OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Sub-Word Level Compositions for Sentiment Analysis of Hindi-English Code Mixed Text
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Sentiment analysis (SA) using code-mixed data from social media has several applications in opinion mining ranging from customer satisfaction to social campaign analysis in multilingual societies. Advances in this area are impeded by the lack of a suitable annotated dataset. We introduce a Hindi-English (Hi-En) code-mixed dataset for sentiment analysis and perform empirical analysis comparing the suitability and performance of various state-of-the-art SA methods in social media. In this paper, we introduce learning sub-word level representations in LSTM (Subword-LSTM) architecture instead of character-level or word-level representations. This linguistic prior in our architecture enables us to learn the information about sentiment value of important morphemes. This also seems to work well in highly noisy text containing misspellings as shown in our experiments which is demonstrated in morpheme-level feature maps learned by our model. Also, we hypothesize that encoding this linguistic prior in the Subword-LSTM architecture leads to the superior performance. Our system attains accuracy 4-5% greater than traditional approaches on our dataset, and also outperforms the available system for sentiment analysis in Hi-En code-mixed text by 18%.
Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis for Tensor-based Composition
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

According to the distributional inclusion hypothesis, entailment between words can be measured via the feature inclusions of their distributional vectors. In recent work, we showed how this hypothesis can be extended from words to phrases and sentences in the setting of compositional distributional semantics. This paper focuses on inclusion properties of tensors; its main contribution is a theoretical and experimental analysis of how feature inclusion works in different concrete models of verb tensors. We present results for relational, Frobenius, projective, and holistic methods and compare them to the simple vector addition, multiplication, min, and max models. The degrees of entailment thus obtained are evaluated via a variety of existing word-based measures, such as Weed's and Clarke's, KL-divergence, APinc, balAPinc, and two of our previously proposed metrics at the phrase/sentence level. We perform experiments on three entailment datasets, investigating which version of tensor-based composition achieves the highest performance when combined with the sentence-level measures.
An Empirical Evaluation of various Deep Learning Architectures for Bi-Sequence Classification Tasks
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Several tasks in argumentation mining and debating, question-answering, and natural language inference involve classifying a sequence in the context of another sequence (referred as bi-sequence classification). For several single sequence classification tasks, the current state-of-the-art approaches are based on recurrent and convolutional neural networks. On the other hand, for bi-sequence classification problems, there is not much understanding as to the best deep learning architecture. In this paper, we attempt to get an understanding of this category of problems by extensive empirical evaluation of 19 different deep learning architectures (specifically on different ways of handling context) for various problems originating in natural language processing like debating, textual entailment and question-answering. Following the empirical evaluation, we offer our insights and conclusions regarding the architectures we have considered. We also establish the first deep learning baselines for three argumentation mining tasks.
Detecting Context Dependent Messages in a Conversational Environment
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

While automatic response generation for building chatbot systems has drawn a lot of attention recently, there is limited understanding on when we need to consider the linguistic context of an input text in the generation process. The task is challenging, as messages in a conversational environment are short and informal, and evidence that can indicate a message is context dependent is scarce. After a study of social conversation data crawled from the web, we observed that some characteristics estimated from the responses of messages are discriminative for identifying context dependent messages. With the characteristics as weak supervision, we propose using a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to learn a classifier. Our method carries out text representation and classifier learning in a unified framework. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform baseline methods on accuracy of classification.
Joint Embedding of Hierarchical Categories and Entities for Concept Categorization and Dataless Classification
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Due to the lack of structured knowledge applied in learning distributed representation of cate- gories, existing work cannot incorporate category hierarchies into entity information. We propose a framework that embeds entities and categories into a semantic space by integrating structured knowledge and taxonomy hierarchy from large knowledge bases. The framework allows to com- pute meaningful semantic relatedness between entities and categories. Our framework can han- dle both single-word concepts and multiple-word concepts with superior performance on concept categorization and yield state of the art results on dataless hierarchical classification.
Neural Machine Translation with Supervised Attention
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

The attention mechanisim is appealing for neural machine translation, since it is able to dynam- ically encode a source sentence by generating a alignment between a target word and source words. Unfortunately, it has been proved to be worse than conventional alignment models in aligment accuracy. In this paper, we analyze and explain this issue from the point view of re- ordering, and propose a supervised attention which is learned with guidance from conventional alignment models. Experiments on two Chinese-to-English translation tasks show that the super- vised attention mechanism yields better alignments leading to substantial gains over the standard attention based NMT.
