# RexUniNLU: Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal NLU

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05275/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10205/) (2023)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [Few-NERD: A Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07464/) (2021)
- [VisualMRC: Machine Reading Comprehension on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11272/) (2021)
- [The Multilingual Amazon Reviews Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02573/) (2020)
- [StructBERT: Incorporating Language Structures into Pre-training for Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04577/) (2019)
- [CrossNER: Evaluating Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04373/) (2020)
- [CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08087/) (2021)
- [WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09465/) (2021)
- [LayoutLLM: Layout Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05225/) (2024)
- [OCNLI: Original Chinese Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05444/) (2020)
- [A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07366/) (2018)
- [Kleister: Key Information Extraction Datasets Involving Long Documents with Complex Layouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05796/) (2021)
- [Investigating Prior Knowledge for Challenging Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09679/) (2019)
- [Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03654/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Knowledge Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05994/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Information Extraction (IE) and Text Classification (CLS) serve as the fundamental pillars of NLU, with both disciplines relying on analyzing input sequences to categorize outputs into pre-established schemas. However, there is no existing encoder-based model that can unify IE and CLS tasks from this perspective. To fully explore the foundation shared within NLU tasks, we have proposed a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal NLU. Specifically, we firstly redefine the true universal information extraction (UIE) with a formal formulation that covers almost all extraction schemas, including quadruples and quintuples which remain unsolved for previous UIE models. Then, we expands the formulation to all CLS and multi-modal NLU tasks. Based on that, we introduce RexUniNLU, an universal NLU solution that employs explicit schema constraints for IE and CLS, which encompasses all IE and CLS tasks and prevent incorrect connections between schema and input sequence. To avoid interference between different schemas, we reset the position ids and attention mask matrices. Extensive experiments are conducted on IE, CLS in both English and Chinese, and multi-modality, revealing the effectiveness and superiority. Our codes are publicly released.