{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/effective-use-of-transformer-networks-for","title":"Effective Use of Transformer Networks for Entity Tracking","arxiv_id":"1909.02635","date":"2019-09-05","proceeding":"IJCNLP 2019 11","authors":["Aditya Gupta","Greg Durrett"],"abstract":"Tracking entities in procedural language requires understanding the transformations arising from actions on entities as well as those entities' interactions. While self-attention-based pre-trained language encoders like GPT and BERT have been successfully applied across a range of natural language understanding tasks, their ability to handle the nuances of procedural texts is still untested. In this paper, we explore the use of pre-trained transformer networks for entity tracking tasks in procedural text. First, we test standard lightweight approaches for prediction with pre-trained transformers, and find that these approaches underperform even simple baselines. We show that much stronger results can be attained by restructuring the input to guide the transformer model to focus on a particular entity. Second, we assess the degree to which transformer networks capture the process dynamics, investigating such factors as merged entities and oblique entity references. On two different tasks, ingredient detection in recipes and QA over scientific processes, we achieve state-of-the-art results, but our models still largely attend to shallow context clues and do not form complex representations of intermediate entity or process state.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02635v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02635v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"effective-use-of-transformer-networks-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"discriminative-fine-tuning","method_name":"Discriminative Fine-Tuning"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt","method_name":"GPT"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.02635","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1909.02635"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":2,"ran_draft_wrong":1,"unverified":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":3,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":5,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"eb725d5794b15f6b","entry":"accuracy","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"eb725d5794b15f6b"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"b3feaffc79a790e6","entry":"convert_examples_to_features","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b3feaffc79a790e6"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"7472ff4126963d47","entry":"flatten_list","repo":"aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking","repo_kind":"official","path":"gpt-entity-tracking/train_transformer_recipe_lm.py","file_url":"https://github.com/aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking/blob/HEAD/gpt-entity-tracking/train_transformer_recipe_lm.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"7472ff4126963d47"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"8c70e61ab43aea22","entry":"transform_recipe_whole","repo":"aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking","repo_kind":"official","path":"gpt-entity-tracking/train_transformer_recipe_lm.py","file_url":"https://github.com/aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking/blob/HEAD/gpt-entity-tracking/train_transformer_recipe_lm.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"8c70e61ab43aea22"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"27c4cac37df54708","entry":"transform_recipe_whole_just_recipe","repo":"aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking","repo_kind":"official","path":"gpt-entity-tracking/train_transformer_recipe_lm.py","file_url":"https://github.com/aditya2211/transformer-entity-tracking/blob/HEAD/gpt-entity-tracking/train_transformer_recipe_lm.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"27c4cac37df54708"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}