Abstract: Prior knowledge has been shown very useful to address many natural language processing tasks. Many approaches have been proposed to formalise a variety of knowledge, however, whether the proposed approach is robust or sensitive to the knowledge supplied to the model has rarely been discussed. In this paper, we propose three regularization terms on top of generalized expectation criteria, and conduct extensive experiments to justify the robustness of the proposed methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods obtain remarkable improvements and are much more robust than baselines.

Introduction: We posses a wealth of prior knowledge about many natural language processing tasks. For example, in text categorization, we know that words such as NBA, player, and basketball are strong indicators of the sports category BIBREF0 , and words like terrible, boring, and messing indicate a negative polarity while words like perfect, exciting, and moving suggest a positive polarity in sentiment classification. A key problem arisen here, is how to leverage such knowledge to guide the learning process, an interesting problem for both NLP and machine learning communities. Previous studies addressing the problem fall into several lines. First, to leverage prior knowledge to label data BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . Second, to encode prior knowledge with a prior on parameters, which can be commonly seen in many Bayesian approaches BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . Third, to formalise prior knowledge with additional variables and dependencies BIBREF5 . Last, to use prior knowledge to control the distributions over latent output variables BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , which makes the output variables easily interpretable. However, a crucial problem, which has rarely been addressed, is the bias in the prior knowledge that we supply to the learning model. Would the model be robust or sensitive to the prior knowledge? Or, which kind of knowledge is appropriate for the task? Let's see an example: we may be a baseball fan but unfamiliar with hockey so that we can provide a few number of feature words of baseball, but much less of hockey for a baseball-hockey classification task. Such prior knowledge may mislead the model with heavy bias to baseball. If the model cannot handle this situation appropriately, the performance may be undesirable. In this paper, we investigate into the problem in the framework of Generalized Expectation Criteria BIBREF7 . The study aims to reveal the factors of reducing the sensibility of the prior knowledge and therefore to make the model more robust and practical. To this end, we introduce auxiliary regularization terms in which our prior knowledge is formalized as distribution over output variables. Recall the example just mentioned, though we do not have enough knowledge to provide features for class hockey, it is easy for us to provide some neutral words, namely words that are not strong indicators of any class, like player here. As one of the factors revealed in this paper, supplying neutral feature words can boost the performance remarkably, making the model more robust. More attractively, we do not need manual annotation to label these neutral feature words in our proposed approach. More specifically, we explore three regularization terms to address the problem: (1) a regularization term associated with neutral features; (2) the maximum entropy of class distribution regularization term; and (3) the KL divergence between reference and predicted class distribution. For the first manner, we simply use the most common features as neutral features and assume the neutral features are distributed uniformly over class labels. For the second and third one, we assume we have some knowledge about the class distribution which will be detailed soon later. To summarize, the main contributions of this work are as follows: The rest of the paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we briefly describe the generalized expectation criteria and present the proposed regularization terms. In Section 3, we conduct extensive experiments to justify the proposed methods. We survey related work in Section 4, and summarize our work in Section 5.

Question: What NLP tasks do they consider?
Answer: text classification for themes including sentiment, web-page, science, medical and healthcare