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EMNLP | Rule Extraction for Tree-to-Tree Transducers by Cost Minimization | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1002 | Finite-state transducers give efficient representations of many Natural Language phenomena. They allow to account for complex lexicon restrictions encountered, without involving the use of a large set of complex rules difficult to analyze. We here show that these representations can be made very compact, indicate how to perform the corresponding minimization, and point out interesting linguistic side-effects of this operation. |
EMNLP | A Neural Network for Coordination Boundary Prediction | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1003 | We propose a neural-network based model for coordination boundary prediction. The network is designed to incorporate two signals: the similarity between conjuncts and the observation that replacing the whole coordination phrase with a conjunct tends to produce a coherent sentences. The modeling makes use of several LSTM networks. The model is trained solely on conjunction annotations in a Treebank, without using external resources. We show improvements on predicting coordination boundaries on the PTB compared to two state-of-the-art parsers; as well as improvement over previous coordination boundary prediction systems on the Genia corpus. |
EMNLP | Distinguishing Past, On-going, and Future Events: The EventStatus Corpus | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1005 | The tremendous amount of user generated data through social networking sites led to the gaining popularity of automatic text classification in the field of computational linguistics over the past decade. Within this domain, one problem that has drawn the attention of many researchers is automatic humor detection in texts. In depth semantic understanding of the text is required to detect humor which makes the problem difficult to automate. With increase in the number of social media users, many multilingual speakers often interchange between languages while posting on social media which is called code-mixing. It introduces some challenges in the field of linguistic analysis of social media content (Barman et al., 2014), like spelling variations and non-grammatical structures in a sentence. Past researches include detecting puns in texts (Kao et al., 2016) and humor in one-lines (Mihalcea et al., 2010) in a single language, but with the tremendous amount of code-mixed data available online, there is a need to develop techniques which detects humor in code-mixed tweets. In this paper, we analyze the task of humor detection in texts and describe a freely available corpus containing English-Hindi code-mixed tweets annotated with humorous(H) or non-humorous(N) tags. We also tagged the words in the tweets with Language tags (English/Hindi/Others). Moreover, we describe the experiments carried out on the corpus and provide a baseline classification system which distinguishes between humorous and non-humorous texts. |
EMNLP | Nested Propositions in Open Information Extraction | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1006 | We introduce Graphene, an Open IE system whose goal is to generate accurate, meaningful and complete propositions that may facilitate a variety of downstream semantic applications. For this purpose, we transform syntactically complex input sentences into clean, compact structures in the form of core facts and accompanying contexts, while identifying the rhetorical relations that hold between them in order to maintain their semantic relationship. In that way, we preserve the context of the relational tuples extracted from a source sentence, generating a novel lightweight semantic representation for Open IE that enhances the expressiveness of the extracted propositions. |
EMNLP | Learning to Recognize Discontiguous Entities | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1008 | This paper focuses on the study of recognizing discontiguous entities. Motivated by a previous work, we propose to use a novel hypergraph representation to jointly encode discontiguous entities of unbounded length, which can overlap with one another. To compare with existing approaches, we first formally introduce the notion of model ambiguity, which defines the difficulty level of interpreting the outputs of a model, and then formally analyze the theoretical advantages of our model over previous existing approaches based on linear-chain CRFs. Our empirical results also show that our model is able to achieve significantly better results when evaluated on standard data with many discontiguous entities. |
EMNLP | Modeling Human Reading with Neural Attention | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1009 | When humans read text, they fixate some words and skip others. However, there have been few attempts to explain skipping behavior with computational models, as most existing work has focused on predicting reading times (e.g.,~using surprisal). In this paper, we propose a novel approach that models both skipping and reading, using an unsupervised architecture that combines a neural attention with autoencoding, trained on raw text using reinforcement learning. Our model explains human reading behavior as a tradeoff between precision of language understanding (encoding the input accurately) and economy of attention (fixating as few words as possible). We evaluate the model on the Dundee eye-tracking corpus, showing that it accurately predicts skipping behavior and reading times, is competitive with surprisal, and captures known qualitative features of human reading. |
EMNLP | Rationalizing Neural Predictions | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1011 | Deviations from rational decision-making due to limited computational resources have been studied in the field of bounded rationality, originally proposed by Herbert Simon. There have been a number of different approaches to model bounded rationality ranging from optimality principles to heuristics. Here we take an information-theoretic approach to bounded rationality, where information-processing costs are measured by the relative entropy between a posterior decision strategy and a given fixed prior strategy. In the case of multiple environments, it can be shown that there is an optimal prior rendering the bounded rationality problem equivalent to the rate distortion problem for lossy compression in information theory. Accordingly, the optimal prior and posterior strategies can be computed by the well-known Blahut-Arimoto algorithm which requires the computation of partition sums over all possible outcomes and cannot be applied straightforwardly to continuous problems. Here we derive a sampling-based alternative update rule for the adaptation of prior behaviors of decision-makers and we show convergence to the optimal prior predicted by rate distortion theory. Importantly, the update rule avoids typical infeasible operations such as the computation of partition sums. We show in simulations a proof of concept for discrete action and environment domains. This approach is not only interesting as a generic computational method, but might also provide a more realistic model of human decision-making processes occurring on a fast and a slow time scale. |
EMNLP | Deep Multi-Task Learning with Shared Memory for Text Classification | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1012 | We consider the task of identifying attitudes towards a given set of entities from text. Conventionally, this task is decomposed into two separate subtasks: target detection that identifies whether each entity is mentioned in the text, either explicitly or implicitly, and polarity classification that classifies the exact sentiment towards an identified entity (the target) into positive, negative, or neutral. Instead, we show that attitude identification can be solved with an end-to-end machine learning architecture, in which the two subtasks are interleaved by a deep memory network. In this way, signals produced in target detection provide clues for polarity classification, and reversely, the predicted polarity provides feedback to the identification of targets. Moreover, the treatments for the set of targets also influence each other -- the learned representations may share the same semantics for some targets but vary for others. The proposed deep memory network, the AttNet, outperforms methods that do not consider the interactions between the subtasks or those among the targets, including conventional machine learning methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning models. |
EMNLP | Natural Language Comprehension with the EpiReader | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1013 | We present the EpiReader, a novel model for machine comprehension of text. Machine comprehension of unstructured, real-world text is a major research goal for natural language processing. Current tests of machine comprehension pose questions whose answers can be inferred from some supporting text, and evaluate a model's response to the questions. The EpiReader is an end-to-end neural model comprising two components: the first component proposes a small set of candidate answers after comparing a question to its supporting text, and the second component formulates hypotheses using the proposed candidates and the question, then reranks the hypotheses based on their estimated concordance with the supporting text. We present experiments demonstrating that the EpiReader sets a new state-of-the-art on the CNN and Children's Book Test machine comprehension benchmarks, outperforming previous neural models by a significant margin. |
EMNLP | Creating Causal Embeddings for Question Answering with Minimal Supervision | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1014 | A common model for question answering (QA) is that a good answer is one that is closely related to the question, where relatedness is often determined using general-purpose lexical models such as word embeddings. We argue that a better approach is to look for answers that are related to the question in a relevant way, according to the information need of the question, which may be determined through task-specific embeddings. With causality as a use case, we implement this insight in three steps. First, we generate causal embeddings cost-effectively by bootstrapping cause-effect pairs extracted from free text using a small set of seed patterns. Second, we train dedicated embeddings over this data, by using task-specific contexts, i.e., the context of a cause is its effect. Finally, we extend a state-of-the-art reranking approach for QA to incorporate these causal embeddings. We evaluate the causal embedding models both directly with a casual implication task, and indirectly, in a downstream causal QA task using data from Yahoo! Answers. We show that explicitly modeling causality improves performance in both tasks. In the QA task our best model achieves 37.3% P@1, significantly outperforming a strong baseline by 7.7% (relative). |
