Information Extraction Techniques Research Articles

Data augmentation and transfer learning for cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition in the biomedical domain

AbstractGiven the increase in production of data for the biomedical field and the unstoppable growth of the internet, the need for Information Extraction (IE) techniques has skyrocketed. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of such IE tasks useful for professionals in different areas. There are several settings where biomedical NER is needed, for instance, extraction and analysis of biomedical literature, relation extraction, organisation of biomedical documents, and knowledge-base completion. However, the computational treatment of entities in the biomedical domain has faced a number of challenges including its high cost of annotation, ambiguity, and lack of biomedical NER datasets in languages other than English. These difficulties have hampered data development, affecting both the domain itself and its multilingual coverage. The purpose of this study is to overcome the scarcity of biomedical data for NER in Spanish, for which only two datasets exist, by developing a robust bilingual NER model. Inspired by back-translation, this paper leverages the progress in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to create a synthetic version of the Colorado Richly Annotated Full-Text (CRAFT) dataset in Spanish. Additionally, a new CRAFT dataset is constructed by replacing 20% of the entities in the original dataset generating a new augmented dataset. We evaluate two training methods: concatenation of datasets and continuous training to assess the transfer learning capabilities of transformers using the newly obtained datasets. The best performing NER system in the development set achieved an F-1 score of 86.39%. The novel methodology proposed in this paper presents the first bilingual NER system and it has the potential to improve applications across under-resourced languages.

Automatic knowledge graph creation from engineering standards using the example of formulas

AbstractEngineering standards are an important source of knowledge in product development. Despite the increasing digitalisation, the provision and usage of standards is characterised by lots of manual steps. This research paper aims at applying automatic knowledge graph creation in the domain of engineering standards to enable machine-actionable standards. For this, a formula knowledge graph ontology as well as suitable information extraction techniques are developed. The concept is validated using the example of DIN ISO 281, showing the overall capability of automatic knowledge graph creation.

A Joint Communication and Computation Design for Probabilistic Semantic Communications.

In this paper, the problem of joint transmission and computation resource allocation for a multi-user probabilistic semantic communication (PSC) network is investigated. In the considered model, users employ semantic information extraction techniques to compress their large-sized data before transmitting them to a multi-antenna base station (BS). Our model represents large-sized data through substantial knowledge graphs, utilizing shared probability graphs between the users and the BS for efficient semantic compression. The resource allocation problem is formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the sum of the equivalent rate of all users, considering the total power budget and semantic resource limit constraints. The computation load considered in the PSC network is formulated as a non-smooth piecewise function with respect to the semantic compression ratio. To tackle this non-convex non-smooth optimization challenge, a three-stage algorithm is proposed, where the solutions for the received beamforming matrix of the BS, the transmit power of each user, and the semantic compression ratio of each user are obtained stage by stage. The numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

An Empirical Evaluation of Prompting Strategies for Large Language Models in Zero-Shot Clinical Natural Language Processing: Algorithm Development and Validation Study.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing (NLP), especially in domains where labeled data are scarce or expensive, such as the clinical domain. However, to unlock the clinical knowledge hidden in these LLMs, we need to design effective prompts that can guide them to perform specific clinical NLP tasks without any task-specific training data. This is known as in-context learning, which is an art and science that requires understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different LLMs and prompt engineering approaches. The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of various prompt engineering techniques, including 2 newly introduced types-heuristic and ensemble prompts, for zero-shot and few-shot clinical information extraction using pretrained language models. This comprehensive experimental study evaluated different prompt types (simple prefix, simple cloze, chain of thought, anticipatory, heuristic, and ensemble) across 5 clinical NLP tasks: clinical sense disambiguation, biomedical evidence extraction, coreference resolution, medication status extraction, and medication attribute extraction. The performance of these prompts was assessed using 3 state-of-the-art language models: GPT-3.5 (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), and LLaMA-2 (Meta). The study contrasted zero-shot with few-shot prompting and explored the effectiveness of ensemble approaches. The study revealed that task-specific prompt tailoring is vital for the high performance of LLMs for zero-shot clinical NLP. In clinical sense disambiguation, GPT-3.5 achieved an accuracy of 0.96 with heuristic prompts and 0.94 in biomedical evidence extraction. Heuristic prompts, alongside chain of thought prompts, were highly effective across tasks. Few-shot prompting improved performance in complex scenarios, and ensemble approaches capitalized on multiple prompt strengths. GPT-3.5 consistently outperformed Gemini and LLaMA-2 across tasks and prompt types. This study provides a rigorous evaluation of prompt engineering methodologies and introduces innovative techniques for clinical information extraction, demonstrating the potential of in-context learning in the clinical domain. These findings offer clear guidelines for future prompt-based clinical NLP research, facilitating engagement by non-NLP experts in clinical NLP advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works on the empirical evaluation of different prompt engineering approaches for clinical NLP in this era of generative artificial intelligence, and we hope that it will inspire and inform future research in this area.

