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Relation Extraction (RE) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), enabling the transformation of unstructured text into structured knowledge. While recent advancements in deep learning and large pre-trained language models have improved RE performance, challenges persist in handling noisy supervision, discovering novel relation types, and adapting RE to domain-specific tasks. This dissertation addresses these challenges through four key contributions, improving RE across multiple dimensions, including pre-training, open-world discovery, domain adaptation, and inference-based modeling.First, we introduce Fine-grained Contrastive Learning (FineCL), a novel pre-training method that refines contrastive learning with noise-aware weighting. By leveraging learning order denoising to assess the reliability of distantly supervised training instances, FineCL prioritizes high-quality labels, leading to more accurate relation representations and improved downstream performance in relation extraction.Second, we advance Open-world Relation Extraction (OpenRE) by grounding it in a real-world setting that includes both known and novel relation classes, as well as negative instances where no relation exists. We develop a method called Known and Novel Relation Discovery (KNoRD), which leverages intrinsic qualities of explicit and implicit relations, significantly improving the discovery of long-tail relation classes.Third, we introduce MiDRED, a manually annotated corpus for microbe-disease relation extraction, containing 3,116 high-quality annotations. MiDRED serves as a valuable resource for training and evaluating RE models in the biomedical domain, addressing the scarcity of well-labeled data in this field.Finally, we explore the adaptation of RE to Natural Language Inference (NLI) with MetaEntail-RE, a framework that reframes RE as an entailment task. By incorporating meta-class analysis, feasible hypothesis filtering, and group-based prediction selection, MetaEntail-RE enhances performance, achieving significant F1-score improvements on both biomedical and general-domain RE benchmarks.Together, these contributions advance RE by improving robustness to noisy supervision, enhancing open-world discovery, introducing a key domain-specific dataset, and integrating NLI techniques for better extraction performance. These innovations not only enhance RE methodologies but also contribute to broader NLP applications, including knowledge graph construction, automated fact verification, and biomedical text mining.

Anglo-American modernism is frequently regarded as a literary movement without place, an international phenomenon created by expatriates and exiles. Modernist poetry, in particular, with its complex and difficult formal procedures, has not been widely read for its engagement with particular landscapes and places. This study counters that trend, arguing that the changing interface between culture and environment during the first decades of the twentieth century provided a crucial subtext for modernist literary production. Using W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes as its central examples, Locating Modernism suggests that these writers engaged deeply with place, rethinking for a new century the complex processes by which environments and culture confer meaning on one another. This study blends recent theoretical insights from both environmental studies and textual theory, suggesting that for Yeats, Moore, and Hughes, places are texts, imagined and written into existence, and also that texts are places, physical environments through which literature circulates in culture. Accordingly, Locating Modernism examines not only the language of the poems it studies, but also the material texts that carried those poems into the wider world, the physical environments that shape and inform the poems' meaning. Chapter One argues for the importance of environments, both physical and textual, in the shaping of modernist literary production, discussing Yeats's “Blood and the Moon,” Moore's “An Octopus,” and Hughes's “Shakespeare in Harlem” as preliminary examples. Chapter Two examines the importance of Irish landscapes and places to W. B. Yeats's cultural nationalism, looking particularly at his poems about Sligo, Coole Park, and Thoor Ballylee. Chapter Three places Marianne Moore's rigorously constructed poetry in the context of industrial America's ambivalent attitude toward wilderness, focusing especially on her volume Observations and on her editorial work at The Dial. Finally, Chapter Four reads Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew to illustrate Hughes's idea of Harlem as a distinctly African American metropolis. This study proposes a modernism situated in particular historical and geographical locations, suggesting that the conventional idea of the modernist writer in exile might be complicated by a better understanding of modernism's engagement with place.

