OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Chinese Poetry Generation with Planning based Neural Network
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Chinese poetry generation is a very challenging task in natural language processing. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage poetry generating method which first plans the sub-topics of the poem according to the user's writing intent, and then generates each line of the poem sequentially, using a modified recurrent neural network encoder-decoder framework. The proposed planning-based method can ensure that the generated poem is coherent and semantically consistent with the user's intent. A comprehensive evaluation with human judgments demonstrates that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art poetry generating methods and the poem quality is somehow comparable to human poets.
Sensing Emotions in Text Messages: An Application and Deployment Study of EmotionPush
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Instant messaging and push notifications play important roles in modern digital life. To enable robust sense-making and rich context awareness in computer mediated communications, we introduce EmotionPush, a system that automatically conveys the emotion of received text with a colored push notification on mobile devices. EmotionPush is powered by state-of-the-art emotion classifiers and is deployed for Facebook Messenger clients on Android. The study showed that the system is able to help users prioritize interactions.
Connecting Phrase based Statistical Machine Translation Adaptation
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Although more additional corpora are now available for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), only the ones which belong to the same or similar domains with the original corpus can indeed enhance SMT performance directly. Most of the existing adaptation methods focus on sentence selection. In comparison, phrase is a smaller and more fine grained unit for data selection, therefore we propose a straightforward and efficient connecting phrase based adaptation method, which is applied to both bilingual phrase pair and monolingual n-gram adaptation. The proposed method is evaluated on IWSLT/NIST data sets, and the results show that phrase based SMT performance are significantly improved (up to +1.6 in comparison with phrase based SMT baseline system and +0.9 in comparison with existing methods).
An Empirical Exploration of Skip Connections for Sequential Tagging
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we empirically explore the effects of various kinds of skip connections in stacked bidirectional LSTMs for sequential tagging. We investigate three kinds of skip connections connecting to LSTM cells: (a) skip connections to the gates, (b) skip connections to the internal states and (c) skip connections to the cell outputs. We present comprehensive experiments showing that skip connections to cell outputs outperform the remaining two. Furthermore, we observe that using gated identity functions as skip mappings works pretty well. Based on this novel skip connections, we successfully train deep stacked bidirectional LSTM models and obtain state-of-the-art results on CCG supertagging and comparable results on POS tagging.
Distance Metric Learning for Aspect Phrase Grouping
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Aspect phrase grouping is an important task in aspect-level sentiment analysis. It is a challenging problem due to polysemy and context dependency. We propose an Attention-based Deep Distance Metric Learning (ADDML) method, by considering aspect phrase representation as well as context representation. First, leveraging the characteristics of the review text, we automatically generate aspect phrase sample pairs for distant supervision. Second, we feed word embeddings of aspect phrases and their contexts into an attention-based neural network to learn feature representation of contexts. Both aspect phrase embedding and context embedding are used to learn a deep feature subspace for measure the distances between aspect phrases for K-means clustering. Experiments on four review datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art strong baseline methods.
Improved relation classification by deep recurrent neural networks with data augmentation
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Nowadays, neural networks play an important role in the task of relation classification. By designing different neural architectures, researchers have improved the performance to a large extent in comparison with traditional methods. However, existing neural networks for relation classification are usually of shallow architectures (e.g., one-layer convolutional neural networks or recurrent networks). They may fail to explore the potential representation space in different abstraction levels. In this paper, we propose deep recurrent neural networks (DRNNs) for relation classification to tackle this challenge. Further, we propose a data augmentation method by leveraging the directionality of relations. We evaluated our DRNNs on the SemEval-2010 Task~8, and achieve an F1-score of 86.1%, outperforming previous state-of-the-art recorded results.
Hierarchical Memory Networks for Answer Selection on Unknown Words
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Recently, end-to-end memory networks have shown promising results on Question Answering task, which encode the past facts into an explicit memory and perform reasoning ability by making multiple computational steps on the memory. However, memory networks conduct the reasoning on sentence-level memory to output coarse semantic vectors and do not further take any attention mechanism to focus on words, which may lead to the model lose some detail information, especially when the answers are rare or unknown words. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Memory Networks, dubbed HMN. First, we encode the past facts into sentence-level memory and word-level memory respectively. Then, (k)-max pooling is exploited following reasoning module on the sentence-level memory to sample the (k) most relevant sentences to a question and feed these sentences into attention mechanism on the word-level memory to focus the words in the selected sentences. Finally, the prediction is jointly learned over the outputs of the sentence-level reasoning module and the word-level attention mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully conducts answer selection on unknown words and achieves a better performance than memory networks.
Simple Question Answering by Attentive Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

