Abstract: Most existing recursive neural network (RvNN) architectures utilize only the structure of parse trees, ignoring syntactic tags which are provided as by-products of parsing. We present a novel RvNN architecture that can provide dynamic compositionality by considering comprehensive syntactic information derived from both the structure and linguistic tags. Specifically, we introduce a structure-aware tag representation constructed by a separate tag-level tree-LSTM. With this, we can control the composition function of the existing word-level tree-LSTM by augmenting the representation as a supplementary input to the gate functions of the tree-LSTM. In extensive experiments, we show that models built upon the proposed architecture obtain superior or competitive performance on several sentence-level tasks such as sentiment analysis and natural language inference when compared against previous tree-structured models and other sophisticated neural models.

Introduction: 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:

Question: Which baselines did they compare against?
Answer: Sentence classification baselines: RNTN (Socher et al. 2013), AdaMC-RNTN (Dong et al. 2014), TE-RNTN (Qian et al. 2015), TBCNN (Mou et al. 2015), Tree-LSTM (Tai, Socher, and Manning 2015), AdaHT-LSTM-CM (Liu, Qiu, and Huang 2017), DC-TreeLSTM (Liu, Qiu, and Huang 2017), TE-LSTM (Huang, Qian, and Zhu 2017), BiConTree (Teng and Zhang 2017), Gumbel Tree-LSTM (Choi, Yoo, and Lee 2018), TreeNet (Cheng et al. 2018), CNN (Kim 2014), AdaSent (Zhao, Lu, and Poupart 2015), LSTM-CNN (Zhou et al. 2016), byte-mLSTM (Radford, Jozefowicz, and Sutskever 2017), BCN + Char + CoVe (McCann et al. 2017), BCN + Char + ELMo (Peters et al. 2018). 
Stanford Natural Language Inference baselines: Latent Syntax Tree-LSTM (Yogatama et al. 2017), Tree-based CNN (Mou et al. 2016), Gumbel Tree-LSTM (Choi, Yoo, and Lee 2018), NSE (Munkhdalai and Yu 2017), Reinforced Self- Attention Network (Shen et al. 2018), Residual stacked encoders: (Nie and Bansal 2017), BiLSTM with generalized pooling (Chen, Ling, and Zhu 2018).