VLLM prompts. By incorporating these auxiliary predictions, VLLMs are guided to attend relevant multimodal content without ad hoc training. The accuracy results achieved by KIEPrompter in three benchmark document collections are superior to those of VLLMs in both zero-shot and layout-sensitive scenarios. We compare various strategies for incorporating lightweight model predictions, ranging from coarse-grained predictions without explicit confidence scores to fine-grained per-element network logits. We also demonstrate that our approach is robust to the absence of specific classes in trained lightweight models, as the VLLMs' pre-training compensates for the limited generality of lightweight models.

Chart question answering (ChartQA) is challenged by the heterogeneous composition of chart elements and the subtle data patterns they encode.This work introduces a novel joint multimodal scene graph framework that explicitly models the relationships among chart components and their underlying structures.The framework integrates both visual and textual graphs to capture structural and semantic characteristics, while a graph contrastive learning strategy aligns node representations across modalities-enabling their seamless incorporation into a transformer decoder as soft prompts.Moreover, a set of tailored Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts is proposed to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in zero-shot scenarios by mitigating hallucinations.Extensive evaluations on benchmarks including ChartQA, OpenCQA, and ChartX demonstrate significant performance improvements and validate the efficacy of the proposed approach.

Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition (DNER) presents a challenging problem where entities may be scattered across multiple non-adjacent tokens, making traditional sequence labelling approaches inadequate. Existing methods predominantly rely on custom tagging schemes to handle these discontinuous entities, resulting in models tightly coupled to specific tagging strategies and lacking generalisability across diverse datasets. To address these challenges, we propose TriG-NER, a novel Triplet-Grid Framework that introduces a generalisable approach to learning robust token-level representations for discontinuous entity extraction. Our framework applies triplet loss at the token level, where similarity is defined by word pairs existing within the same entity, effectively pulling together similar and pushing apart dissimilar ones. This approach enhances entity boundary detection and reduces the dependency on specific tagging schemes by focusing on word-pair relationships within a flexible grid structure. We evaluate TriG-NER on three benchmark DNER datasets and demonstrate significant improvements over existing grid-based architectures. These results underscore our framework's effectiveness in capturing complex entity structures and its adaptability to various tagging schemes, setting a new benchmark for discontinuous entity extraction.

The significance of mental health classification is paramount in contemporary society, where digital platforms serve as crucial sources for monitoring individuals' well-being. However, existing social media mental health datasets primarily consist of text-only samples, potentially limiting the efficacy of models trained on such data. Recognising that humans utilise cross-modal information to comprehend complex situations or issues, we present a novel approach to address the limitations of current methodologies. In this work, we introduce a Multimodal and Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation model for Mental Health Classification, leveraging insights from cross-modal human understanding. Unlike conventional approaches that often rely on simple concatenation to integrate diverse features, our model addresses the challenge of appropriately representing inputs of varying natures (e.g., texts and sounds). To mitigate the computational complexity associated with integrating all features into a single model, we employ a multimodal and multi-teacher architecture. By distributing the learning process across multiple teachers, each specialising in a particular feature extraction aspect, we enhance the overall mental health classification performance. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our model in achieving improved performance.

Automatic Chart Question Answering (ChartQA) is challenging due to the complex distribution of chart elements with patterns of the underlying data not explicitly displayed in charts. To address this challenge, we design a joint multimodal scene graph for charts to explicitly represent the relationships between chart elements and their patterns. Our proposed multimodal scene graph includes a visual graph and a textual graph to jointly capture the structural and semantical knowledge from the chart. This graph module can be easily integrated with different vision transformers as inductive bias. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating the proposed graph module enhances the understanding of charts' elements' structure and semantics, thereby improving performance on publicly available benchmarks, ChartQA and OpenCQA.

Document understanding and information extraction include different tasks to understand a document and extract valuable information automatically. Recently, there has been a rising demand for developing document understanding among different domains, including business, law, and medicine, to boost the efficiency of work that is associated with a large number of documents. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry developers in the field of document intelligence and understanding diverse document types to boost automatic document processing and understanding techniques. We also release a data challenge on the recently introduced document-level VQA dataset, PDFVQA. The PDFVQA challenge examines the model's structural and contextual understandings on the natural full document level of multiple consecutive document pages by including questions with a sequence of answers extracted from multi-pages of the full document. This task helps to boost the document understanding step from the single-page level to the full document level understanding.