Interactive Attention for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Conventional attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) conducts dynamic alignment in generating the target sentence. By repeatedly reading the representation of source sentence, which keeps fixed after generated by the encoder (Bahdanau et al., 2015), the attention mechanism has greatly enhanced state-of-the-art NMT. In this paper, we propose a new attention mechanism, called INTERACTIVE ATTENTION, which models the interaction between the decoder and the representation of source sentence during translation by both reading and writing operations. INTERACTIVE ATTENTION can keep track of the interaction history and therefore improve the translation performance. Experiments on NIST Chinese-English translation task show that INTERACTIVE ATTENTION can achieve significant improvements over both the previous attention-based NMT baseline and some state-of-the-art variants of attention-based NMT (i.e., coverage models (Tu et al., 2016)). And neural machine translator with our INTERACTIVE ATTENTION can outperform the open source attention-based NMT system Groundhog by 4.22 BLEU points and the open source phrase-based system Moses by 3.94 BLEU points averagely on multiple test sets.
Sequence to Backward and Forward Sequences: A Content-Introducing Approach to Generative Short-Text Conversation
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Using neural networks to generate replies in human-computer dialogue systems is attracting increasing attention over the past few years. However, the performance is not satisfactory: the neural network tends to generate safe, universally relevant replies which carry little meaning. In this paper, we propose a content-introducing approach to neural network-based generative dialogue systems. We first use pointwise mutual information (PMI) to predict a noun as a keyword, reflecting the main gist of the reply. We then propose seq2BF, a "sequence to backward and forward sequences" model, which generates a reply containing the given keyword. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms traditional sequence-to-sequence models in terms of human evaluation and the entropy measure, and that the predicted keyword can appear at an appropriate position in the reply.
Neural-based Noise Filtering from Word Embeddings
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Word embeddings have been demonstrated to benefit NLP tasks impressively. Yet, there is room for improvement in the vector representations, because current word embeddings typically contain unnecessary information, i.e., noise. We propose two novel models to improve word embeddings by unsupervised learning, in order to yield word denoising embeddings. The word denoising embeddings are obtained by strengthening salient information and weakening noise in the original word embeddings, based on a deep feed-forward neural network filter. Results from benchmark tasks show that the filtered word denoising embeddings outperform the original word embeddings.
Pre-Translation for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Recently, the development of neural machine translation (NMT) has significantly improved the translation quality of automatic machine translation. While most sentences are more accurate and fluent than translations by statistical machine translation (SMT)-based systems, in some cases, the NMT system produces translations that have a completely different meaning. This is especially the case when rare words occur. When using statistical machine translation, it has already been shown that significant gains can be achieved by simplifying the input in a preprocessing step. A commonly used example is the pre-reordering approach. In this work, we used phrase-based machine translation to pre-translate the input into the target language. Then a neural machine translation system generates the final hypothesis using the pre-translation. Thereby, we use either only the output of the phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) system or a combination of the PBMT output and the source sentence. We evaluate the technique on the English to German translation task. Using this approach we are able to outperform the PBMT system as well as the baseline neural MT system by up to 2 BLEU points. We analyzed the influence of the quality of the initial system on the final result.
Survey on the Use of Typological Information in Natural Language Processing
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

In recent years linguistic typology, which classifies the world's languages according to their functional and structural properties, has been widely used to support multilingual NLP. While the growing importance of typological information in supporting multilingual tasks has been recognised, no systematic survey of existing typological resources and their use in NLP has been published. This paper provides such a survey as well as discussion which we hope will both inform and inspire future work in the area.
Keystroke dynamics as signal for shallow syntactic parsing
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Keystroke dynamics have been extensively used in psycholinguistic and writing research to gain insights into cognitive processing. But do keystroke logs contain actual signal that can be used to learn better natural language processing models? We postulate that keystroke dynamics contain information about syntactic structure that can inform shallow syntactic parsing. To test this hypothesis, we explore labels derived from keystroke logs as auxiliary task in a multi-task bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (bi-LSTM). Our results show promising results on two shallow syntactic parsing tasks, chunking and CCG supertagging. Our model is simple, has the advantage that data can come from distinct sources, and produces models that are significantly better than models trained on the text annotations alone.
