pyBART: Evidence-based Syntactic Transformations for IE

Aryeh Tiktinsky, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty


Abstract
Syntactic dependencies can be predicted with high accuracy, and are useful for both machine-learned and pattern-based information extraction tasks. However, their utility can be improved. These syntactic dependencies are designed to accurately reflect syntactic relations, and they do not make semantic relations explicit. Therefore, these representations lack many explicit connections between content words, that would be useful for downstream applications. Proposals like English Enhanced UD improve the situation by extending universal dependency trees with additional explicit arcs. However, they are not available to Python users, and are also limited in coverage. We introduce a broad-coverage, data-driven and linguistically sound set of transformations, that makes event-structure and many lexical relations explicit. We present pyBART, an easy-to-use open-source Python library for converting English UD trees either to Enhanced UD graphs or to our representation. The library can work as a standalone package or be integrated within a spaCy NLP pipeline. When evaluated in a pattern-based relation extraction scenario, our representation results in higher extraction scores than Enhanced UD, while requiring fewer patterns.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-demos.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Asli Celikyilmaz, Tsung-Hsien Wen
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
47–55
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-demos.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-demos.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aryeh Tiktinsky, Yoav Goldberg, and Reut Tsarfaty. 2020. pyBART: Evidence-based Syntactic Transformations for IE. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 47–55, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
pyBART: Evidence-based Syntactic Transformations for IE (Tiktinsky et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-demos.7.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928600