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We propose an efficient method to conduct phrase alignment on parse forests for paraphrase detection. Unlike previous studies, our method identifies syntactic paraphrases under linguistically motivated grammar. In addition, it allows phrases to non-compositionally align to handle paraphrases with non-homographic phrase correspondences. A dataset that provides gold parse trees and their phrase alignments is created. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method conducts highly accurate phrase alignment compared to human performance.
We first present a minimal feature set for transition-based dependency parsing, continuing a recent trend started by Kiperwasser and Goldberg (2016a) and Cross and Huang (2016a) of using bi-directional LSTM features. We plug our minimal feature set into the dynamic-programming framework of Huang and Sagae (2010) and Kuhlmann et al. (2011) to produce the first implementation of worst-case O(n3) exact decoders for arc-hybrid and arc-eager transition systems. With our minimal features, we also present O(n3) global training methods. Finally, using ensembles including our new parsers, we achieve the best unlabeled attachment score reported (to our knowledge) on the Chinese Treebank and the “second-best-in-class” result on the English Penn Treebank.
We propose a new Maximum Subgraph algorithm for first-order parsing to 1-endpoint-crossing, pagenumber-2 graphs. Our algorithm has two characteristics: (1) it separates the construction for noncrossing edges and crossing edges; (2) in a single construction step, whether to create a new arc is deterministic. These two characteristics make our algorithm relatively easy to be extended to incorporiate crossing-sensitive second-order features. We then introduce a new algorithm for quasi-second-order parsing. Experiments demonstrate that second-order features are helpful for Maximum Subgraph parsing.
Organized relational knowledge in the form of “knowledge graphs” is important for many applications. However, the ability to populate knowledge bases with facts automatically extracted from documents has improved frustratingly slowly. This paper simultaneously addresses two issues that have held back prior work. We first propose an effective new model, which combines an LSTM sequence model with a form of entity position-aware attention that is better suited to relation extraction. Then we build TACRED, a large (119,474 examples) supervised relation extraction dataset obtained via crowdsourcing and targeted towards TAC KBP relations. The combination of better supervised data and a more appropriate high-capacity model enables much better relation extraction performance. When the model trained on this new dataset replaces the previous relation extraction component of the best TAC KBP 2015 slot filling system, its F1 score increases markedly from 22.2% to 26.7%.
Relation extraction is a fundamental task in information extraction. Most existing methods have heavy reliance on annotations labeled by human experts, which are costly and time-consuming. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel framework, REHession, to conduct relation extractor learning using annotations from heterogeneous information source, e.g., knowledge base and domain heuristics. These annotations, referred as heterogeneous supervision, often conflict with each other, which brings a new challenge to the original relation extraction task: how to infer the true label from noisy labels for a given instance. Identifying context information as the backbone of both relation extraction and true label discovery, we adopt embedding techniques to learn the distributed representations of context, which bridges all components with mutual enhancement in an iterative fashion. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of REHession over the state-of-the-art.
There has been a recent line of work automatically learning scripts from unstructured texts, by modeling narrative event chains. While the dominant approach group events using event pair relations, LSTMs have been used to encode full chains of narrative events. The latter has the advantage of learning long-range temporal orders, yet the former is more adaptive to partial orders. We propose a neural model that leverages the advantages of both methods, by using LSTM hidden states as features for event pair modelling. A dynamic memory network is utilized to automatically induce weights on existing events for inferring a subsequent event. Standard evaluation shows that our method significantly outperforms both methods above, giving the best results reported so far.
We present a simple yet effective approach for linking entities in queries. The key idea is to search sentences similar to a query from Wikipedia articles and directly use the human-annotated entities in the similar sentences as candidate entities for the query. Then, we employ a rich set of features, such as link-probability, context-matching, word embeddings, and relatedness among candidate entities as well as their related entities, to rank the candidates under a regression based framework. The advantages of our approach lie in two aspects, which contribute to the ranking process and final linking result. First, it can greatly reduce the number of candidate entities by filtering out irrelevant entities with the words in the query. Second, we can obtain the query sensitive prior probability in addition to the static link-probability derived from all Wikipedia articles. We conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets on entity linking for queries, namely the ERD14 dataset and the GERDAQ dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art systems and yields 75.0% in F1 on the ERD14 dataset and 56.9% on the GERDAQ dataset.
Annotating large numbers of sentences with senses is the heaviest requirement of current Word Sense Disambiguation. We present Train-O-Matic, a language-independent method for generating millions of sense-annotated training instances for virtually all meanings of words in a language’s vocabulary. The approach is fully automatic: no human intervention is required and the only type of human knowledge used is a WordNet-like resource. Train-O-Matic achieves consistently state-of-the-art performance across gold standard datasets and languages, while at the same time removing the burden of manual annotation. All the training data is available for research purposes at http://trainomatic.org.