Neural Paraphrase Generation with Stacked Residual LSTM Networks
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we propose a novel neural approach for paraphrase generation. Conventional para- phrase generation methods either leverage hand-written rules and thesauri-based alignments, or use statistical machine learning principles. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to explore deep learning models for paraphrase generation. Our primary contribution is a stacked residual LSTM network, where we add residual connections between LSTM layers. This allows for efficient training of deep LSTMs. We evaluate our model and other state-of-the-art deep learning models on three different datasets: PPDB, WikiAnswers and MSCOCO. Evaluation results demonstrate that our model outperforms sequence to sequence, attention-based and bi- directional LSTM models on BLEU, METEOR, TER and an embedding-based sentence similarity metric.
Attending to Characters in Neural Sequence Labeling Models
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Sequence labeling architectures use word embeddings for capturing similarity, but suffer when handling previously unseen or rare words. We investigate character-level extensions to such models and propose a novel architecture for combining alternative word representations. By using an attention mechanism, the model is able to dynamically decide how much information to use from a word- or character-level component. We evaluated different architectures on a range of sequence labeling datasets, and character-level extensions were found to improve performance on every benchmark. In addition, the proposed attention-based architecture delivered the best results even with a smaller number of trainable parameters.
Exploiting Sentence and Context Representations in Deep Neural Models for Spoken Language Understanding
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a deep learning architecture for the semantic decoder component of a Statistical Spoken Dialogue System. In a slot-filling dialogue, the semantic decoder predicts the dialogue act and a set of slot-value pairs from a set of n-best hypotheses returned by the Automatic Speech Recognition. Most current models for spoken language understanding assume (i) word-aligned semantic annotations as in sequence taggers and (ii) delexicalisation, or a mapping of input words to domain-specific concepts using heuristics that try to capture morphological variation but that do not scale to other domains nor to language variation (e.g., morphology, synonyms, paraphrasing ). In this work the semantic decoder is trained using unaligned semantic annotations and it uses distributed semantic representation learning to overcome the limitations of explicit delexicalisation. The proposed architecture uses a convolutional neural network for the sentence representation and a long-short term memory network for the context representation. Results are presented for the publicly available DSTC2 corpus and an In-car corpus which is similar to DSTC2 but has a significantly higher word error rate (WER).
SentiHood: Targeted Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis Dataset for Urban Neighbourhoods
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we introduce the task of targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis. The goal is to extract fine-grained information with respect to entities mentioned in user comments. This work extends both aspect-based sentiment analysis that assumes a single entity per document and targeted sentiment analysis that assumes a single sentiment towards a target entity. In particular, we identify the sentiment towards each aspect of one or more entities. As a testbed for this task, we introduce the SentiHood dataset, extracted from a question answering (QA) platform where urban neighbourhoods are discussed by users. In this context units of text often mention several aspects of one or more neighbourhoods. This is the first time that a generic social media platform in this case a QA platform, is used for fine-grained opinion mining. Text coming from QA platforms is far less constrained compared to text from review specific platforms which current datasets are based on. We develop several strong baselines, relying on logistic regression and state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks.
A Correlational Encoder Decoder Architecture for Pivot Based Sequence Generation
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Interlingua based Machine Translation (MT) aims to encode multiple languages into a common linguistic representation and then decode sentences in multiple target languages from this representation. In this work we explore this idea in the context of neural encoder decoder architectures, albeit on a smaller scale and without MT as the end goal. Specifically, we consider the case of three languages or modalities X, Z and Y wherein we are interested in generating sequences in Y starting from information available in X. However, there is no parallel training data available between X and Y but, training data is available between X & Z and Z & Y (as is often the case in many real world applications). Z thus acts as a pivot/bridge. An obvious solution, which is perhaps less elegant but works very well in practice is to train a two stage model which first converts from X to Z and then from Z to Y. Instead we explore an interlingua inspired solution which jointly learns to do the following (i) encode X and Z to a common representation and (ii) decode Y from this common representation. We evaluate our model on two tasks: (i) bridge transliteration and (ii) bridge captioning. We report promising results in both these applications and believe that this is a right step towards truly interlingua inspired encoder decoder architectures.
