M$^{3}$D: A Multimodal, Multilingual and Multitask Dataset for Grounded Document-level Information Extraction

Multimodal information extraction (IE) tasks have attracted increasing attention because many studies have shown that multimodal information benefits text information extraction. However, existing multimodal IE datasets mainly focus on sentence-level image-facilitated IE in English text, and pay little attention to video-based multimodal IE and fine-grained visual grounding. Therefore, in order to promote the development of multimodal IE, we constructed a multimodal multilingual multitask dataset, named M$^{3}$D, which has the following features: (1) It contains paired document-level text and video to enrich multimodal information; (2) It supports two widely-used languages, namely English and Chinese; (3) It includes more multimodal IE tasks such as entity recognition, entity chain extraction, relation extraction and visual grounding. In addition, our dataset introduces an unexplored theme, i.e., biography, enriching the domains of multimodal IE resources. To establish a benchmark for our dataset, we propose an innovative hierarchical multimodal IE model. This model effectively leverages and integrates multimodal information through a Denoised Feature Fusion Module (DFFM). Furthermore, in non-ideal scenarios, modal information is often incomplete. Thus, we designed a Missing Modality Construction Module (MMCM) to alleviate the issues caused by missing modalities. Our model achieved an average performance of 53.80% and 53.77% on four tasks in English and Chinese datasets, respectively, which set a reasonable standard for subsequent research. In addition, we conducted more analytical experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed module. We believe that our work can promote the development of the field of multimodal IE.

PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

While existing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has received extensive effort and advancement, there are still gaps in defining a more holistic research target seamlessly integrating multimodality, conversation context, fine-granularity, and also covering the changing sentiment dynamics as well as cognitive causal rationales. This paper bridges the gaps by introducing a multimodal conversational ABSA, where two novel subtasks are proposed: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, rationale from multi-turn multi-party multimodal dialogue. 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation with the causal reasons. To benchmark the tasks, we construct PanoSent, a dataset annotated both manually and automatically, featuring high quality, large scale, multimodality, multilingualism, multi-scenarios, and covering both implicit and explicit sentiment elements. To effectively address the tasks, we devise a novel Chain-of-Sentiment reasoning framework, together with a novel multimodal large language model (namely Sentica) and a paraphrase-based verification mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our methods over strong baselines, validating the efficacy of all our proposed methods. The work is expected to open up a new era for the ABSA community, and thus all our codes and data are open at https://PanoSent.github.io/

Revisiting Structured Sentiment Analysis as Latent Dependency Graph Parsing

Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) was cast as a problem of bi-lexical dependency graph parsing by prior studies. Multiple formulations have been proposed to construct the graph, which share several intrinsic drawbacks: (1) The internal structures of spans are neglected, thus only the boundary tokens of spans are used for relation prediction and span recognition, thus hindering the model's expressiveness; (2) Long spans occupy a significant proportion in the SSA datasets, which further exacerbates the problem of internal structure neglect. In this paper, we treat the SSA task as a dependency parsing task on partially-observed dependency trees, regarding flat spans without determined tree annotations as latent subtrees to consider internal structures of spans. We propose a two-stage parsing method and leverage TreeCRFs with a novel constrained inside algorithm to model latent structures explicitly, which also takes advantages of joint scoring graph arcs and headed spans for global optimization and inference. Results of extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets reveal that our method performs significantly better than all previous bi-lexical methods, achieving new state-of-the-art.

Harvesting Events from Multiple Sources: Towards a Cross-Document Event Extraction Paradigm

Document-level event extraction aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. However, a single document often contains limited event information and the roles of different event arguments may be biased due to the influence of the information source. This paper addresses the limitations of traditional document-level event extraction by proposing the task of cross-document event extraction (CDEE) to integrate event information from multiple documents and provide a comprehensive perspective on events. We construct a novel cross-document event extraction dataset, namely CLES, which contains 20,059 documents and 37,688 mention-level events, where over 70% of them are cross-document. To build a benchmark, we propose a CDEE pipeline that includes 5 steps, namely event extraction, coreference resolution, entity normalization, role normalization and entity-role resolution. Our CDEE pipeline achieves about 72% F1 in end-to-end cross-document event extraction, suggesting the challenge of this task. Our work builds a new line of information extraction research and will attract new research attention.

Enhancing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution by Discourse Structure and Semantic Information

Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models, which either compute mention similarity directly or enhance mention representation by extracting event arguments (such as location, time, agent, and patient), lacking the ability to utilize document-level information. As a result, they struggle to capture long-distance dependencies. This shortcoming leads to their underwhelming performance in determining coreference for the events where their argument information relies on long-distance dependencies. In light of these limitations, we propose the construction of document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model the structural and semantic information of documents. Subsequently, cross-document heterogeneous graphs are constructed and GAT is utilized to learn the representations of events. Finally, a pair scorer calculates the similarity between each pair of events and co-referred events can be recognized using standard clustering algorithm. Additionally, as the existing cross-document event coreference datasets are limited to English, we have developed a large-scale Chinese cross-document event coreference dataset to fill this gap, which comprises 53,066 event mentions and 4,476 clusters. After applying our model on the English and Chinese datasets respectively, it outperforms all baselines by large margins.