Premier Danny Williams and Justice Minister Tom Marshall are to be congratulated on their initiatives to bring the complement in the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) up to where it should be, and for the training for the new officers which will be delivered at Memorial University in co-operation with the RNC. Except for former justice minister Paul Dicks' efforts in stopping the bureaucrats from gutting the RNC, and former cabinet minister Ed Roberts' endeavours to get the bureaucrats to work for the RNC, not one effort has been made since the days of the late former justice minister Les Curtis to respect and manage the police department as it should be.

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC), that venerable and respected institution, hasn't been delivering the service of protection to its constituents that it should because, prior to this week's throne speech, it didn't have the human, and other resources to do so. Speaking of surveillance, would you believe RNC officers had very strong reasons to suspect a horrendous crime was about to be committed, and the subject was put under surveillance for some considerable time. One night, the surveillance had to be lifted because if they worked beyond midnight, it would be overtime and overtime was not permitted. It appeared that someone wanted by the RNC was being detained on the mainland and the RNC had to go get him. The kicker was that RNC officers who had to travel had to get his/her travel cheque signed by one of those junior bureaucrats.

Let me comment on a process I have some personal knowledge about which is relevant to the Lemar inquiry that is in the media so much these days, where some witnesses are clearly targeting the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC), and police generally. The Justice Department micromanages the police department, from the purchase of paper clips to the prosecution of big criminal cases. This micromanagement, which is a kind word for it, is my word for constant interference and obstruction. By the way, where are the defenders of the rank and file RNC? Why isn't there a hue and cry to address this finger-pointing?

He made a number of mistakes which deserve commentary. I never did refer to our doctors as money-hungry or selfish, but I did say that some, as there are in all walks of life, including mine, deserve that description. Dr. [Anthony Rockel] came across as a part of that group but, as I read his letter and learned more about him, I concluded someone or something else pitched in his Cornflakes. And, while I would find another way to vent my venom, he takes it out on politicians. Most of my life I have professionally and privately dealt with the medical profession and I have yet to meet one person, male or female, that did not do a good job. More recently, I have been dealing privately with the group at the Placentia hospital and I have not had one criticism to offer, nor have I heard any, except isolated cases that are more individualized and one-time experiences. The doctor says that his patients cannot avail of diagnostic services and treatments they need. He mentions the shameful treatment of nurses. I listened to the spokesperson and head of the provincial nurses' association. She doesn't seem to articulate any specific ill treatment of nurses. There is a shortage and they are underpaid for their workload, an experience obviously shared by nurses across the country.

I thought it was interesting that Dr. Anthony Rockel from Placentia decided to lambaste the premier and two of his cabinet ministers in his letter to The Telegram, Jan. 13, titled \"What a cast of characters.\" Come on Dr. Rockel, fess up. You don't care about the provincial deficit as long as your wallet is fattened. You will never be satisfied with the health system unless people like you are in control. You know the premier has not given any resources away. Rather, he has signed deals like Voisey's Bay and White Rose which give our economy and our people the chance we need to grow and prosper. Grimes, Williams, et al, myself included, should expect our conduct, practices, policies or whatever to be viciously and vigorously attacked, but to be personally vilified by reckless ravings does not become Rockel's profession.

Stop, think and listen closely to the various stories highlighted by pilots who, in consultation with traffic controllers, weather maps and fellow employees, landed at the nearest airport that could take them -- for example, one pilot stated quite clearly that he listened to other pilots, checked the weather information, found Stephenville's weather was not as good as that at Gander so he landed at Gander.

The Telegram failed to say that the initial loan was approved to make leasehold improvements and purchase office equipment and furniture. WPH and Associates was afforded an opportunity through another company, H.P. Holdings Inc., to purchase the building. WPH and Associates asked the lender to withdraw the first offer and make the loan to purchase using the building and furniture as collateral. Had the reporter bothered to investigate further, he would have learned that the lawsuit against the Hogans is just one of a very select few, if not the only one, that are being sued by the lender despite dozens and dozens of other such failed transactions.