EMNLP | Improving Semantic Parsing via Answer Type Inference | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1015 | Existing knowledge-based question answering systems often rely on small annotated training data. While shallow methods like relation extraction are robust to data scarcity, they are less expressive than the deep meaning representation methods like semantic parsing, thereby failing at answering questions involving multiple constraints. Here we alleviate this problem by empowering a relation extraction method with additional evidence from Wikipedia. We first present a neural network based relation extractor to retrieve the candidate answers from Freebase, and then infer over Wikipedia to validate these answers. Experiments on the WebQuestions question answering dataset show that our method achieves an F_1 of 53.3%, a substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art. |
EMNLP | Semantic Parsing to Probabilistic Programs for Situated Question Answering | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1016 | Situated question answering is the problem of answering questions about an environment such as an image or diagram. This problem requires jointly interpreting a question and an environment using background knowledge to select the correct answer. We present Parsing to Probabilistic Programs (P3), a novel situated question answering model that can use background knowledge and global features of the question/environment interpretation while retaining efficient approximate inference. Our key insight is to treat semantic parses as probabilistic programs that execute nondeterministically and whose possible executions represent environmental uncertainty. We evaluate our approach on a new, publicly-released data set of 5000 science diagram questions, outperforming several competitive classical and neural baselines. |
EMNLP | Event participant modelling with neural networks | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1017 | It is approved that artificial neural networks can be considerable effective in anticipating and analyzing flows in which traditional methods and statics are not able to solve. in this article, by using two-layer feedforward network with tan-sigmoid transmission function in input and output layers, we can anticipate participation rate of public in kohgiloye and boyerahmad province in future presidential election of islamic republic of iran with 91% accuracy. the assessment standards of participation such as confusion matrix and roc diagrams have been approved our claims. |
EMNLP | Context-Dependent Sense Embedding | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1018 | Word embeddings play a significant role in many modern NLP systems. Since learning one representation per word is problematic for polysemous words and homonymous words, researchers propose to use one embedding per word sense. Their approaches mainly train word sense embeddings on a corpus. In this paper, we propose to use word sense definitions to learn one embedding per word sense. Experimental results on word similarity tasks and a word sense disambiguation task show that word sense embeddings produced by our approach are of high quality. |
EMNLP | Jointly Embedding Knowledge Graphs and Logical Rules | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1019 | Representation learning of knowledge graphs encodes entities and relation types into a continuous low-dimensional vector space, learns embeddings of entities and relation types. Most existing methods only concentrate on knowledge triples, ignoring logic rules which contain rich background knowledge. Although there has been some work aiming at leveraging both knowledge triples and logic rules, they ignore the transitivity and antisymmetry of logic rules. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn knowledge representations with entities and ordered relations in knowledges and logic rules. The key idea is to integrate knowledge triples and logic rules, and approximately order the relation types in logic rules to utilize the transitivity and antisymmetry of logic rules. All entries of the embeddings of relation types are constrained to be non-negative. We translate the general constrained optimization problem into an unconstrained optimization problem to solve the non-negative matrix factorization. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms other baselines on knowledge graph completion task. It indicates that our model is capable of capturing the transitivity and antisymmetry information, which is significant when learning embeddings of knowledge graphs. |
EMNLP | Aspect Level Sentiment Classification with Deep Memory Network | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1021 | We introduce a deep memory network for aspect level sentiment classification. Unlike feature-based SVM and sequential neural models such as LSTM, this approach explicitly captures the importance of each context word when inferring the sentiment polarity of an aspect. Such importance degree and text representation are calculated with multiple computational layers, each of which is a neural attention model over an external memory. Experiments on laptop and restaurant datasets demonstrate that our approach performs comparable to state-of-art feature based SVM system, and substantially better than LSTM and attention-based LSTM architectures. On both datasets we show that multiple computational layers could improve the performance. Moreover, our approach is also fast. The deep memory network with 9 layers is 15 times faster than LSTM with a CPU implementation. |
EMNLP | Attention-based LSTM Network for Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1024 | With the development of the Internet, natural language processing (NLP), in which sentiment analysis is an important task, became vital in information processing.Sentiment analysis includes aspect sentiment classification. Aspect sentiment can provide complete and in-depth results with increased attention on aspect-level. Different context words in a sentence influence the sentiment polarity of a sentence variably, and polarity varies based on the different aspects in a sentence. Take the sentence, 'I bought a new camera. The picture quality is amazing but the battery life is too short.'as an example. If the aspect is picture quality, then the expected sentiment polarity is 'positive', if the battery life aspect is considered, then the sentiment polarity should be 'negative'; therefore, aspect is important to consider when we explore aspect sentiment in the sentence. Recurrent neural network (RNN) is regarded as a good model to deal with natural language processing, and RNNs has get good performance on aspect sentiment classification including Target-Dependent LSTM (TD-LSTM) ,Target-Connection LSTM (TC-LSTM) (Tang, 2015a, b), AE-LSTM, AT-LSTM, AEAT-LSTM (Wang et al., 2016).There are also extensive literatures on sentiment classification utilizing convolutional neural network, but there is little literature on aspect sentiment classification using convolutional neural network. In our paper, we develop attention-based input layers in which aspect information is considered by input layer. We then incorporate attention-based input layers into convolutional neural network (CNN) to introduce context words information. In our experiment, incorporating aspect information into CNN improves the latter's aspect sentiment classification performance without using syntactic parser or external sentiment lexicons in a benchmark dataset from Twitter but get better performance compared with other models. |
EMNLP | Neural versus Phrase-Based Machine Translation Quality: a Case Study | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1025 | Within the field of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), the neural approach (NMT) has recently emerged as the first technology able to challenge the long-standing dominance of phrase-based approaches (PBMT). In particular, at the IWSLT 2015 evaluation campaign, NMT outperformed well established state-of-the-art PBMT systems on English-German, a language pair known to be particularly hard because of morphology and syntactic differences. To understand in what respects NMT provides better translation quality than PBMT, we perform a detailed analysis of neural versus phrase-based SMT outputs, leveraging high quality post-edits performed by professional translators on the IWSLT data. For the first time, our analysis provides useful insights on what linguistic phenomena are best modeled by neural models -- such as the reordering of verbs -- while pointing out other aspects that remain to be improved. |
EMNLP | Zero-Resource Translation with Multi-Lingual Neural Machine Translation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1026 | There has been relatively little attention to incorporating linguistic prior to neural machine translation. Much of the previous work was further constrained to considering linguistic prior on the source side. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model, called NMT+RNNG, that learns to parse and translate by combining the recurrent neural network grammar into the attention-based neural machine translation. Our approach encourages the neural machine translation model to incorporate linguistic prior during training, and lets it translate on its own afterward. Extensive experiments with four language pairs show the effectiveness of the proposed NMT+RNNG. |
EMNLP | Memory-enhanced Decoder for Neural Machine Translation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1027 | Recent research in neural machine translation has largely focused on two aspects; neural network architectures and end-to-end learning algorithms. The problem of decoding, however, has received relatively little attention from the research community. In this paper, we solely focus on the problem of decoding given a trained neural machine translation model. Instead of trying to build a new decoding algorithm for any specific decoding objective, we propose the idea of trainable decoding algorithm in which we train a decoding algorithm to find a translation that maximizes an arbitrary decoding objective. More specifically, we design an actor that observes and manipulates the hidden state of the neural machine translation decoder and propose to train it using a variant of deterministic policy gradient. We extensively evaluate the proposed algorithm using four language pairs and two decoding objectives and show that we can indeed train a trainable greedy decoder that generates a better translation (in terms of a target decoding objective) with minimal computational overhead. |
EMNLP | Semi-Supervised Learning of Sequence Models with Method of Moments | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1028 | We propose a method of moments (MoM) algorithm for training large-scale implicit generative models. Moment estimation in this setting encounters two problems: it is often difficult to define the millions of moments needed to learn the model parameters, and it is hard to determine which properties are useful when specifying moments. To address the first issue, we introduce a moment network, and define the moments as the network's hidden units and the gradient of the network's output with the respect to its parameters. To tackle the second problem, we use asymptotic theory to highlight desiderata for moments -- namely they should minimize the asymptotic variance of estimated model parameters -- and introduce an objective to learn better moments. The sequence of objectives created by this Method of Learned Moments (MoLM) can train high-quality neural image samplers. On CIFAR-10, we demonstrate that MoLM-trained generators achieve significantly higher Inception Scores and lower Frechet Inception Distances than those trained with gradient penalty-regularized and spectrally-normalized adversarial objectives. These generators also achieve nearly perfect Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Scores on CelebA, and can create high-quality samples of 128x128 images. |