Extracting meaningful drug-related information chunks, such as adverse drug events (ADE), is crucial for preventing morbidity and saving many lives. Most ADEs are reported via an unstructured conversation with the medical context, so applying a general entity recognition approach is not sufficient enough. In this paper, we propose a new multi-aspect cross-integration framework for drug entity/event detection by capturing and aligning different context/language/knowledge properties from drug-related documents. We first construct multi-aspect encoders to describe semantic, syntactic, and medical document contextual information by conducting those slot tagging tasks, main drug entity/event detection, part-of-speech tagging, and general medical named entity recognition. Then, each encoder conducts cross-integration with other contextual information in three ways: the key-value cross, attention cross, and feedforward cross, so the multi-encoders are integrated in depth. Our model outperforms all SOTA on two widely used tasks, flat entity detection and discontinuous event extraction.

Compared to general document analysis tasks, form document structure understanding and retrieval are challenging. Form documents are typically made by two types of authors; A form designer, who develops the form structure and keys, and a form user, who fills out form values based on the provided keys. Hence, the form values may not be aligned with the form designer's intention (structure and keys) if a form user gets confused. In this paper, we introduce Form-NLU, the first novel dataset for form structure understanding and its key and value information extraction, interpreting the form designer's intent and the alignment of user-written value on it. It consists of 857 form images, 6k form keys and values, and 4k table keys and values. Our dataset also includes three form types: digital, printed, and handwritten, which cover diverse form appearances and layouts. We propose a robust positional and logical relation-based form key-value information extraction framework. Using this dataset, Form-NLU, we first examine strong object detection models for the form layout understanding, then evaluate the key information extraction task on the dataset, providing fine-grained results for different types of forms and keys. Furthermore, we examine it with the off-the-shelf pdf layout extraction tool and prove its feasibility in real-world cases.

We propose a PiggyBack, a Visual Question Answering platform that allows users to apply the state-of-the-art visual-language pretrained models easily. We integrate visual-language models, pretrained by HuggingFace, an open-source API platform of deep learning technologies; however, it cannot be runnable without programming skills or deep learning understanding. Hence, our PiggyBack supports an easy-to-use browser-based user interface with several deep-learning visual language pretrained models for general users and domain experts. The PiggyBack includes the following benefits: Portability due to web-based and thus runs on almost any platform, A comprehensive data creation and processing technique, and ease of use on visual language pretrained models. The demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/iz44RZ1lF4s.

Abstract As an essential component of human cognition, cause–effect relations appear frequently in text, and curating cause–effect relations from text helps in building causal networks for predictive tasks. Existing causality extraction techniques include knowledge-based, statistical machine learning (ML)-based, and deep learning-based approaches. Each method has its advantages and weaknesses. For example, knowledge-based methods are understandable but require extensive manual domain knowledge and have poor cross-domain applicability. Statistical machine learning methods are more automated because of natural language processing (NLP) toolkits. However, feature engineering is labor-intensive, and toolkits may lead to error propagation. In the past few years, deep learning techniques attract substantial attention from NLP researchers because of its powerful representation learning ability and the rapid increase in computational resources. Their limitations include high computational costs and a lack of adequate annotated training data. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of causality extraction. We initially introduce primary forms existing in the causality extraction: explicit intra-sentential causality, implicit causality, and inter-sentential causality. Next, we list benchmark datasets and modeling assessment methods for causal relation extraction. Then, we present a structured overview of the three techniques with their representative systems. Lastly, we highlight existing open challenges with their potential directions.

Recommender systems typically operate on high-dimensional sparse user-item matrices. Matrix completion is a very challenging task to predict one's interest based on millions of other users having each seen a small subset of thousands of items. We propose a G lobal-Local Kernel-based matrix completion framework, named GLocal-K, that aims to generalise and represent a high-dimensional sparse user-item matrix entry into a low dimensional space with a small number of important features. Our GLocal-K can be divided into two major stages. First, we pre-train an auto encoder with the local kernelised weight matrix, which transforms the data from one space into the feature space by using a 2d-RBF kernel. Then, the pre-trained auto encoder is fine-tuned with the rating matrix, produced by a convolution-based global kernel, which captures the characteristics of each item. We apply our GLocal-K model under the extreme low-resource setting, which includes only a user-item rating matrix, with no side information. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on three collaborative filtering benchmarks: ML-100K, ML-1M, and Douban.

The Federal Reserve System (the Fed) plays a significant role in affecting monetary policy and financial conditions worldwide. Although it is important to analyse the Fed's communications to extract useful information, it is generally long-form and complex due to the ambiguous and esoteric nature of content. In this paper, we present FedNLP, an interpretable multi-component Natural Language Processing (NLP) system to decode Federal Reserve communications. This system is designed for end-users to explore how NLP techniques can assist their holistic understanding of the Fed's communications with NO coding. Behind the scenes, FedNLP uses multiple NLP models from traditional machine learning algorithms to deep neural network architectures in each downstream task. The demonstration shows multiple results at once including sentiment analysis, summary of the document, prediction of the Federal Funds Rate movement and visualization for interpreting the prediction model's result. Our application system and demonstration are available at https://fednlp.net.