Lambert Deng

Sha Wang, Yuchen Li, Hanhua Xiao et al.

The creation of news timeline is essential for a comprehensive and contextual understanding of events as they unfold over time. This approach aids in discerning patterns and trends that might be obscured when news is viewed in isolation. By organizing news in a chronological sequence, it becomes easier to track the development of stories, understand the interrelation of events, and grasp the broader implications of news items. This is particularly helpful in sectors like finance and insurance, where timely understanding of the event development-ranging from extreme weather to political upheavals and health crises-is indispensable for effective risk management. While traditional natural language processing (NLP) techniques have had some success, they often fail to capture the news with nuanced relevance that are readily apparent to domain experts, hindering broader industry integration. The advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a renewed opportunity to tackle this challenge. However, direct prompting LLMs for this task is often ineffective. Our study investigates the application of an extended task prompting technique to assess past news relevance. We demonstrate that enhancing conventional prompts with additional tasks boosts their effectiveness on various news dataset, rendering news timeline generation practical for professional use. This work has been deployed as a publicly accessible browser extension which is adopted within our network.

Yanfei Dong, Lambert Deng, Jiazheng Zhang et al.

Documents that consist of diverse templates and exhibit complex spatial structures pose a challenge for document entity classification. We propose KNN-former, which incorporates a new kind of spatial bias in attention calculation based on the K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) graph of document entities. We limit entities' attention only to their local radius defined by the KNN graph. We also use combinatorial matching to address the one-to-one mapping property that exists in many documents, where one field has only one corresponding entity. Moreover, our method is highly parameter-efficient compared to existing approaches in terms of the number of trainable parameters. Despite this, experiments across various datasets show our method outperforms baselines in most entity types. Many real-world documents exhibit combinatorial properties which can be leveraged as inductive biases to improve extraction accuracy, but existing datasets do not cover these documents. To facilitate future research into these types of documents, we release a new ID document dataset that covers diverse templates and languages. We also release enhanced annotations for an existing dataset.