Learning to Extract Structured Entities Using Language Models

Haolun Wu, Ye Yuan, Liana Mikaelyan, Alexander Meulemans, Xue Liu, James Hensman, Bhaskar Mitra


Abstract
Recent advances in machine learning have significantly impacted the field of information extraction, with Language Models (LMs) playing a pivotal role in extracting structured information from unstructured text. Prior works typically represent information extraction as triplet-centric and use classical metrics such as precision and recall for evaluation. We reformulate the task to be entity-centric, enabling the use of diverse metrics that can provide more insights from various perspectives. We contribute to the field by introducing Structured Entity Extraction and proposing the Approximate Entity Set OverlaP (AESOP) metric, designed to appropriately assess model performance. Later, we introduce a new Multistage Structured Entity Extraction (MuSEE) model that harnesses the power of LMs for enhanced effectiveness and efficiency by decomposing the extraction task into multiple stages. Quantitative and human side-by-side evaluations confirm that our model outperforms baselines, offering promising directions for future advancements in structured entity extraction. Our source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Structured-Entity-Extraction.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.388
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6817–6834
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.388
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haolun Wu, Ye Yuan, Liana Mikaelyan, Alexander Meulemans, Xue Liu, James Hensman, and Bhaskar Mitra. 2024. Learning to Extract Structured Entities Using Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6817–6834, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Extract Structured Entities Using Language Models (Wu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.388.pdf