Clinical notes classification system for automated identification of diabetic patients: Hybrid approach integrating rules, information extraction and machine learning

Efficient medical information management is essential in today’s healthcare, significantly to automate diagnoses of chronic diseases. This study focuses on the automated identification of diabetic patients through a clinical note classification system. This innovative approach combines rules, information extraction, and machine learning algorithms to promise greater accuracy and adaptability. Initially, the four algorithms evaluated showed similar performance, with Gradient Boosting standing out with an accuracy of 0.999. They were tested on our clinical and oncology notes, where SVM excelled in correctly labeling non-oncology notes with a 0.99. Gradient Boosting had the best average with 0.966. The combination of rules, information extraction, and Random Forest provided the best average performance, significantly improving the classification of clinical notes and reducing the margin of error in identifying diabetic patients. The principal contribution of this research lies in the pioneering integration of rule-based methods, information extraction techniques, and machine learning algorithms for enhanced accuracy in diabetic patient identification. For future work, we consider implementing these algorithms in natural clinical settings to evaluate their practical performance. Additionally, additional approaches will be explored to improve the accuracy and applicability of clinical note-grading systems in healthcare.

GTLP: A graph transformer based link prediction framework with unified feature pre-processing

In the realm of graph representation learning, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated exceptional efficacy across diverse tasks. Typically, GNNs employ message-passing schemes to disseminate node features along graph structures, culminating in learned graph representations. However, their heavy reliance on smoothed node features over graph structures, coupled with limited expressiveness in the presence of node attributes, often constrains link prediction performance. To surmount this challenge, we propose GTLP, a Graph Transformer based link prediction framework. GTLP integrates unsupervised GNNs and structure encoding, enabling a holistic consideration of both topological structures and node features. This approach preserves critical node location and role information, enhancing the model’s expressiveness. By introducing the Graph Transformer model, GTLP adeptly incorporates neighbor information, refining embedding quality and bolstering the model’s learning and generalization capabilities. Notably, our method exhibits superior scalability, accommodating diverse techniques for information extraction, embedding learning, and sampling. Experimental results underscore GTLP’s state-of-the-art performance, outpacing various baselines across five real-world datasets.

A Review of Crowdsourcing Update Methods for High-Definition Maps

High-definition (HD) maps serve as crucial infrastructure for autonomous driving technology, facilitating vehicles in positioning, environmental perception, and motion planning without being affected by weather changes or sensor-visibility limitations. Maintaining precision and freshness in HD maps is paramount, as delayed or inaccurate information can significantly impact the safety of autonomous vehicles. Utilizing crowdsourced data for HD map updating is widely recognized as a superior method for preserving map accuracy and freshness. Although it has garnered considerable attention from researchers, there remains a lack of comprehensive exploration into the entire process of updating HD maps through crowdsourcing. For this reason, it is imperative to review and discuss crowdsourcing techniques. This paper aims to provide an overview of the overall process of crowdsourced updates, followed by a detailed examination and comparison of existing methodologies concerning the key techniques of data collection, information extraction, and change detection. Finally, this paper addresses the challenges encountered in crowdsourced updates for HD maps.