EMNLP | Globally Coherent Text Generation with Neural Checklist Models | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1032 | Discourse coherence is strongly associated with text quality, making it important to natural language generation and understanding. Yet existing models of coherence focus on measuring individual aspects of coherence (lexical overlap, rhetorical structure, entity centering) in narrow domains. In this paper, we describe domain-independent neural models of discourse coherence that are capable of measuring multiple aspects of coherence in existing sentences and can maintain coherence while generating new sentences. We study both discriminative models that learn to distinguish coherent from incoherent discourse, and generative models that produce coherent text, including a novel neural latent-variable Markovian generative model that captures the latent discourse dependencies between sentences in a text. Our work achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple coherence evaluations, and marks an initial step in generating coherent texts given discourse contexts. |
EMNLP | Discourse Parsing with Attention-based Hierarchical Neural Networks | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1035 | This paper describes the Georgia Tech team's approach to the CoNLL-2016 supplementary evaluation on discourse relation sense classification. We use long short-term memories (LSTM) to induce distributed representations of each argument, and then combine these representations with surface features in a neural network. The architecture of the neural network is determined by Bayesian hyperparameter search. |
EMNLP | Multi-view Response Selection for Human-Computer Conversation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1036 | Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and topics. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million-dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams were challenged to build conversational agents, known as socialbots, to converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics such as Sports, Politics, Entertainment, Fashion and Technology for 20 minutes. The Alexa Prize offers the academic community a unique opportunity to perform research with a live system used by millions of users. The competition provided university teams with real user conversational data at scale, along with the user-provided ratings and feedback augmented with annotations by the Alexa team. This enabled teams to effectively iterate and make improvements throughout the competition while being evaluated in real-time through live user interactions. To build their socialbots, university teams combined state-of-the-art techniques with novel strategies in the areas of Natural Language Understanding, Context Modeling, Dialog Management, Response Generation, and Knowledge Acquisition. To support the efforts of participating teams, the Alexa Prize team made significant scientific and engineering investments to build and improve Conversational Speech Recognition, Topic Tracking, Dialog Evaluation, Voice User Experience, and tools for traffic management and scalability. This paper outlines the advances created by the university teams as well as the Alexa Prize team to achieve the common goal of solving the problem of Conversational AI. |
EMNLP | Variational Neural Discourse Relation Recognizer | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1037 | Implicit discourse relation recognition is a crucial component for automatic discourselevel analysis and nature language understanding. Previous studies exploit discriminative models that are built on either powerful manual features or deep discourse representations. In this paper, instead, we explore generative models and propose a variational neural discourse relation recognizer. We refer to this model as VarNDRR. VarNDRR establishes a directed probabilistic model with a latent continuous variable that generates both a discourse and the relation between the two arguments of the discourse. In order to perform efficient inference and learning, we introduce neural discourse relation models to approximate the prior and posterior distributions of the latent variable, and employ these approximated distributions to optimize a reparameterized variational lower bound. This allows VarNDRR to be trained with standard stochastic gradient methods. Experiments on the benchmark data set show that VarNDRR can achieve comparable results against stateof- the-art baselines without using any manual features. |
EMNLP | Event Detection and Co-reference with Minimal Supervision | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1038 | Audio Event Detection is an important task for content analysis of multimedia data. Most of the current works on detection of audio events is driven through supervised learning approaches. We propose a weakly supervised learning framework which can make use of the tremendous amount of web multimedia data with significantly reduced annotation effort and expense. Specifically, we use several multiple instance learning algorithms to show that audio event detection through weak labels is feasible. We also propose a novel scalable multiple instance learning algorithm and show that its competitive with other multiple instance learning algorithms for audio event detection tasks. |
EMNLP | Relation Schema Induction using Tensor Factorization with Side Information | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1040 | Given a set of documents from a specific domain (e.g., medical research journals), how do we automatically build a Knowledge Graph (KG) for that domain? Automatic identification of relations and their schemas, i.e., type signature of arguments of relations (e.g., undergo(Patient, Surgery)), is an important first step towards this goal. We refer to this problem as Relation Schema Induction (RSI). In this paper, we propose Schema Induction using Coupled Tensor Factorization (SICTF), a novel tensor factorization method for relation schema induction. SICTF factorizes Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) triples extracted from a domain corpus along with additional side information in a principled way to induce relation schemas. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of tensor factorization for the RSI problem. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we find that SICTF is not only more accurate than state-of-the-art baselines, but also significantly faster (about 14x faster). |
EMNLP | Supervised Distributional Hypernym Discovery via Domain Adaptation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1041 | Modeling hypernymy, such as poodle is-a dog, is an important generalization aid to many NLP tasks, such as entailment, coreference, relation extraction, and question answering. Supervised learning from labeled hypernym sources, such as WordNet, limits the coverage of these models, which can be addressed by learning hypernyms from unlabeled text. Existing unsupervised methods either do not scale to large vocabularies or yield unacceptably poor accuracy. This paper introduces distributional inclusion vector embedding (DIVE), a simple-to-implement unsupervised method of hypernym discovery via per-word non-negative vector embeddings which preserve the inclusion property of word contexts in a low-dimensional and interpretable space. In experimental evaluations more comprehensive than any previous literature of which we are aware-evaluating on 11 datasets using multiple existing as well as newly proposed scoring functions-we find that our method provides up to double the precision of previous unsupervised embeddings, and the highest average performance, using a much more compact word representation, and yielding many new state-of-the-art results. |
EMNLP | Latent Tree Language Model | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1042 | Latent tree learning models represent sentences by composing their words according to an induced parse tree, all based on a downstream task. These models often outperform baselines which use (externally provided) syntax trees to drive the composition order. This work contributes (a) a new latent tree learning model based on shift-reduce parsing, with competitive downstream performance and non-trivial induced trees, and (b) an analysis of the trees learned by our shift-reduce model and by a chart-based model. |
EMNLP | The Structured Weighted Violations Perceptron Algorithm | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1045 | We present the Structured Weighted Violations Perceptron (SWVP) algorithm, a new structured prediction algorithm that generalizes the Collins Structured Perceptron (CSP). Unlike CSP, the update rule of SWVP explicitly exploits the internal structure of the predicted labels. We prove the convergence of SWVP for linearly separable training sets, provide mistake and generalization bounds, and show that in the general case these bounds are tighter than those of the CSP special case. In synthetic data experiments with data drawn from an HMM, various variants of SWVP substantially outperform its CSP special case. SWVP also provides encouraging initial dependency parsing results. |
EMNLP | How Transferable are Neural Networks in NLP Applications? | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1046 | Transfer learning is aimed to make use of valuable knowledge in a source domain to help model performance in a target domain. It is particularly important to neural networks, which are very likely to be overfitting. In some fields like image processing, many studies have shown the effectiveness of neural network-based transfer learning. For neural NLP, however, existing studies have only casually applied transfer learning, and conclusions are inconsistent. In this paper, we conduct systematic case studies and provide an illuminating picture on the transferability of neural networks in NLP. |
EMNLP | Morphological Priors for Probabilistic Neural Word Embeddings | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1047 | Word embeddings allow natural language processing systems to share statistical information across related words. These embeddings are typically based on distributional statistics, making it difficult for them to generalize to rare or unseen words. We propose to improve word embeddings by incorporating morphological information, capturing shared sub-word features. Unlike previous work that constructs word embeddings directly from morphemes, we combine morphological and distributional information in a unified probabilistic framework, in which the word embedding is a latent variable. The morphological information provides a prior distribution on the latent word embeddings, which in turn condition a likelihood function over an observed corpus. This approach yields improvements on intrinsic word similarity evaluations, and also in the downstream task of part-of-speech tagging. |
