Dynamic Multi-Scale Context Aggregation for Conversational Aspect-Based Sentiment Quadruple AnalysisYuqing Li, Wenyuan Zhang, Binbin Li et al.
Conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis (DiaASQ) aims to extract the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment within a dialogue. In DiaASQ, a quadruple's elements often cross multiple utterances. This situation complicates the extraction process, emphasizing the need for an adequate understanding of conversational context and interactions. However, existing work independently encodes each utterance, thereby struggling to capture long-range conversational context and overlooking the deep inter-utterance dependencies. In this work, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-scale Context Aggregation network (DMCA) to address the challenges. Specifically, we first utilize dialogue structure to generate multi-scale utterance windows for capturing rich contextual information. After that, we design a Dynamic Hierarchical Aggregation module (DHA) to integrate progressive cues between them. In addition, we form a multi-stage loss strategy to improve model performance and generalization ability. Extensive experimental results show that the DMCA model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
A Boundary Offset Prediction Network for Named Entity RecognitionMinghao Tang, Yongquan He, Yongxiu Xu et al.
Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to identify and classify named entities in text. However, span-based methods for NER typically assign entity types to text spans, resulting in an imbalanced sample space and neglecting the connections between non-entity and entity spans. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach for NER, named the Boundary Offset Prediction Network (BOPN), which predicts the boundary offsets between candidate spans and their nearest entity spans. By leveraging the guiding semantics of boundary offsets, BOPN establishes connections between non-entity and entity spans, enabling non-entity spans to function as additional positive samples for entity detection. Furthermore, our method integrates entity type and span representations to generate type-aware boundary offsets instead of using entity types as detection targets. We conduct experiments on eight widely-used NER datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed BOPN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.