Still not there? Comparing Traditional Sequence-to-Sequence Models to Encoder-Decoder Neural Networks on Monotone String Translation Tasks
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

We analyze the performance of encoder-decoder neural models and compare them with well-known established methods. The latter represent different classes of traditional approaches that are applied to the monotone sequence-to-sequence tasks OCR post-correction, spelling correction, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and lemmatization. Such tasks are of practical relevance for various higher-level research fields including digital humanities, automatic text correction, and speech recognition. We investigate how well generic deep-learning approaches adapt to these tasks, and how they perform in comparison with established and more specialized methods, including our own adaptation of pruned CRFs.
Recurrent Dropout without Memory Loss
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a novel approach to recurrent neural network (RNN) regularization. Differently from the widely adopted dropout method, which is applied to \textit{forward} connections of feed-forward architectures or RNNs, we propose to drop neurons directly in \textit{recurrent} connections in a way that does not cause loss of long-term memory. Our approach is as easy to implement and apply as the regular feed-forward dropout and we demonstrate its effectiveness for Long Short-Term Memory network, the most popular type of RNN cells. Our experiments on NLP benchmarks show consistent improvements even when combined with conventional feed-forward dropout.
Word2Vec vs DBnary: Augmenting METEOR using Vector Representations or Lexical Resources?
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents an approach combining lexico-semantic resources and distributed representations of words applied to the evaluation in machine translation (MT). This study is made through the enrichment of a well-known MT evaluation metric: METEOR. This metric enables an approximate match (synonymy or morphological similarity) between an automatic and a reference translation. Our experiments are made in the framework of the Metrics task of WMT 2014. We show that distributed representations are a good alternative to lexico-semantic resources for MT evaluation and they can even bring interesting additional information. The augmented versions of METEOR, using vector representations, are made available on our Github page.
OCR++: A Robust Framework For Information Extraction from Scholarly Articles
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

This paper proposes OCR++, an open-source framework designed for a variety of information extraction tasks from scholarly articles including metadata (title, author names, affiliation and e-mail), structure (section headings and body text, table and figure headings, URLs and footnotes) and bibliography (citation instances and references). We analyze a diverse set of scientific articles written in English language to understand generic writing patterns and formulate rules to develop this hybrid framework. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art tools with huge margin in structural information extraction along with improved performance in metadata and bibliography extraction tasks, both in terms of accuracy (around 50% improvement) and processing time (around 52% improvement). A user experience study conducted with the help of 30 researchers reveals that the researchers found this system to be very helpful. As an additional objective, we discuss two novel use cases including automatically extracting links to public datasets from the proceedings, which would further accelerate the advancement in digital libraries. The result of the framework can be exported as a whole into structured TEI-encoded documents. Our framework is accessible online at http://cnergres.iitkgp.ac.in/OCR++/home/.
Effective LSTMs for Target-Dependent Sentiment Classification
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Target-dependent sentiment classification remains a challenge: modeling the semantic relatedness of a target with its context words in a sentence. Different context words have different influences on determining the sentiment polarity of a sentence towards the target. Therefore, it is desirable to integrate the connections between target word and context words when building a learning system. In this paper, we develop two target dependent long short-term memory (LSTM) models, where target information is automatically taken into account. We evaluate our methods on a benchmark dataset from Twitter. Empirical results show that modeling sentence representation with standard LSTM does not perform well. Incorporating target information into LSTM can significantly boost the classification accuracy. The target-dependent LSTM models achieve state-of-the-art performances without using syntactic parser or external sentiment lexicons.
Implementing a Reverse Dictionary, based on word definitions, using a Node-Graph Architecture
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we outline an approach to build graph-based reverse dictionaries using word definitions. A reverse dictionary takes a phrase as an input and outputs a list of words semantically similar to that phrase. It is a solution to the Tip-of-the-Tongue problem. We use a distance-based similarity measure, computed on a graph, to assess the similarity between a word and the input phrase. We compare the performance of our approach with the Onelook Reverse Dictionary and a distributional semantics method based on word2vec, and show that our approach is much better than the distributional semantics method, and as good as Onelook, on a 3k lexicon. This simple approach sets a new performance baseline for reverse dictionaries.