EMNLP | Variational Neural Machine Translation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1050 | Models of neural machine translation are often from a discriminative family of encoderdecoders that learn a conditional distribution of a target sentence given a source sentence. In this paper, we propose a variational model to learn this conditional distribution for neural machine translation: a variational encoderdecoder model that can be trained end-to-end. Different from the vanilla encoder-decoder model that generates target translations from hidden representations of source sentences alone, the variational model introduces a continuous latent variable to explicitly model underlying semantics of source sentences and to guide the generation of target translations. In order to perform efficient posterior inference and large-scale training, we build a neural posterior approximator conditioned on both the source and the target sides, and equip it with a reparameterization technique to estimate the variational lower bound. Experiments on both Chinese-English and English- German translation tasks show that the proposed variational neural machine translation achieves significant improvements over the vanilla neural machine translation baselines. |
EMNLP | Towards a Convex HMM Surrogate for Word Alignment | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1051 | This paper presents a novel approach towards Indic handwritten word recognition using zone-wise information. Because of complex nature due to compound characters, modifiers, overlapping and touching, etc., character segmentation and recognition is a tedious job in Indic scripts (e.g. Devanagari, Bangla, Gurumukhi, and other similar scripts). To avoid character segmentation in such scripts, HMM-based sequence modeling has been used earlier in holistic way. This paper proposes an efficient word recognition framework by segmenting the handwritten word images horizontally into three zones (upper, middle and lower) and recognize the corresponding zones. The main aim of this zone segmentation approach is to reduce the number of distinct component classes compared to the total number of classes in Indic scripts. As a result, use of this zone segmentation approach enhances the recognition performance of the system. The components in middle zone where characters are mostly touching are recognized using HMM. After the recognition of middle zone, HMM based Viterbi forced alignment is applied to mark the left and right boundaries of the characters. Next, the residue components, if any, in upper and lower zones in their respective boundary are combined to achieve the final word level recognition. Water reservoir feature has been integrated in this framework to improve the zone segmentation and character alignment defects while segmentation. A novel sliding window-based feature, called Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradient (PHOG) is proposed for middle zone recognition. An exhaustive experiment is performed on two Indic scripts namely, Bangla and Devanagari for the performance evaluation. From the experiment, it has been noted that proposed zone-wise recognition improves accuracy with respect to the traditional way of Indic word recognition. |
EMNLP | Solving Verbal Questions in IQ Test by Knowledge-Powered Word Embedding | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1052 | Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Test is a set of standardized questions designed to evaluate human intelligence. Verbal comprehension questions appear very frequently in IQ tests, which measure human's verbal ability including the understanding of the words with multiple senses, the synonyms and antonyms, and the analogies among words. In this work, we explore whether such tests can be solved automatically by artificial intelligence technologies, especially the deep learning technologies that are recently developed and successfully applied in a number of fields. However, we found that the task was quite challenging, and simply applying existing technologies (e.g., word embedding) could not achieve a good performance, mainly due to the multiple senses of words and the complex relations among words. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework consisting of three components. First, we build a classifier to recognize the specific type of a verbal question (e.g., analogy, classification, synonym, or antonym). Second, we obtain distributed representations of words and relations by leveraging a novel word embedding method that considers the multi-sense nature of words and the relational knowledge among words (or their senses) contained in dictionaries. Third, for each type of questions, we propose a specific solver based on the obtained distributed word representations and relation representations. Experimental results have shown that the proposed framework can not only outperform existing methods for solving verbal comprehension questions but also exceed the average performance of the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers involved in the study. The results indicate that with appropriate uses of the deep learning technologies we might be a further step closer to the human intelligence. |
EMNLP | Long Short-Term Memory-Networks for Machine Reading | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1053 | New long read sequencing technologies, like PacBio SMRT and Oxford NanoPore, can produce sequencing reads up to 50,000 bp long but with an error rate of at least 15%. Reducing the error rate is necessary for subsequent utilisation of the reads in, e.g., de novo genome assembly. The error correction problem has been tackled either by aligning the long reads against each other or by a hybrid approach that uses the more accurate short reads produced by second generation sequencing technologies to correct the long reads. We present an error correction method that uses long reads only. The method consists of two phases: first we use an iterative alignment-free correction method based on de Bruijn graphs with increasing length of k-mers, and second, the corrected reads are further polished using long-distance dependencies that are found using multiple alignments. According to our experiments the proposed method is the most accurate one relying on long reads only for read sets with high coverage. Furthermore, when the coverage of the read set is at least 75x, the throughput of the new method is at least 20% higher. LoRMA is freely available at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/lmsalmel/LoRMA/. |
EMNLP | On Generating Characteristic-rich Question Sets for QA Evaluation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1054 | While question answering (QA) with neural network, i.e. neural QA, has achieved promising results in recent years, lacking of large scale real-word QA dataset is still a challenge for developing and evaluating neural QA system. To alleviate this problem, we propose a large scale human annotated real-world QA dataset WebQA with more than 42k questions and 556k evidences. As existing neural QA methods resolve QA either as sequence generation or classification/ranking problem, they face challenges of expensive softmax computation, unseen answers handling or separate candidate answer generation component. In this work, we cast neural QA as a sequence labeling problem and propose an end-to-end sequence labeling model, which overcomes all the above challenges. Experimental results on WebQA show that our model outperforms the baselines significantly with an F1 score of 74.69% with word-based input, and the performance drops only 3.72 F1 points with more challenging character-based input. |
EMNLP | Learning to Translate for Multilingual Question Answering | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1055 | In multilingual question answering, either the question needs to be translated into the document language, or vice versa. In addition to direction, there are multiple methods to perform the translation, four of which we explore in this paper: word-based, 10-best, context-based, and grammar-based. We build a feature for each combination of translation direction and method, and train a model that learns optimal feature weights. On a large forum dataset consisting of posts in English, Arabic, and Chinese, our novel learn-to-translate approach was more effective than a strong baseline (p<0.05): translating all text into English, then training a classifier based only on English (original or translated) text. |
EMNLP | A Semiparametric Model for Bayesian Reader Identification | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1056 | We study the problem of identifying individuals based on their characteristic gaze patterns during reading of arbitrary text. The motivation for this problem is an unobtrusive biometric setting in which a user is observed during access to a document, but no specific challenge protocol requiring the user's time and attention is carried out. Existing models of individual differences in gaze control during reading are either based on simple aggregate features of eye movements, or rely on parametric density models to describe, for instance, saccade amplitudes or word fixation durations. We develop flexible semiparametric models of eye movements during reading in which densities are inferred under a Gaussian process prior centered at a parametric distribution family that is expected to approximate the true distribution well. An empirical study on reading data from 251 individuals shows significant improvements over the state of the art. |
EMNLP | Inducing Domain-Specific Sentiment Lexicons from Unlabeled Corpora | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1057 | A word's sentiment depends on the domain in which it is used. Computational social science research thus requires sentiment lexicons that are specific to the domains being studied. We combine domain-specific word embeddings with a label propagation framework to induce accurate domain-specific sentiment lexicons using small sets of seed words, achieving state-of-the-art performance competitive with approaches that rely on hand-curated resources. Using our framework we perform two large-scale empirical studies to quantify the extent to which sentiment varies across time and between communities. We induce and release historical sentiment lexicons for 150 years of English and community-specific sentiment lexicons for 250 online communities from the social media forum Reddit. The historical lexicons show that more than 5% of sentiment-bearing (non-neutral) English words completely switched polarity during the last 150 years, and the community-specific lexicons highlight how sentiment varies drastically between different communities. |
