Question: What do the authors demonstrate about linguistic priors in this paper?
Evidence: One of the most fundamental topics in natural language processing is how best to derive high-level representations from constituent parts, as natural language meanings are a function of their constituent parts. How best to construct a sentence representation from distributed word embeddings is an example domain of this larger issue. Even though sequential neural models such as recurrent neural networks (RNN) BIBREF0 and their variants including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) BIBREF1 and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) BIBREF2 have become the de-facto standard for condensing sentence-level information from a sequence of words into a fixed vector, there have been many lines of research towards better sentence representation using other neural architectures, e.g. convolutional neural networks (CNN) BIBREF3 or self-attention based models BIBREF4 .
From a linguistic point of view, the underlying tree structure—as expressed by its constituency and dependency trees—of a sentence is an integral part of its meaning. Inspired by this fact, some recursive neural network (RvNN) models are designed to reflect the syntactic tree structure, achieving impressive results on several sentence-level tasks such as sentiment analysis BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , machine translation BIBREF7 , natural language inference BIBREF8 , and discourse relation classification BIBREF9 .
However, some recent works have BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 proposed latent tree models, which learn to construct task-specific tree structures without explicit supervision, bringing into question the value of linguistically-motivated recursive neural models. Witnessing the surprising performance of the latent tree models on some sentence-level tasks, there arises a natural question: Are linguistic tree structures the optimal way of composing sentence representations for NLP tasks?
In this paper, we demonstrate that linguistic priors are in fact useful for devising effective neural models for sentence representations, showing that our novel architecture based on constituency trees and their tag information obtains superior performance on several sentence-level tasks, including sentiment analysis and natural language inference.
A chief novelty of our approach is that we introduce a small separate tag-level tree-LSTM to control the composition function of the existing word-level tree-LSTM, which is in charge of extracting helpful syntactic signals for meaningful semantic composition of constituents by considering both the structures and linguistic tags of constituency trees simultaneously. In addition, we demonstrate that applying a typical LSTM to preprocess the leaf nodes of a tree-LSTM greatly improves the performance of the tree models. Moreover, we propose a clustered tag set to replace the existing tags on the assumption that the original syntactic tags are too fined-grained to be useful in neural models.
In short, our contributions in this work are as follows:
In this paper, we demonstrate that linguistic priors are in fact useful for devising effective neural models for sentence representations, showing that our novel architecture based on constituency trees and their tag information obtains superior performance on several sentence-level tasks, including sentiment analysis and natural language inference.
Answer: Demonstrate that linguistic priors are in fact useful for devising effective neural models for sentence representations.