Part & Whole Extraction: Towards A Deep Understanding of Quantitative Facts for Percentages in Text

We study the problem of quantitative facts extraction for text with percentages. For example, given the sentence "30 percent of Americans like watching football, while 20% prefer to watch NBA.", our goal is to obtain a deep understanding of the percentage numbers ("30 percent" and "20%") by extracting their quantitative facts: part ("like watching football" and "prefer to watch NBA") and whole ("Americans). These quantitative facts can empower new applications like automated infographic generation. We formulate part and whole extraction as a sequence tagging problem. Due to the large gap between part/whole and its corresponding percentage, we introduce skip mechanism in sequence modeling, and achieved improved performance on both our task and the CoNLL-2003 named entity recognition task. Experimental results demonstrate that learning to skip in sequence tagging is promising.