EMNLP | Attention-based LSTM for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1058 | With the development of the Internet, natural language processing (NLP), in which sentiment analysis is an important task, became vital in information processing.Sentiment analysis includes aspect sentiment classification. Aspect sentiment can provide complete and in-depth results with increased attention on aspect-level. Different context words in a sentence influence the sentiment polarity of a sentence variably, and polarity varies based on the different aspects in a sentence. Take the sentence, 'I bought a new camera. The picture quality is amazing but the battery life is too short.'as an example. If the aspect is picture quality, then the expected sentiment polarity is 'positive', if the battery life aspect is considered, then the sentiment polarity should be 'negative'; therefore, aspect is important to consider when we explore aspect sentiment in the sentence. Recurrent neural network (RNN) is regarded as a good model to deal with natural language processing, and RNNs has get good performance on aspect sentiment classification including Target-Dependent LSTM (TD-LSTM) ,Target-Connection LSTM (TC-LSTM) (Tang, 2015a, b), AE-LSTM, AT-LSTM, AEAT-LSTM (Wang et al., 2016).There are also extensive literatures on sentiment classification utilizing convolutional neural network, but there is little literature on aspect sentiment classification using convolutional neural network. In our paper, we develop attention-based input layers in which aspect information is considered by input layer. We then incorporate attention-based input layers into convolutional neural network (CNN) to introduce context words information. In our experiment, incorporating aspect information into CNN improves the latter's aspect sentiment classification performance without using syntactic parser or external sentiment lexicons in a benchmark dataset from Twitter but get better performance compared with other models. |
EMNLP | Recursive Neural Conditional Random Fields for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1059 | In aspect-based sentiment analysis, extracting aspect terms along with the opinions being expressed from user-generated content is one of the most important subtasks. Previous studies have shown that exploiting connections between aspect and opinion terms is promising for this task. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model that integrates recursive neural networks and conditional random fields into a unified framework for explicit aspect and opinion terms co-extraction. The proposed model learns high-level discriminative features and double propagate information between aspect and opinion terms, simultaneously. Moreover, it is flexible to incorporate hand-crafted features into the proposed model to further boost its information extraction performance. Experimental results on the SemEval Challenge 2014 dataset show the superiority of our proposed model over several baseline methods as well as the winning systems of the challenge. |
EMNLP | Extracting Aspect Specific Opinion Expressions | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1060 | Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment. So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising or complaining about. |
EMNLP | Emotion Distribution Learning from Texts | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1061 | Emotion can be expressed in many ways that can be seen such as facial expression and gestures, speech and by written text. Emotion Detection in text documents is essentially a content - based classification problem involving concepts from the domains of Natural Language Processing as well as Machine Learning. In this paper emotion recognition based on textual data and the techniques used in emotion detection are discussed. |
EMNLP | Building an Evaluation Scale using Item Response Theory | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1062 | Evaluation of NLP methods requires testing against a previously vetted gold-standard test set and reporting standard metrics (accuracy/precision/recall/F1). The current assumption is that all items in a given test set are equal with regards to difficulty and discriminating power. We propose Item Response Theory (IRT) from psychometrics as an alternative means for gold-standard test-set generation and NLP system evaluation. IRT is able to describe characteristics of individual items - their difficulty and discriminating power - and can account for these characteristics in its estimation of human intelligence or ability for an NLP task. In this paper, we demonstrate IRT by generating a gold-standard test set for Recognizing Textual Entailment. By collecting a large number of human responses and fitting our IRT model, we show that our IRT model compares NLP systems with the performance in a human population and is able to provide more insight into system performance than standard evaluation metrics. We show that a high accuracy score does not always imply a high IRT score, which depends on the item characteristics and the response pattern. |
EMNLP | WordRank: Learning Word Embeddings via Robust Ranking | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1063 | Embedding words in a vector space has gained a lot of attention in recent years. While state-of-the-art methods provide efficient computation of word similarities via a low-dimensional matrix embedding, their motivation is often left unclear. In this paper, we argue that word embedding can be naturally viewed as a ranking problem due to the ranking nature of the evaluation metrics. Then, based on this insight, we propose a novel framework WordRank that efficiently estimates word representations via robust ranking, in which the attention mechanism and robustness to noise are readily achieved via the DCG-like ranking losses. The performance of WordRank is measured in word similarity and word analogy benchmarks, and the results are compared to the state-of-the-art word embedding techniques. Our algorithm is very competitive to the state-of-the- arts on large corpora, while outperforms them by a significant margin when the training set is limited (i.e., sparse and noisy). With 17 million tokens, WordRank performs almost as well as existing methods using 7.2 billion tokens on a popular word similarity benchmark. Our multi-node distributed implementation of WordRank is publicly available for general usage. |
EMNLP | Exploring Semantic Representation in Brain Activity Using Word Embeddings | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1064 | We evaluate 8 different word embedding models on their usefulness for predicting the neural activation patterns associated with concrete nouns. The models we consider include an experiential model, based on crowd-sourced association data, several popular neural and distributional models, and a model that reflects the syntactic context of words (based on dependency parses). Our goal is to assess the cognitive plausibility of these various embedding models, and understand how we can further improve our methods for interpreting brain imaging data. We show that neural word embedding models exhibit superior performance on the tasks we consider, beating experiential word representation model. The syntactically informed model gives the overall best performance when predicting brain activation patterns from word embeddings; whereas the GloVe distributional method gives the overall best performance when predicting in the reverse direction (words vectors from brain images). Interestingly, however, the error patterns of these different models are markedly different. This may support the idea that the brain uses different systems for processing different kinds of words. Moreover, we suggest that taking the relative strengths of different embedding models into account will lead to better models of the brain activity associated with words. |
EMNLP | AMR Parsing with an Incremental Joint Model | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1065 | Abstract meaning representations (AMRs) are broad-coverage sentence-level semantic representations. AMRs represent sentences as rooted labeled directed acyclic graphs. AMR parsing is challenging partly due to the lack of annotated alignments between nodes in the graphs and words in the corresponding sentences. We introduce a neural parser which treats alignments as latent variables within a joint probabilistic model of concepts, relations and alignments. As exact inference requires marginalizing over alignments and is infeasible, we use the variational auto-encoding framework and a continuous relaxation of the discrete alignments. We show that joint modeling is preferable to using a pipeline of align and parse. The parser achieves the best reported results on the standard benchmark (74.4% on LDC2016E25). |
EMNLP | Identifying Dogmatism in Social Media: Signals and Models | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1066 | We explore linguistic and behavioral features of dogmatism in social media and construct statistical models that can identify dogmatic comments. Our model is based on a corpus of Reddit posts, collected across a diverse set of conversational topics and annotated via paid crowdsourcing. We operationalize key aspects of dogmatism described by existing psychology theories (such as over-confidence), finding they have predictive power. We also find evidence for new signals of dogmatism, such as the tendency of dogmatic posts to refrain from signaling cognitive processes. When we use our predictive model to analyze millions of other Reddit posts, we find evidence that suggests dogmatism is a deeper personality trait, present for dogmatic users across many different domains, and that users who engage on dogmatic comments tend to show increases in dogmatic posts themselves. |
EMNLP | Enhanced Personalized Search using Social Data | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1067 | The MBTI personality test and a personal facebook network were used in order to gain some insights on the relationship of social network centrality and path length measures and different personality types. Although the personality classification data were scarce, there were some intuitive quantitative results supporting anecdotal statements, based on empirical observations, about the expected social behavior of personality types. |
EMNLP | Effective Greedy Inference for Graph-based Non-Projective Dependency Parsing | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1068 | Easy-first parsing relies on subtree re-ranking to build the complete parse tree. Whereas the intermediate state of parsing processing are represented by various subtrees, whose internal structural information is the key lead for later parsing action decisions, we explore a better representation for such subtrees. In detail, this work introduces a bottom-up subtree encoder based on the child-sum tree-LSTM. Starting from an easy-first dependency parser without other handcraft features, we show that the effective subtree encoder does promote the parsing process, and is able to make a greedy search easy-first parser achieve promising results on benchmark treebanks compared to state-of-the-art baselines. |