Universal Dependencies (UD) offer a uniform cross-lingual syntactic representation, with the aim of advancing multilingual applications. Recent work shows that semantic parsing can be accomplished by transforming syntactic dependencies to logical forms. However, this work is limited to English, and cannot process dependency graphs, which allow handling complex phenomena such as control. In this work, we introduce UDepLambda, a semantic interface for UD, which maps natural language to logical forms in an almost language-independent fashion and can process dependency graphs. We perform experiments on question answering against Freebase and provide German and Spanish translations of the WebQuestions and GraphQuestions datasets to facilitate multilingual evaluation. Results show that UDepLambda outperforms strong baselines across languages and datasets. For English, it achieves a 4.9 F1 point improvement over the state-of-the-art on GraphQuestions.
Word embeddings improve generalization over lexical features by placing each word in a lower-dimensional space, using distributional information obtained from unlabeled data. However, the effectiveness of word embeddings for downstream NLP tasks is limited by out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, for which embeddings do not exist. In this paper, we present MIMICK, an approach to generating OOV word embeddings compositionally, by learning a function from spellings to distributional embeddings. Unlike prior work, MIMICK does not require re-training on the original word embedding corpus; instead, learning is performed at the type level. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations demonstrate the power of this simple approach. On 23 languages, MIMICK improves performance over a word-based baseline for tagging part-of-speech and morphosyntactic attributes. It is competitive with (and complementary to) a supervised character-based model in low resource settings.
We present SuperPivot, an analysis method for low-resource languages that occur in a superparallel corpus, i.e., in a corpus that contains an order of magnitude more languages than parallel corpora currently in use. We show that SuperPivot performs well for the crosslingual analysis of the linguistic phenomenon of tense. We produce analysis results for more than 1000 languages, conducting – to the best of our knowledge – the largest crosslingual computational study performed to date. We extend existing methodology for leveraging parallel corpora for typological analysis by overcoming a limiting assumption of earlier work: We only require that a linguistic feature is overtly marked in a few of thousands of languages as opposed to requiring that it be marked in all languages under investigation.
This paper presents a novel neural machine translation model which jointly learns translation and source-side latent graph representations of sentences. Unlike existing pipelined approaches using syntactic parsers, our end-to-end model learns a latent graph parser as part of the encoder of an attention-based neural machine translation model, and thus the parser is optimized according to the translation objective. In experiments, we first show that our model compares favorably with state-of-the-art sequential and pipelined syntax-based NMT models. We also show that the performance of our model can be further improved by pre-training it with a small amount of treebank annotations. Our final ensemble model significantly outperforms the previous best models on the standard English-to-Japanese translation dataset.
In the encoder-decoder architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), the hidden states of the recurrent structures in the encoder and decoder carry the crucial information about the sentence. These vectors are generated by parameters which are updated by back-propagation of translation errors through time. We argue that propagating errors through the end-to-end recurrent structures are not a direct way of control the hidden vectors. In this paper, we propose to use word predictions as a mechanism for direct supervision. More specifically, we require these vectors to be able to predict the vocabulary in target sentence. Our simple mechanism ensures better representations in the encoder and decoder without using any extra data or annotation. It is also helpful in reducing the target side vocabulary and improving the decoding efficiency. Experiments on Chinese-English machine translation task show an average BLEU improvement by 4.53, respectively.
We propose a novel decoding approach for neural machine translation (NMT) based on continuous optimisation. We reformulate decoding, a discrete optimization problem, into a continuous problem, such that optimization can make use of efficient gradient-based techniques. Our powerful decoding framework allows for more accurate decoding for standard neural machine translation models, as well as enabling decoding in intractable models such as intersection of several different NMT models. Our empirical results show that our decoding framework is effective, and can leads to substantial improvements in translations, especially in situations where greedy search and beam search are not feasible. Finally, we show how the technique is highly competitive with, and complementary to, reranking.
We present a model for locating regions in space based on natural language descriptions. Starting with a 3D scene and a sentence, our model is able to associate words in the sentence with regions in the scene, interpret relations such as ‘on top of’ or ‘next to,’ and finally locate the region described in the sentence. All components form a single neural network that is trained end-to-end without prior knowledge of object segmentation. To evaluate our model, we construct and release a new dataset consisting of Minecraft scenes with crowdsourced natural language descriptions. We achieve a 32% relative error reduction compared to a strong neural baseline.
We propose a method for embedding two-dimensional locations in a continuous vector space using a neural network-based model incorporating mixtures of Gaussian distributions, presenting two model variants for text-based geolocation and lexical dialectology. Evaluated over Twitter data, the proposed model outperforms conventional regression-based geolocation and provides a better estimate of uncertainty. We also show the effectiveness of the representation for predicting words from location in lexical dialectology, and evaluate it using the DARE dataset.
Generating captions for images is a task that has recently received considerable attention. Another type of visual inputs are abstract scenes or object layouts where the only information provided is a set of objects and their locations. This type of imagery is commonly found in many applications in computer graphics, virtual reality, and storyboarding. We explore in this paper OBJ2TEXT, a sequence-to-sequence model that encodes a set of objects and their locations as an input sequence using an LSTM network, and decodes this representation using an LSTM language model. We show in our paper that this model despite using a sequence encoder can effectively represent complex spatial object-object relationships and produce descriptions that are globally coherent and semantically relevant. We test our approach for the task of describing object layouts in the MS-COCO dataset by producing sentences given only object annotations. We additionally show that our model combined with a state-of-the-art object detector can improve the accuracy of an image captioning model.