Thermo-oxidative aging state detection of rubber sandwich structure using synchrosqueezing transform-assisted feature extraction and customized detection indicator

Rubber sandwich structures (RSSs) are used extensively in mechanical engineering. The aging state detection of such structures is urgently required to avoid disastrous accidents. However, this is still a challenging task owing to the weakness of the rubber layer aging feature information contained in the vibration signal of the RSS and the lack of effective aging feature information extraction techniques. Thus, an aging state detection method for the RSS using synchrosqueezing transform (SST)-assisted feature extraction and a customized detection indicator was proposed in this study. First, the SST was used to decompose the vibration signal of the RSS, and a time-frequency (TF) spectrum with an enhanced aging state feature was obtained. Second, a TF bandpass filter was constructed and used to filter the information unrelated to the aging state feature from the TF spectrum. Subsequently, a hard threshold denoising method was applied to reduce noise in the filtered TF spectrum. Then, the aging state signal was reconstructed using the inverse SST. Finally, a customized detection indicator was constructed and its value was calculated to detect the aging state of the RSS. A thermo-oxidative aging dataset of the RSS from Xi’an Jiaotong University was used to validate the proposed method. The experimental results showed that the proposed method was more effective than other methods.

Parsing of Research Documents into XML Using Formal Grammars

Automatic information extraction of content and style format in paged documents is challenging. It requires the conversion of the original document into a granular level of details for which every document section and content is identifiable. This functionality or tool does not exist for any academic research document yet. In this paper, we present an automated process of parsing research paper documents into XML files using a formal method approach of context-free grammars (CFGs) and regular expressions (REGEXs) definable of a standard template. We created a tool for the algorithms to parse these documents into tree-like structures organized as XML files named research_XML (RX) parser. The RX tool performed the extraction of syntactic structure and semantic information of the document’s contents into XML files. These XML output files are lightweight, analyzable, query-able, and web interoperable. The RX tool has a success rate of 91% when evaluated on fifty varying research documents of 160 average pages and 8,004 total pages. The tool and test data are accessible on GitHub repo. The novelty of our process is specific to applying formal techniques for information extraction in structured multipaged documents and academic research documents thus advancing the research in automatic information extraction.

Deep signal separation for adaptive estimation of instantaneous phase from vibration signals

Accurate extraction of instantaneous phase information is an essential step in condition monitoring and intelligent diagnosis of rotating machinery under variable speed conditions, which will directly affect the reliability of the tacho-less order tracking (TLOT) results. At present, instantaneous phase information extraction techniques are mainly divided into time–frequency analysis and signal decomposition. These methods are constrained because they are not available to extract harmonic components adaptively. Therefore, it is important to develop an intelligent model to accurately separate harmonic component with strict physical meaning for TLOT. In order to address the aforementioned issues, a deep binary mask (BM) signal separation model is presented for rotating machinery TLOT. The deep BM signal separation method can adaptively separate the fundamental harmonic component of vibration signals without prior knowledge. The outcomes indicate that the deep BM signal separation model is more productive and flexible in terms of accuracy and self-adaptation compared to some advanced TLOT algorithms.

RESEARCH ON EFFICIENT INDEXING OF LARGE-SCALE GEOSPATIAL DATA BASED ON MULTI-LEVEL GEOGRAPHIC GRID

Abstract. With the implementation of unified natural resource management in China, national geographic conditions monitoring data have been identified as fundamental data for natural resource survey and monitoring. The efficiency of information extraction from massive spatio-temporal data to support natural resource management has emerged as a critical indicator for maximizing the value of geographic conditions monitoring data and enhancing data-driven decision management. Traditional spatial indices are computationally intensive, and when confronted with immense data volume or uneven data scale, issues such as extensive index computations and poor scale adaptability arise, impeding the efficient retrieval of complex geospatial data. In response to the need for efficient indexing of massive geospatial monitoring data at a scale of 100 million, a multi-level geographic spatial index framework based on geographic grids is proposed. Within the geographic conditions spatio-temporal database, a three-level spatial index of "zone-grid-space" is constructed, utilizing massive land cover data for analysis and testing. The results demonstrate that the multi-level spatial index method exhibits excellent scale adaptability, and grid coding dimensionality reduction and numerical operations effectively reduce the computational load of spatial retrievals of complex vector patches. This method significantly improves the retrieval efficiency of large-scale national geographic conditions data, providing an efficient technique for lightweight information extraction of large-scale monitoring geospatial data within spatial computing systems. The method holds reference value for on-demand retrieval, analysis, and decision-making of natural resource spatio-temporal big data.