EMNLP | Neural Network for Heterogeneous Annotations | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1070 | Argument mining is a core technology for automating argument search in large document collections. Despite its usefulness for this task, most current approaches to argument mining are designed for use only with specific text types and fall short when applied to heterogeneous texts. In this paper, we propose a new sentential annotation scheme that is reliably applicable by crowd workers to arbitrary Web texts. We source annotations for over 25,000 instances covering eight controversial topics. The results of cross-topic experiments show that our attention-based neural network generalizes best to unseen topics and outperforms vanilla BiLSTM models by 6% in accuracy and 11% in F-score. |
EMNLP | LAMB: A Good Shepherd of Morphologically Rich Languages | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1071 | We provide a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between pre-trained word embeddings, character models and POS tags in a transition-based dependency parser. While previous studies have shown POS information to be less important in the presence of character models, we show that in fact there are complex interactions between all three techniques. In isolation each produces large improvements over a baseline system using randomly initialised word embeddings only, but combining them quickly leads to diminishing returns. We categorise words by frequency, POS tag and language in order to systematically investigate how each of the techniques affects parsing quality. For many word categories, applying any two of the three techniques is almost as good as the full combined system. Character models tend to be more important for low-frequency open-class words, especially in morphologically rich languages, while POS tags can help disambiguate high-frequency function words. We also show that large character embedding sizes help even for languages with small character sets, especially in morphologically rich languages. |
EMNLP | Unsupervised Neural Dependency Parsing | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1073 | Unsupervised learning of syntactic structure is typically performed using generative models with discrete latent variables and multinomial parameters. In most cases, these models have not leveraged continuous word representations. In this work, we propose a novel generative model that jointly learns discrete syntactic structure and continuous word representations in an unsupervised fashion by cascading an invertible neural network with a structured generative prior. We show that the invertibility condition allows for efficient exact inference and marginal likelihood computation in our model so long as the prior is well-behaved. In experiments we instantiate our approach with both Markov and tree-structured priors, evaluating on two tasks: part-of-speech (POS) induction, and unsupervised dependency parsing without gold POS annotation. On the Penn Treebank, our Markov-structured model surpasses state-of-the-art results on POS induction. Similarly, we find that our tree-structured model achieves state-of-the-art performance on unsupervised dependency parsing for the difficult training condition where neither gold POS annotation nor punctuation-based constraints are available. |
EMNLP | Generating Coherent Summaries of Scientific Articles Using Coherence Patterns | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1074 | Coherence plays a critical role in producing a high-quality summary from a document. In recent years, neural extractive summarization is becoming increasingly attractive. However, most of them ignore the coherence of summaries when extracting sentences. As an effort towards extracting coherent summaries, we propose a neural coherence model to capture the cross-sentence semantic and syntactic coherence patterns. The proposed neural coherence model obviates the need for feature engineering and can be trained in an end-to-end fashion using unlabeled data. Empirical results show that the proposed neural coherence model can efficiently capture the cross-sentence coherence patterns. Using the combined output of the neural coherence model and ROUGE package as the reward, we design a reinforcement learning method to train a proposed neural extractive summarizer which is named Reinforced Neural Extractive Summarization (RNES) model. The RNES model learns to optimize coherence and informative importance of the summary simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed RNES outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in term of ROUGE on CNN/Daily Mail dataset. The qualitative evaluation indicates that summaries produced by RNES are more coherent and readable. |
EMNLP | News Stream Summarization using Burst Information Networks | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1075 | Graph streams, which refer to the graph with edges being updated sequentially in a form of a stream, have wide applications such as cyber security, social networks and transportation networks. This paper studies the problem of summarizing graph streams. Specifically, given a graph stream G, directed or undirected, the objective is to summarize G as S with much smaller (sublinear) space, linear construction time and constant maintenance cost for each edge update, such that S allows many queries over G to be approximately conducted efficiently. Due to the sheer volume and highly dynamic nature of graph streams, summarizing them remains a notoriously hard, if not impossible, problem. The widely used practice of summarizing data streams is to treat each element independently by e.g., hash- or sampling-based method, without keeping track of the connections between elements in a data stream, which gives these summaries limited power in supporting complicated queries over graph streams. This paper discusses a fundamentally different philosophy for summarizing graph streams. We present gLava, a probabilistic graph model that, instead of treating an edge (a stream element) as the operating unit, uses the finer grained node in an element. This will naturally form a new graph sketch where edges capture the connections inside elements, and nodes maintain relationships across elements. We discuss a wide range of supported graph queries and establish theoretical error bounds for basic queries. |
EMNLP | Rationale-Augmented Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1076 | This article provides an interesting exploration of character-level convolutional neural network solving Chinese corpus text classification problem. We constructed a large-scale Chinese language dataset, and the result shows that character-level convolutional neural network works better on Chinese corpus than its corresponding pinyin format dataset. This is the first time that character-level convolutional neural network applied to text classification problem. |
EMNLP | Speculation and Negation Scope Detection via Convolutional Neural Networks | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1078 | Negation scope has been annotated in several English and Chinese corpora, and highly accurate models for this task in these languages have been learned from these annotations. Unfortunately, annotations are not available in other languages. Could a model that detects negation scope be applied to a language that it hasn't been trained on? We develop neural models that learn from cross-lingual word embeddings or universal dependencies in English, and test them on Chinese, showing that they work surprisingly well. We find that modelling syntax is helpful even in monolingual settings and that cross-lingual word embeddings help relatively little, and we analyse cases that are still difficult for this task. |
EMNLP | Analyzing Linguistic Knowledge in Sequential Model of Sentence | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1079 | Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in spoken dialogue system, which can be divided into two phases: (1) sentence planning: deciding the overall sentence structure, (2) surface realization: determining specific word forms and flattening the sentence structure into a string. With the rise of deep learning, most modern NLG models are based on a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, which basically contains an encoder-decoder structure; these NLG models generate sentences from scratch by jointly optimizing sentence planning and surface realization. However, such simple encoder-decoder architecture usually fail to generate complex and long sentences, because the decoder has difficulty learning all grammar and diction knowledge well. This paper introduces an NLG model with a hierarchical attentional decoder, where the hierarchy focuses on leveraging linguistic knowledge in a specific order. The experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the traditional seq2seq model with a smaller model size, and the design of the hierarchical attentional decoder can be applied to various NLG systems. Furthermore, different generation strategies based on linguistic patterns are investigated and analyzed in order to guide future NLG research work. |
EMNLP | Keyphrase Extraction Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks on Twitter | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1080 | Keyphrases provide a simple way of describing a document, giving the reader some clues about its contents. Keyphrases can be useful in a various applications such as retrieval engines, browsing interfaces, thesaurus construction, text mining etc.. There are also other tasks for which keyphrases are useful, as we discuss in this paper. This paper describes a neural network based approach to keyphrase extraction from scientific articles. Our results show that the proposed method performs better than some state-of-the art keyphrase extraction approaches. |
EMNLP | Solving and Generating Chinese Character Riddles | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1081 | Handwriting of Chinese has long been an important skill in East Asia. However, automatic generation of handwritten Chinese characters poses a great challenge due to the large number of characters. Various machine learning techniques have been used to recognize Chinese characters, but few works have studied the handwritten Chinese character generation problem, especially with unpaired training data. In this work, we formulate the Chinese handwritten character generation as a problem that learns a mapping from an existing printed font to a personalized handwritten style. We further propose DenseNet CycleGAN to generate Chinese handwritten characters. Our method is applied not only to commonly used Chinese characters but also to calligraphy work with aesthetic values. Furthermore, we propose content accuracy and style discrepancy as the evaluation metrics to assess the quality of the handwritten characters generated. We then use our proposed metrics to evaluate the generated characters from CASIA dataset as well as our newly introduced Lanting calligraphy dataset. |