We introduce the first end-to-end coreference resolution model and show that it significantly outperforms all previous work without using a syntactic parser or hand-engineered mention detector. The key idea is to directly consider all spans in a document as potential mentions and learn distributions over possible antecedents for each. The model computes span embeddings that combine context-dependent boundary representations with a head-finding attention mechanism. It is trained to maximize the marginal likelihood of gold antecedent spans from coreference clusters and is factored to enable aggressive pruning of potential mentions. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with a gain of 1.5 F1 on the OntoNotes benchmark and by 3.1 F1 using a 5-model ensemble, despite the fact that this is the first approach to be successfully trained with no external resources.
Discourse coherence is strongly associated with text quality, making it important to natural language generation and understanding. Yet existing models of coherence focus on measuring individual aspects of coherence (lexical overlap, rhetorical structure, entity centering) in narrow domains. In this paper, we describe domain-independent neural models of discourse coherence that are capable of measuring multiple aspects of coherence in existing sentences and can maintain coherence while generating new sentences. We study both discriminative models that learn to distinguish coherent from incoherent discourse, and generative models that produce coherent text, including a novel neural latent-variable Markovian generative model that captures the latent discourse dependencies between sentences in a text. Our work achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple coherence evaluations, and marks an initial step in generating coherent texts given discourse contexts.
Multi-document summarization provides users with a short text that summarizes the information in a set of related documents. This paper introduces affinity-preserving random walk to the summarization task, which preserves the affinity relations of sentences by an absorbing random walk model. Meanwhile, we put forward adjustable affinity-preserving random walk to enforce the diversity constraint of summarization in the random walk process. The ROUGE evaluations on DUC 2003 topic-focused summarization task and DUC 2004 generic summarization task show the good performance of our method, which has the best ROUGE-2 recall among the graph-based ranking methods.
Resolving abstract anaphora is an important, but difficult task for text understanding. Yet, with recent advances in representation learning this task becomes a more tangible aim. A central property of abstract anaphora is that it establishes a relation between the anaphor embedded in the anaphoric sentence and its (typically non-nominal) antecedent. We propose a mention-ranking model that learns how abstract anaphors relate to their antecedents with an LSTM-Siamese Net. We overcome the lack of training data by generating artificial anaphoric sentence–antecedent pairs. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art results on shell noun resolution. We also report first benchmark results on an abstract anaphora subset of the ARRAU corpus. This corpus presents a greater challenge due to a mixture of nominal and pronominal anaphors and a greater range of confounders. We found model variants that outperform the baselines for nominal anaphors, without training on individual anaphor data, but still lag behind for pronominal anaphors. Our model selects syntactically plausible candidates and – if disregarding syntax – discriminates candidates using deeper features.
We present a novel neural model HyperVec to learn hierarchical embeddings for hypernymy detection and directionality. While previous embeddings have shown limitations on prototypical hypernyms, HyperVec represents an unsupervised measure where embeddings are learned in a specific order and capture the hypernym–hyponym distributional hierarchy. Moreover, our model is able to generalize over unseen hypernymy pairs, when using only small sets of training data, and by mapping to other languages. Results on benchmark datasets show that HyperVec outperforms both state-of-the-art unsupervised measures and embedding models on hypernymy detection and directionality, and on predicting graded lexical entailment.
The existing word representation methods mostly limit their information source to word co-occurrence statistics. In this paper, we introduce ngrams into four representation methods: SGNS, GloVe, PPMI matrix, and its SVD factorization. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on word analogy and similarity tasks. The results show that improved word representations are learned from ngram co-occurrence statistics. We also demonstrate that the trained ngram representations are useful in many aspects such as finding antonyms and collocations. Besides, a novel approach of building co-occurrence matrix is proposed to alleviate the hardware burdens brought by ngrams.
Learning word embeddings on large unlabeled corpus has been shown to be successful in improving many natural language tasks. The most efficient and popular approaches learn or retrofit such representations using additional external data. Resulting embeddings are generally better than their corpus-only counterparts, although such resources cover a fraction of words in the vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a new approach, Dict2vec, based on one of the largest yet refined datasource for describing words – natural language dictionaries. Dict2vec builds new word pairs from dictionary entries so that semantically-related words are moved closer, and negative sampling filters out pairs whose words are unrelated in dictionaries. We evaluate the word representations obtained using Dict2vec on eleven datasets for the word similarity task and on four datasets for a text classification task.
In this paper, we propose new methods to learn Chinese word representations. Chinese characters are composed of graphical components, which carry rich semantics. It is common for a Chinese learner to comprehend the meaning of a word from these graphical components. As a result, we propose models that enhance word representations by character glyphs. The character glyph features are directly learned from the bitmaps of characters by convolutional auto-encoder(convAE), and the glyph features improve Chinese word representations which are already enhanced by character embeddings. Another contribution in this paper is that we created several evaluation datasets in traditional Chinese and made them public.