Self-updatable AI-assisted design of low-carbon cost-effective ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC)

Machine learning has exhibited high efficiency in designing concrete. However, collecting the dataset for training machine learning models is challenging. To address this challenge, this paper develops an approach to collect concrete design data automatically based on information extraction techniques. The approach enables machine learning models to automatically track, extract, and learn knowledge embedded in data from relevant publications. The approach has been incorporated into AI-assisted design of low-carbon cost-effective ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) via integrating the capabilities of automatically collecting and processing data, predicting UHPC properties, and optimizing UHPC properties regarding the material cost, carbon footprint, and compressive strength. A self-updating mechanism is imparted to continuously learn available data. Such a mechanism enables the self-updatable automatic discovery of low-carbon cost-effective UHPC. The results showed increasing prediction accuracy and optimization performance of the proposed approach over time when more knowledge was learned from new data, therefore accelerating the design of UHPC.

IntelliExtract: An End-to-End Framework for Chinese Resume Information Extraction from Document Images

Traditional document processing can be labor-intensive and time-consuming to manually extract and organize the information in a document. This manual process is often inefficient and error-prone. In order to improve processing efficiency and accuracy of document data, we develop IntelliExtract, an end-to-end framework designed for document information extraction. This is a comprehensive framework that includes image text detection and recognition, information extraction, and document intelligent question-answering. Some recent models and algorithms are employed, OCR models for converting scanned documents into machine readable text, layout analysis algorithms for understanding the spatial arrangement of document elements, and information extraction techniques for extracting structured data from unstructured documents. To evaluate the effectiveness of the framework, we conducted experiments by employing a Chinese Talent Resumes Dataset for visualizing the results. For named entity extraction, the confidence level of the extracted results from the text in the images is generally above 0.95. The proposed framework provides a powerful tool for enterprises, educational institutions, and other entities in processing document information, and holds promise for significant practical applications.

FVI-BD: Multiple File Extraction using Fusion Vector Investigation (FVI) in Big Data Hadoop Environment

— The Information Extraction (IE) approach extracts useful data from unstructured and semi-structured data. Big Data, with its rising volume of multidimensional unstructured data, provides new tools for IE. Traditional Information Extraction (IE) systems are incapable of appropriately handling this massive flood of unstructured data. The processing capability of current IE systems must be enhanced because to the amount and variety of Big Data. Existing IE techniques for data preparation, extraction, and transformation, as well as representations of massive amounts of multidimensional, unstructured data, must be evaluated in terms of their capabilities and limits. The proposed FVI-BD Framework for IOT device Information Extraction in Big Data. The unstructured data has cleaned and integration using POS tagging and similarity finding using LTA method. The features are extracted using TF and IDF. The Information extracted using NLP with WordNet. The classification has done with FVI algorithm. This research paper discovered that vast data analytics may be enhanced by extracting document feature terms with synonymous similarity and increasing IE accuracy.

Toward the end-to-end optimization of particle physics instruments with differentiable programming

The full optimization of the design and operation of instruments whose functioning relies on the interaction of radiation with matter is a super-human task, due to the large dimensionality of the space of possible choices for geometry, detection technology, materials, data-acquisition, and information-extraction techniques, and the interdependence of the related parameters. On the other hand, massive potential gains in performance over standard, “experience-driven” layouts are in principle within our reach if an objective function fully aligned with the final goals of the instrument is maximized through a systematic search of the configuration space. The stochastic nature of the involved quantum processes make the modeling of these systems an intractable problem from a classical statistics point of view, yet the construction of a fully differentiable pipeline and the use of deep learning techniques may allow the simultaneous optimization of all design parameters. In this white paper, we lay down our plans for the design of a modular and versatile modeling tool for the end-to-end optimization of complex instruments for particle physics experiments as well as industrial and medical applications that share the detection of radiation as their basic ingredient. We consider a selected set of use cases to highlight the specific needs of different applications.

Research on information extraction technology applied for knowledge graphs

Information extraction is an important part of natural language processing and is an important basis for building question and answer systems and knowledge graphs. A growing number of new technologies are being applied to information extraction with the development of deep learning techniques. As a first step, this paper introduces information extraction techniques and their main tasks, then describes the development history of information extraction techniques, and introduces the practice and application of different types of information extraction techniques in knowledge graph construction, including entity-extraction, relationship extraction and attribute extraction. Finally, some problems and research directions faced by information extraction techniques are discussed.