EMNLP | Structured prediction models for RNN based sequence labeling in clinical text | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1082 | Sequence labeling is a widely used method for named entity recognition and information extraction from unstructured natural language data. In clinical domain one major application of sequence labeling involves extraction of medical entities such as medication, indication, and side-effects from Electronic Health Record narratives. Sequence labeling in this domain, presents its own set of challenges and objectives. In this work we experimented with various CRF based structured learning models with Recurrent Neural Networks. We extend the previously studied LSTM-CRF models with explicit modeling of pairwise potentials. We also propose an approximate version of skip-chain CRF inference with RNN potentials. We use these methodologies for structured prediction in order to improve the exact phrase detection of various medical entities. |
EMNLP | Learning to Represent Review with Tensor Decomposition for Spam Detection | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1083 | With the rapid adoption of Internet as an easy way to communicate, the amount of unsolicited e-mails, known as spam e-mails, has been growing rapidly. The major problem of spam e-mails is the loss of productivity and a drain on IT resources. Today, we receive spam more rapidly than the legitimate e-mails. Initially, spam e-mails contained only textual messages which were easily detected by the text-based spam filters. To evade such detection, spammers came up with a new sophisticated technique called image spam. Image spam consists in embedding the advertisement text in images rather than in the body of the e-mail, yet the image contents are not detected by most spam filters. In this paper, we examine the motivations and the challenges in image spam filtering research, and we review the recent trends in combating image spam e-mails. The review indicates that spamming is a business model and spammers are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to adapt to all challenges, and hence, defeating the conventional spam filtering technologies. Therefore, image spam detection techniques should be scalable and adaptable to meet the future tactics of the spammers. |
EMNLP | Stance Detection with Bidirectional Conditional Encoding | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1084 | Stance detection is the task of classifying the attitude expressed in a text towards a target such as Hillary Clinton to be "positive", negative" or "neutral". Previous work has assumed that either the target is mentioned in the text or that training data for every target is given. This paper considers the more challenging version of this task, where targets are not always mentioned and no training data is available for the test targets. We experiment with conditional LSTM encoding, which builds a representation of the tweet that is dependent on the target, and demonstrate that it outperforms encoding the tweet and the target independently. Performance is improved further when the conditional model is augmented with bidirectional encoding. We evaluate our approach on the SemEval 2016 Task 6 Twitter Stance Detection corpus achieving performance second best only to a system trained on semi-automatically labelled tweets for the test target. When such weak supervision is added, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results. |
EMNLP | Modeling Skip-Grams for Event Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1085 | We propose a multi-label multi-task framework based on a convolutional recurrent neural network to unify detection of isolated and overlapping audio events. The framework leverages the power of convolutional recurrent neural network architectures; convolutional layers learn effective features over which higher recurrent layers perform sequential modelling. Furthermore, the output layer is designed to handle arbitrary degrees of event overlap. At each time step in the recurrent output sequence, an output triple is dedicated to each event category of interest to jointly model event occurrence and temporal boundaries. That is, the network jointly determines whether an event of this category occurs, and when it occurs, by estimating onset and offset positions at each recurrent time step. We then introduce three sequential losses for network training: multi-label classification loss, distance estimation loss, and confidence loss. We demonstrate good generalization on two datasets: ITC-Irst for isolated audio event detection, and TUT-SED-Synthetic-2016 for overlapping audio event detection. |
EMNLP | Porting an Open Information Extraction System from English to German | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1086 | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely used in recent years with significant improvements for many language pairs. Although state-of-the-art NMT systems are generating progressively better translations, idiom translation remains one of the open challenges in this field. Idioms, a category of multiword expressions, are an interesting language phenomenon where the overall meaning of the expression cannot be composed from the meanings of its parts. A first important challenge is the lack of dedicated data sets for learning and evaluating idiom translation. In this paper we address this problem by creating the first large-scale data set for idiom translation. Our data set is automatically extracted from a widely used German-English translation corpus and includes, for each language direction, a targeted evaluation set where all sentences contain idioms and a regular training corpus where sentences including idioms are marked. We release this data set and use it to perform preliminary NMT experiments as the first step towards better idiom translation. |
EMNLP | Named Entity Recognition for Novel Types by Transfer Learning | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1087 | In named entity recognition, we often don't have a large in-domain training corpus or a knowledge base with adequate coverage to train a model directly. In this paper, we propose a method where, given training data in a related domain with similar (but not identical) named entity (NE) types and a small amount of in-domain training data, we use transfer learning to learn a domain-specific NE model. That is, the novelty in the task setup is that we assume not just domain mismatch, but also label mismatch. |
EMNLP | Extracting Subevents via an Effective Two-phase Approach | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1088 | Multi-particle azimuthal cumulants, often used to study collective flow in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, have recently been applied in small collision systems such as $pp$ and $p$+A to extract the second-order azimuthal harmonic flow $v_2$. Recent observation of four-, six- and eight-particle cumulants with "correct sign" $c_2\{4\}<0, c_2\{6\}>0, c_2\{8\}<0$ and approximate equality of the inferred single-particle harmonic flow, $v_2\{4\}\approx v_2\{6\}\approx v_2\{8\}$, have been used as strong evidence for a collective emission of all soft particles produced in the collisions. We show that these relations in principle could be violated due to the non-Gaussianity in the event-by-event fluctuation of flow and/or non-flow. Furthermore, we show, using $pp$ events generated with the PYTHIA model, that $c_2\{2k\}$ obtained with standard cumulant method are dominated by non-flow from dijets. An alternative cumulant method based on two or more $\eta$-separated subevents is proposed to suppress the dijet contribution. The new method is shown to be able to recover a flow signal as low as 4\% imposed on the PYTHIA events, independently of how the event activity class is defined. Therefore the subevent cumulant method offers a more robust way of studying collectivity based on the existence of long-range azimuthal correlations between multiple distinct $\eta$ ranges. The prospect of using the subevent cumulants to study collective flow in A+A collisions, in particular its longitudinal dynamics, is discussed. |
EMNLP | Gaussian Visual-Linguistic Embedding for Zero-Shot Recognition | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1089 | Embeddings in machine learning are low-dimensional representations of complex input patterns, with the property that simple geometric operations like Euclidean distances and dot products can be used for classification and comparison tasks. The proposed meta-embeddings are special embeddings that live in more general inner product spaces. They are designed to propagate uncertainty to the final output in speaker recognition and similar applications. The familiar Gaussian PLDA model (GPLDA) can be re-formulated as an extractor for Gaussian meta-embeddings (GMEs), such that likelihood ratio scores are given by Hilbert space inner products between Gaussian likelihood functions. GMEs extracted by the GPLDA model have fixed precisions and do not propagate uncertainty. We show that a generalization to heavy-tailed PLDA gives GMEs with variable precisions, which do propagate uncertainty. Experiments on NIST SRE 2010 and 2016 show that the proposed method applied to i-vectors without length normalization is up to 20% more accurate than GPLDA applied to length-normalized ivectors. |
EMNLP | Question Relevance in VQA: Identifying Non-Visual And False-Premise Questions | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1090 | Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task of answering natural-language questions about images. We introduce the novel problem of determining the relevance of questions to images in VQA. Current VQA models do not reason about whether a question is even related to the given image (e.g. What is the capital of Argentina?) or if it requires information from external resources to answer correctly. This can break the continuity of a dialogue in human-machine interaction. Our approaches for determining relevance are composed of two stages. Given an image and a question, (1) we first determine whether the question is visual or not, (2) if visual, we determine whether the question is relevant to the given image or not. Our approaches, based on LSTM-RNNs, VQA model uncertainty, and caption-question similarity, are able to outperform strong baselines on both relevance tasks. We also present human studies showing that VQA models augmented with such question relevance reasoning are perceived as more intelligent, reasonable, and human-like. |
EMNLP | Sort Story: Sorting Jumbled Images and Captions into Stories | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1091 | Temporal common sense has applications in AI tasks such as QA, multi-document summarization, and human-AI communication. We propose the task of sequencing -- given a jumbled set of aligned image-caption pairs that belong to a story, the task is to sort them such that the output sequence forms a coherent story. We present multiple approaches, via unary (position) and pairwise (order) predictions, and their ensemble-based combinations, achieving strong results on this task. We use both text-based and image-based features, which depict complementary improvements. Using qualitative examples, we demonstrate that our models have learnt interesting aspects of temporal common sense. |