This work focuses on answering single-relation factoid questions over Freebase. Each question can acquire the answer from a single fact of form (subject, predicate, object) in Freebase. This task, simple question answering (SimpleQA), can be addressed via a two-step pipeline: entity linking and fact selection. In fact selection, we match the subject entity in a fact candidate with the entity mention in the question by a character-level convolutional neural network (char-CNN), and match the predicate in that fact with the question by a word-level CNN (word-CNN). This work makes two main contributions. (i) A simple and effective entity linker over Freebase is proposed. Our entity linker outperforms the state-of-the-art entity linker over SimpleQA task. (ii) A novel attentive maxpooling is stacked over word-CNN, so that the predicate representation can be matched with the predicate-focused question representation more effectively. Experiments show that our system sets new state-of-the-art in this task.
Semi-supervised Word Sense Disambiguation with Neural Models
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Determining the intended sense of words in text - word sense disambiguation (WSD) - is a long standing problem in natural language processing. Recently, researchers have shown promising results using word vectors extracted from a neural network language model as features in WSD algorithms. However, a simple average or concatenation of word vectors for each word in a text loses the sequential and syntactic information of the text. In this paper, we study WSD with a sequence learning neural net, LSTM, to better capture the sequential and syntactic patterns of the text. To alleviate the lack of training data in all-words WSD, we employ the same LSTM in a semi-supervised label propagation classifier. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results, especially on verbs.
Inducing Multilingual Text Analysis Tools Using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

This work focuses on the rapid development of linguistic annotation tools for resource-poor languages. We experiment several cross-lingual annotation projection methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) models. The distinctive feature of our approach is that our multilingual word representation requires only a parallel corpus between the source and target language. More precisely, our method has the following characteristics: (a) it does not use word alignment information, (b) it does not assume any knowledge about foreign languages, which makes it applicable to a wide range of resource-poor languages, (c) it provides truly multilingual taggers. We investigate both uni- and bi-directional RNN models and propose a method to include external information (for instance low level information from POS) in the RNN to train higher level taggers (for instance, super sense taggers). We demonstrate the validity and genericity of our model by using parallel corpora (obtained by manual or automatic translation). Our experiments are conducted to induce cross-lingual POS and super sense taggers.
Modelling Sentence Pairs with Tree-structured Attentive Encoder
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

We describe an attentive encoder that combines tree-structured recursive neural networks and sequential recurrent neural networks for modelling sentence pairs. Since existing attentive models exert attention on the sequential structure, we propose a way to incorporate attention into the tree topology. Specially, given a pair of sentences, our attentive encoder uses the representation of one sentence, which generated via an RNN, to guide the structural encoding of the other sentence on the dependency parse tree. We evaluate the proposed attentive encoder on three tasks: semantic similarity, paraphrase identification and true-false question selection. Experimental results show that our encoder outperforms all baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on two tasks.
Text Classification Improved by Integrating Bidirectional LSTM with Two-dimensional Max Pooling
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is one of the most popular architectures used in Natural Language Processsing (NLP) tasks because its recurrent structure is very suitable to process variable-length text. RNN can utilize distributed representations of words by first converting the tokens comprising each text into vectors, which form a matrix. And this matrix includes two dimensions: the time-step dimension and the feature vector dimension. Then most existing models usually utilize one-dimensional (1D) max pooling operation or attention-based operation only on the time-step dimension to obtain a fixed-length vector. However, the features on the feature vector dimension are not mutually independent, and simply applying 1D pooling operation over the time-step dimension independently may destroy the structure of the feature representation. On the other hand, applying two-dimensional (2D) pooling operation over the two dimensions may sample more meaningful features for sequence modeling tasks. To integrate the features on both dimensions of the matrix, this paper explores applying 2D max pooling operation to obtain a fixed-length representation of the text. This paper also utilizes 2D convolution to sample more meaningful information of the matrix. Experiments are conducted on six text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis, question classification, subjectivity classification and newsgroup classification. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, the proposed models achieve excellent performance on 4 out of 6 tasks. Specifically, one of the proposed models achieves highest accuracy on Stanford Sentiment Treebank binary classification and fine-grained classification tasks.
Stance Classification in Rumours as a Sequential Task Exploiting the Tree Structure of Social Media Conversations
Venue: Conference COLING 2016
Year: 2016

