Jeniya Tabassum

Jeniya Tabassum, Mounica Maddela, Wei Xu et al.

There is an increasing interest in studying natural language and computer code together, as large corpora of programming texts become readily available on the Internet. For example, StackOverflow currently has over 15 million programming related questions written by 8.5 million users. Meanwhile, there is still a lack of fundamental NLP techniques for identifying code tokens or software-related named entities that appear within natural language sentences. In this paper, we introduce a new named entity recognition (NER) corpus for the computer programming domain, consisting of 15,372 sentences annotated with 20 fine-grained entity types. We trained in-domain BERT representations (BERTOverflow) on 152 million sentences from StackOverflow, which lead to an absolute increase of +10 F-1 score over off-the-shelf BERT. We also present the SoftNER model which achieves an overall 79.10 F$_1$ score for code and named entity recognition on StackOverflow data. Our SoftNER model incorporates a context-independent code token classifier with corpus-level features to improve the BERT-based tagging model. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/jeniyat/StackOverflowNER/

Jeniya Tabassum, Sydney Lee, Wei Xu et al.

This paper presents the results of the wet lab information extraction task at WNUT 2020. This task consisted of two sub tasks: (1) a Named Entity Recognition (NER) task with 13 participants and (2) a Relation Extraction (RE) task with 2 participants. We outline the task, data annotation process, corpus statistics, and provide a high-level overview of the participating systems for each sub task.

Jeniya Tabassum, Alan Ritter, Wei Xu

We describe TweeTIME, a temporal tagger for recognizing and normalizing time expressions in Twitter. Most previous work in social media analysis has to rely on temporal resolvers that are designed for well-edited text, and therefore suffer from the reduced performance due to domain mismatch. We present a minimally supervised method that learns from large quantities of unlabeled data and requires no hand-engineered rules or hand-annotated training corpora. TweeTIME achieves 0.68 F1 score on the end-to-end task of resolving date expressions, outperforming a broad range of state-of-the-art systems.