The 2022 n2c2/UW shared task on extracting social determinants of health.

The n2c2/UW SDOH Challenge explores the extraction of social determinant of health (SDOH) information from clinical notes. The objectives include the advancement of natural language processing (NLP) information extraction techniques for SDOH and clinical information more broadly. This article presents the shared task, data, participating teams, performance results, and considerations for future work. The task used the Social History Annotated Corpus (SHAC), which consists of clinical text with detailed event-based annotations for SDOH events, such as alcohol, drug, tobacco, employment, and living situation. Each SDOH event is characterized through attributes related to status, extent, and temporality. The task includes 3 subtasks related to information extraction (Subtask A), generalizability (Subtask B), and learning transfer (Subtask C). In addressing this task, participants utilized a range of techniques, including rules, knowledge bases, n-grams, word embeddings, and pretrained language models (LM). A total of 15 teams participated, and the top teams utilized pretrained deep learning LM. The top team across all subtasks used a sequence-to-sequence approach achieving 0.901 F1 for Subtask A, 0.774 F1 Subtask B, and 0.889 F1 for Subtask C. Similar to many NLP tasks and domains, pretrained LM yielded the best performance, including generalizability and learning transfer. An error analysis indicates extraction performance varies by SDOH, with lower performance achieved for conditions, like substance use and homelessness, which increase health risks (risk factors) and higher performance achieved for conditions, like substance abstinence and living with family, which reduce health risks (protective factors).

Image Feature Information Extraction for Interest Point Detection: A Comprehensive Review

Interest point detection is one of the most fundamental and critical problems in computer vision and image processing. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive review on image feature information (IFI) extraction techniques for interest point detection. To systematically introduce how the existing interest point detection methods extract IFI from an input image, we propose a taxonomy of the IFI extraction techniques for interest point detection. According to this taxonomy, we discuss different types of IFI extraction techniques for interest point detection. Furthermore, we identify the main unresolved issues related to the existing IFI extraction techniques for interest point detection and any interest point detection methods that have not been discussed before. The existing popular datasets and evaluation standards are provided and the performances for fifteen state-of-the-art approaches are evaluated and discussed. Moreover, future research directions on IFI extraction techniques for interest point detection are elaborated.

MoreThanSentiments: A text analysis package

<h2>Abstract</h2> Text mining on a large corpus of data has gained utility and popularity over recent years owing to advancements in information retrieval and machine learning methods. However, popular text mining software packages mainly focus on either sentiment analysis or semantic meaning extraction, requiring pretraining on a large corpus of text data. In comparison, MoreThanSentiments provides computation of newer text attribution measures, including boiler score, specificity, redundancy, and hard info, which have been proposed in accounting analytics literature. Our software package, available in Python, is flexible in terms of parameter setting and is adaptable to different applications. Through this package, we seek to simplify the process of deploying nontrivial information extraction techniques published in domain-specific text analysis research into domain-agnostic analytics applications.

Tinycubes: A modular technology for interactive visual analysis of historical and continuously updated spatiotemporal data

Technological advances allow sending data collected, like IoT data and Social Network data, immediately to computational centers. However, state-of-the-art solutions for interactive visual exploration and analysis of spatiotemporal multidimensional using a single computer are focused on historical datasets. Also, most of these solutions utilize a monolithic architecture, with a restricted set of information extraction techniques and rigid internal data structures, which leads to the creation of forks to handle different usage needs. Tinycubes is a technology that supports the interactive exploration and visual analysis of spatiotemporal multidimensional continuously collected data in real-time combined with data from historical datasets, consistently producing up-to-date information using a single computer. The technology’s core is a novel and efficient data structure based on data cubes that allow data insertion and removal on-the-fly. The Tinycubes Technology is modular, allowing the usage of different information extraction algorithms and efficient data storage methods. Our experiments indicate that Tinycubes will enable the exploration of newly generated data combined with historical data while presenting performance similar or superior to the state-of-the-art solutions that use a single computer.