Rumour stance classification, the task that determines if each tweet in a collection discussing a rumour is supporting, denying, questioning or simply commenting on the rumour, has been attracting substantial interest. Here we introduce a novel approach that makes use of the sequence of transitions observed in tree-structured conversation threads in Twitter. The conversation threads are formed by harvesting users' replies to one another, which results in a nested tree-like structure. Previous work addressing the stance classification task has treated each tweet as a separate unit. Here we analyse tweets by virtue of their position in a sequence and test two sequential classifiers, Linear-Chain CRF and Tree CRF, each of which makes different assumptions about the conversational structure. We experiment with eight Twitter datasets, collected during breaking news, and show that exploiting the sequential structure of Twitter conversations achieves significant improvements over the non-sequential methods. Our work is the first to model Twitter conversations as a tree structure in this manner, introducing a novel way of tackling NLP tasks on Twitter conversations.
Improving Named Entity Recognition by Jointly Learning to Disambiguate Morphological Tags
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

Previous studies have shown that linguistic features of a word such as possession, genitive or other grammatical cases can be employed in word representations of a named entity recognition (NER) tagger to improve the performance for morphologically rich languages. However, these taggers require external morphological disambiguation (MD) tools to function which are hard to obtain or non-existent for many languages. In this work, we propose a model which alleviates the need for such disambiguators by jointly learning NER and MD taggers in languages for which one can provide a list of candidate morphological analyses. We show that this can be done independent of the morphological annotation schemes, which differ among languages. Our experiments employing three different model architectures that join these two tasks show that joint learning improves NER performance. Furthermore, the morphological disambiguator's performance is shown to be competitive.
Recurrent One-Hop Predictions for Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

Large scale knowledge graphs (KGs) such as Freebase are generally incomplete. Reasoning over multi-hop (mh) KG paths is thus an important capability that is needed for question answering or other NLP tasks that require knowledge about the world. mh-KG reasoning includes diverse scenarios, e.g., given a head entity and a relation path, predict the tail entity; or given two entities connected by some relation paths, predict the unknown relation between them. We present ROPs, recurrent one-hop predictors, that predict entities at each step of mh-KB paths by using recurrent neural networks and vector representations of entities and relations, with two benefits: (i) modeling mh-paths of arbitrary lengths while updating the entity and relation representations by the training signal at each step; (ii) handling different types of mh-KG reasoning in a unified framework. Our models show state-of-the-art for two important multi-hop KG reasoning tasks: Knowledge Base Completion and Path Query Answering.
Neural Collective Entity Linking
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

Entity Linking aims to link entity mentions in texts to knowledge bases, and neural models have achieved recent success in this task. However, most existing methods rely on local contexts to resolve entities independently, which may usually fail due to the data sparsity of local information. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural model for collective entity linking, named as NCEL. NCEL applies Graph Convolutional Network to integrate both local contextual features and global coherence information for entity linking. To improve the computation efficiency, we approximately perform graph convolution on a subgraph of adjacent entity mentions instead of those in the entire text. We further introduce an attention scheme to improve the robustness of NCEL to data noise and train the model on Wikipedia hyperlinks to avoid overfitting and domain bias. In experiments, we evaluate NCEL on five publicly available datasets to verify the linking performance as well as generalization ability. We also conduct an extensive analysis of time complexity, the impact of key modules, and qualitative results, which demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.
Evaluation of Unsupervised Compositional Representations
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

