Question: What does the new perspective for paraphrase identification focus on?
Evidence: Paraphrase identification is an important topic in artificial intelligence and this task justifies whether two sentences expressed in various forms are semantically similar, BIBREF0 . For example, “On Sunday, the boy runs in the yard” and “The child runs outside at the weekend” are identified as paraphrase. This task directly benefits many industrial applications, such as plagiarism identification BIBREF0 , machine translation BIBREF1 and removing redundancy questions in Quora website BIBREF2 . Recently, there emerge many methods, such as ABCNN BIBREF3 , Siamese LSTM BIBREF2 and L.D.C BIBREF4 .
Conventionally, neural methodology aligns the sentence pair and then generates a matching score for paraphrase identification, BIBREF4 , BIBREF2 . Regarding the alignment, we conjecture that the aligned unmatched parts are semantically critical, where we define the corresponded word pairs with low similarity as aligned unmatched parts. For an example: “On Sunday, the boy runs in the yard” and “The child runs inside at the weekend”, the matched parts (i.e. (Sunday, weekend), (boy, child), run) barely make contribution to the semantic sentence similarity, but the unmatched parts (i.e. “yard” and “inside”) determine these two sentences are semantically dissimilar. For another example: “On Sunday, the boy runs in the yard” and “The child runs outside at the weekend”, the aligned unmatched parts (i.e. “yard” and “outside”) are semantically similar, which makes the two sentences paraphrase. In conclusion, if the aligned unmatched parts are semantically consistent, the two sentences are paraphrase, otherwise they are non-paraphrase.
Traditional alignment methods take advantage of attention mechanism BIBREF2 , which is a soft-max weighting technique. Weighting technique could pick out the most similar/dissimilar parts, but is weak in modeling the aligned unmatched parts, which are the crucial evidence to identify paraphrase. For the input sentences in Figure FIGREF1 , the weight between “Sunday” and “run” is lower than the weight between “yard” and “inside”, but the former weight is not the evidence of paraphrase/non-paraphrase, because the former two words that are most dissimilar should not be aligned for an inappropriate comparison.
To extract the aligned unmatched parts, in this paper, we embed Hungarian algorithm BIBREF5 into neural architecture as Hungarian layer (Algorithm SECREF7 ). Illustrated in Figure FIGREF1 , the alignment in sentence matching could be formulated as the task-assignment problem, which is tackled by Hungarian algorithm. Simply, Hungarian algorithm works out the theoretically optimal alignment relationship in an exclusive manner and the exclusiveness characterizes the aligned unmatched parts. For the example in Figure FIGREF1 , because Hungarian layer allocates the aligned pairs with exclusiveness, the matched parts (i.e (Sunday, weekend), (boy, child), run) are aligned firstly, then the word “yard” would be assigned to the word “inside” with a negative similarity, making a strong evidence for discrimination.
Specifically, our model performs this task in three steps. First, our model applies BiLSTM to parse the input sentences into hidden representations. Then, Hungarian layer leverages the hidden representations to extract the aligned unmatched parts. Last, we apply cosine similarity to metric the aligned unmatched parts for a final discrimination. Regarding the training process of Hungarian layer, we modify the back-propagation algorithm in both directions. In the forward pass, Hungarian layer works out the alignment relationship, according to which, the computational graph is dynamically constructed, as demonstrated in Figure FIGREF13 . Once the computational graph has been dynamically constructed, the backward propagation could be performed as usual in a conventional graph.
We conduct our experiments on the public benchmark dataset of “Quora Question Pairs” for the task of paraphrase identification. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other baselines extensively and significantly, which verifies our theory about the aligned unmatched parts and illustrates the effectiveness of our methodology.
Contributions. (1.) We offer a new perspective for paraphrase identification, which focuses on the aligned unmatched parts of two sentences. Accordingly, we propose the Hungarian layer to extract the aligned unmatched parts. The proposed method can achieve hard and exclusive alignments between two sequences, while we can learn parameters by end-to-end back-propagation. (2.) Our model outperforms other baselines extensively, verifying the effectiveness of our theory and method.
Organization. In Section 2, we survey the related work of paraphrase identification and dynamic differentiable computational graphs. In Section 3, we introduce our neural architecture. In Section 4, we conduct the experiments. In Section 5, we conclude our paper and publish our codes.
We offer a new perspective for paraphrase identification, which focuses on the aligned unmatched parts of two sentences.
Answer: It focuses on the aligned unmatched parts of a sentence pair.