CMNER: A Chinese Multimodal NER Dataset based on Social Media

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) is a pivotal task designed to extract named entities from text with the support of pertinent images. Nonetheless, a notable paucity of data for Chinese MNER has considerably impeded the progress of this natural language processing task within the Chinese domain. Consequently, in this study, we compile a Chinese Multimodal NER dataset (CMNER) utilizing data sourced from Weibo, China's largest social media platform. Our dataset encompasses 5,000 Weibo posts paired with 18,326 corresponding images. The entities are classified into four distinct categories: person, location, organization, and miscellaneous. We perform baseline experiments on CMNER, and the outcomes underscore the effectiveness of incorporating images for NER. Furthermore, we conduct cross-lingual experiments on the publicly available English MNER dataset (Twitter2015), and the results substantiate our hypothesis that Chinese and English multimodal NER data can mutually enhance the performance of the NER model.

Reverse Multi-Choice Dialogue Commonsense Inference with Graph-of-Thought

With the proliferation of dialogic data across the Internet, the Dialogue Commonsense Multi-choice Question Answering (DC-MCQ) task has emerged as a response to the challenge of comprehending user queries and intentions. Although prevailing methodologies exhibit effectiveness in addressing single-choice questions, they encounter difficulties in handling multi-choice queries due to the heightened intricacy and informational density. In this paper, inspired by the human cognitive process of progressively excluding options, we propose a three-step Reverse Exclusion Graph-of-Thought (ReX-GoT) framework, including Option Exclusion, Error Analysis, and Combine Information. Specifically, our ReX-GoT mimics human reasoning by gradually excluding irrelevant options and learning the reasons for option errors to choose the optimal path of the GoT and ultimately infer the correct answer. By progressively integrating intricate clues, our method effectively reduces the difficulty of multi-choice reasoning and provides a novel solution for DC-MCQ. Extensive experiments on the CICERO and CICERO$_{v2}$ datasets validate the significant improvement of our approach on DC-MCQ task. On zero-shot setting, our model outperform the best baseline by 17.67% in terms of F1 score for the multi-choice task. Most strikingly, our GPT3.5-based ReX-GoT framework achieves a remarkable 39.44% increase in F1 score.

DialogRE^C+: An Extension of DialogRE to Investigate How Much Coreference Helps Relation Extraction in Dialogs

Dialogue relation extraction (DRE) that identifies the relations between argument pairs in dialogue text, suffers much from the frequent occurrence of personal pronouns, or entity and speaker coreference. This work introduces a new benchmark dataset DialogRE^C+, introducing coreference resolution into the DRE scenario. With the aid of high-quality coreference knowledge, the reasoning of argument relations is expected to be enhanced. In DialogRE^C+ dataset, we manually annotate total 5,068 coreference chains over 36,369 argument mentions based on the existing DialogRE data, where four different coreference chain types namely speaker chain, person chain, location chain and organization chain are explicitly marked. We further develop 4 coreference-enhanced graph-based DRE models, which learn effective coreference representations for improving the DRE task. We also train a coreference resolution model based on our annotations and evaluate the effect of automatically extracted coreference chains demonstrating the practicality of our dataset and its potential to other domains and tasks.

Constructing Holistic Spatio-Temporal Scene Graph for Video Semantic Role Labeling

Video Semantic Role Labeling (VidSRL) aims to detect the salient events from given videos, by recognizing the predict-argument event structures and the interrelationships between events. While recent endeavors have put forth methods for VidSRL, they can be mostly subject to two key drawbacks, including the lack of fine-grained spatial scene perception and the insufficiently modeling of video temporality. Towards this end, this work explores a novel holistic spatio-temporal scene graph (namely HostSG) representation based on the existing dynamic scene graph structures, which well model both the fine-grained spatial semantics and temporal dynamics of videos for VidSRL. Built upon the HostSG, we present a nichetargeting VidSRL framework. A scene-event mapping mechanism is first designed to bridge the gap between the underlying scene structure and the high-level event semantic structure, resulting in an overall hierarchical scene-event (termed ICE) graph structure. We further perform iterative structure refinement to optimize the ICE graph, such that the overall structure representation can best coincide with end task demand. Finally, three subtask predictions of VidSRL are jointly decoded, where the end-to-end paradigm effectively avoids error propagation. On the benchmark dataset, our framework boosts significantly over the current best-performing model. Further analyses are shown for a better understanding of the advances of our methods.

Revisiting Disentanglement and Fusion on Modality and Context in Conversational Multimodal Emotion Recognition

It has been a hot research topic to enable machines to understand human emotions in multimodal contexts under dialogue scenarios, which is tasked with multimodal emotion analysis in conversation (MM-ERC). MM-ERC has received consistent attention in recent years, where a diverse range of methods has been proposed for securing better task performance. Most existing works treat MM-ERC as a standard multimodal classification problem and perform multimodal feature disentanglement and fusion for maximizing feature utility. Yet after revisiting the characteristic of MM-ERC, we argue that both the feature multimodality and conversational contextualization should be properly modeled simultaneously during the feature disentanglement and fusion steps. In this work, we target further pushing the task performance by taking full consideration of the above insights. On the one hand, during feature disentanglement, based on the contrastive learning technique, we devise a Dual-level Disentanglement Mechanism (DDM) to decouple the features into both the modality space and utterance space. On the other hand, during the feature fusion stage, we propose a Contribution-aware Fusion Mechanism (CFM) and a Context Refusion Mechanism (CRM) for multimodal and context integration, respectively. They together schedule the proper integrations of multimodal and context features. Specifically, CFM explicitly manages the multimodal feature contributions dynamically, while CRM flexibly coordinates the introduction of dialogue contexts. On two public MM-ERC datasets, our system achieves new state-of-the-art performance consistently. Further analyses demonstrate that all our proposed mechanisms greatly facilitate the MM-ERC task by making full use of the multimodal and context features adaptively. Note that our proposed methods have the great potential to facilitate a broader range of other conversational multimodal tasks.