We evaluated various compositional models, from bag-of-words representations to compositional RNN-based models, on several extrinsic supervised and unsupervised evaluation benchmarks. Our results confirm that weighted vector averaging can outperform context-sensitive models in most benchmarks, but structural features encoded in RNN models can also be useful in certain classification tasks. We analyzed some of the evaluation datasets to identify the aspects of meaning they measure and the characteristics of the various models that explain their performance variance.
Part-of-Speech Tagging on an Endangered Language: a Parallel Griko-Italian Resource
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

Most work on part-of-speech (POS) tagging is focused on high resource languages, or examines low-resource and active learning settings through simulated studies. We evaluate POS tagging techniques on an actual endangered language, Griko. We present a resource that contains 114 narratives in Griko, along with sentence-level translations in Italian, and provides gold annotations for the test set. Based on a previously collected small corpus, we investigate several traditional methods, as well as methods that take advantage of monolingual data or project cross-lingual POS tags. We show that the combination of a semi-supervised method with cross-lingual transfer is more appropriate for this extremely challenging setting, with the best tagger achieving an accuracy of 72.9%. With an applied active learning scheme, which we use to collect sentence-level annotations over the test set, we achieve improvements of more than 21 percentage points.
SeVeN: Augmenting Word Embeddings with Unsupervised Relation Vectors
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

We present SeVeN (Semantic Vector Networks), a hybrid resource that encodes relationships between words in the form of a graph. Different from traditional semantic networks, these relations are represented as vectors in a continuous vector space. We propose a simple pipeline for learning such relation vectors, which is based on word vector averaging in combination with an ad hoc autoencoder. We show that by explicitly encoding relational information in a dedicated vector space we can capture aspects of word meaning that are complementary to what is captured by word embeddings. For example, by examining clusters of relation vectors, we observe that relational similarities can be identified at a more abstract level than with traditional word vector differences. Finally, we test the effectiveness of semantic vector networks in two tasks: measuring word similarity and neural text categorization. SeVeN is available at bitbucket.org/luisespinosa/seven.
Variational Attention for Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

The variational encoder-decoder (VED) encodes source information as a set of random variables using a neural network, which in turn is decoded into target data using another neural network. In natural language processing, sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models typically serve as encoder-decoder networks. When combined with a traditional (deterministic) attention mechanism, the variational latent space may be bypassed by the attention model, and thus becomes ineffective. In this paper, we propose a variational attention mechanism for VED, where the attention vector is also modeled as Gaussian distributed random variables. Results on two experiments show that, without loss of quality, our proposed method alleviates the bypassing phenomenon as it increases the diversity of generated sentences.
Source Critical Reinforcement Learning for Transferring Spoken Language Understanding to a New Language
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

To deploy a spoken language understanding (SLU) model to a new language, language transferring is desired to avoid the trouble of acquiring and labeling a new big SLU corpus. Translating the original SLU corpus into the target language is an attractive strategy. However, SLU corpora consist of plenty of semantic labels (slots), which general-purpose translators cannot handle well, not to mention additional culture differences. This paper focuses on the language transferring task given a tiny in-domain parallel SLU corpus. The in-domain parallel corpus can be used as the first adaptation on the general translator. But more importantly, we show how to use reinforcement learning (RL) to further finetune the adapted translator, where translated sentences with more proper slot tags receive higher rewards. We evaluate our approach on Chinese to English language transferring for SLU systems. The experimental results show that the generated English SLU corpus via adaptation and reinforcement learning gives us over 97% in the slot F1 score and over 84% accuracy in domain classification. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed language transferring method. Compared with naive translation, our proposed method improves domain classification accuracy by relatively 22%, and the slot filling F1 score by relatively more than 71%.
Deep Enhanced Representation for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Venue: Conference COLING 2018
Year: 2018

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task as the relation prediction without explicit connectives in discourse parsing needs understanding of text spans and cannot be easily derived from surface features from the input sentence pairs. Thus, properly representing the text is very crucial to this task. In this paper, we propose a model augmented with different grained text representations, including character, subword, word, sentence, and sentence pair levels. The proposed deeper model is evaluated on the benchmark treebank and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with greater than 48% in 11-way and $F_1$ score greater than 50% in 4-way classifications for the first time according to our best knowledge.