EMNLP | Recurrent Residual Learning for Sequence Classification | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1093 | In this paper, we propose a recurrent neural network (RNN) with residual attention (RRA) to learn long-range dependencies from sequential data. We propose to add residual connections across timesteps to RNN, which explicitly enhances the interaction between current state and hidden states that are several timesteps apart. This also allows training errors to be directly back-propagated through residual connections and effectively alleviates gradient vanishing problem. We further reformulate an attention mechanism over residual connections. An attention gate is defined to summarize the individual contribution from multiple previous hidden states in computing the current state. We evaluate RRA on three tasks: the adding problem, pixel-by-pixel MNIST classification and sentiment analysis on the IMDB dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that RRA yields better performance, faster convergence and more stable training compared to a standard LSTM network. Furthermore, RRA shows highly competitive performance to the state-of-the-art methods. |
EMNLP | Richer Interpolative Smoothing Based on Modified Kneser-Ney Language Modeling | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1094 | We introduce a novel approach for building language models based on a systematic, recursive exploration of skip n-gram models which are interpolated using modified Kneser-Ney smoothing. Our approach generalizes language models as it contains the classical interpolation with lower order models as a special case. In this paper we motivate, formalize and present our approach. In an extensive empirical experiment over English text corpora we demonstrate that our generalized language models lead to a substantial reduction of perplexity between 3.1% and 12.7% in comparison to traditional language models using modified Kneser-Ney smoothing. Furthermore, we investigate the behaviour over three other languages and a domain specific corpus where we observed consistent improvements. Finally, we also show that the strength of our approach lies in its ability to cope in particular with sparse training data. Using a very small training data set of only 736 KB text we yield improvements of even 25.7% reduction of perplexity. |
EMNLP | A General Regularization Framework for Domain Adaptation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1095 | We propose a general framework for unsupervised domain adaptation, which allows deep neural networks trained on a source domain to be tested on a different target domain without requiring any training annotations in the target domain. This is achieved by adding extra networks and losses that help regularize the features extracted by the backbone encoder network. To this end we propose the novel use of the recently proposed unpaired image-toimage translation framework to constrain the features extracted by the encoder network. Specifically, we require that the features extracted are able to reconstruct the images in both domains. In addition we require that the distribution of features extracted from images in the two domains are indistinguishable. Many recent works can be seen as specific cases of our general framework. We apply our method for domain adaptation between MNIST, USPS, and SVHN datasets, and Amazon, Webcam and DSLR Office datasets in classification tasks, and also between GTA5 and Cityscapes datasets for a segmentation task. We demonstrate state of the art performance on each of these datasets. |
EMNLP | Coverage Embedding Models for Neural Machine Translation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1096 | In this paper, we enhance the attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) by adding explicit coverage embedding models to alleviate issues of repeating and dropping translations in NMT. For each source word, our model starts with a full coverage embedding vector to track the coverage status, and then keeps updating it with neural networks as the translation goes. Experiments on the large-scale Chinese-to-English task show that our enhanced model improves the translation quality significantly on various test sets over the strong large vocabulary NMT system. |
EMNLP | Neural Morphological Analysis: Encoding-Decoding Canonical Segments | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1097 | Automatic segmentation of retinal blood vessels from fundus images plays an important role in the computer aided diagnosis of retinal diseases. The task of blood vessel segmentation is challenging due to the extreme variations in morphology of the vessels against noisy background. In this paper, we formulate the segmentation task as a multi-label inference task and utilize the implicit advantages of the combination of convolutional neural networks and structured prediction. Our proposed convolutional neural network based model achieves strong performance and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for automatic retinal blood vessel segmentation on DRIVE dataset with 95.33% accuracy and 0.974 AUC score. |
EMNLP | The Effects of Data Size and Frequency Range on Distributional Semantic Models | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1099 | This paper investigates the effects of data size and frequency range on distributional semantic models. We compare the performance of a number of representative models for several test settings over data of varying sizes, and over test items of various frequency. Our results show that neural network-based models underperform when the data is small, and that the most reliable model over data of varying sizes and frequency ranges is the inverted factorized model. |
EMNLP | Multi-Granularity Chinese Word Embedding | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1100 | Intent classification has been widely researched on English data with deep learning approaches that are based on neural networks and word embeddings. The challenge for Chinese intent classification stems from the fact that, unlike English where most words are made up of 26 phonologic alphabet letters, Chinese is logographic, where a Chinese character is a more basic semantic unit that can be informative and its meaning does not vary too much in contexts. Chinese word embeddings alone can be inadequate for representing words, and pre-trained embeddings can suffer from not aligning well with the task at hand. To account for the inadequacy and leverage Chinese character information, we propose a low-effort and generic way to dynamically integrate character embedding based feature maps with word embedding based inputs, whose resulting word-character embeddings are stacked with a contextual information extraction module to further incorporate context information for predictions. On top of the proposed model, we employ an ensemble method to combine single models and obtain the final result. The approach is data-independent without relying on external sources like pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed model outperforms baseline models and existing methods. |
EMNLP | Numerically Grounded Language Models for Semantic Error Correction | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1101 | Semantic error detection and correction is an important task for applications such as fact checking, speech-to-text or grammatical error correction. Current approaches generally focus on relatively shallow semantics and do not account for numeric quantities. Our approach uses language models grounded in numbers within the text. Such groundings are easily achieved for recurrent neural language model architectures, which can be further conditioned on incomplete background knowledge bases. Our evaluation on clinical reports shows that numerical grounding improves perplexity by 33% and F1 for semantic error correction by 5 points when compared to ungrounded approaches. Conditioning on a knowledge base yields further improvements. |
EMNLP | A Hierarchical Model of Reviews for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1103 | Text summarization and sentiment classification both aim to capture the main ideas of the text but at different levels. Text summarization is to describe the text within a few sentences, while sentiment classification can be regarded as a special type of summarization which "summarizes" the text into a even more abstract fashion, i.e., a sentiment class. Based on this idea, we propose a hierarchical end-to-end model for joint learning of text summarization and sentiment classification, where the sentiment classification label is treated as the further "summarization" of the text summarization output. Hence, the sentiment classification layer is put upon the text summarization layer, and a hierarchical structure is derived. Experimental results on Amazon online reviews datasets show that our model achieves better performance than the strong baseline systems on both abstractive summarization and sentiment classification. |
EMNLP | Are Word Embedding-based Features Useful for Sarcasm Detection? | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1104 | Sarcasm is considered one of the most difficult problem in sentiment analysis. In our ob-servation on Indonesian social media, for cer-tain topics, people tend to criticize something using sarcasm. Here, we proposed two additional features to detect sarcasm after a common sentiment analysis is conducted. The features are the negativity information and the number of interjection words. We also employed translated SentiWordNet in the sentiment classification. All the classifications were conducted with machine learning algorithms. The experimental results showed that the additional features are quite effective in the sarcasm detection. |
EMNLP | Weakly Supervised Tweet Stance Classification by Relational Bootstrapping | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1105 | We can often detect from a person's utterances whether he/she is in favor of or against a given target entity -- their stance towards the target. However, a person may express the same stance towards a target by using negative or positive language. Here for the first time we present a dataset of tweet--target pairs annotated for both stance and sentiment. The targets may or may not be referred to in the tweets, and they may or may not be the target of opinion in the tweets. Partitions of this dataset were used as training and test sets in a SemEval-2016 shared task competition. We propose a simple stance detection system that outperforms submissions from all 19 teams that participated in the shared task. Additionally, access to both stance and sentiment annotations allows us to explore several research questions. We show that while knowing the sentiment expressed by a tweet is beneficial for stance classification, it alone is not sufficient. Finally, we use additional unlabeled data through distant supervision techniques and word embeddings to further improve stance classification. |
EMNLP | The Gun Violence Database: A new task and data set for NLP | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1106 | We describe the Gun Violence Database (GVDB), a large and growing database of gun violence incidents in the United States. The GVDB is built from the detailed information found in local news reports about gun violence, and is constructed via a large-scale crowdsourced annotation effort through our web site, http://gun-violence.org/. We argue that centralized and publicly available data about gun violence can facilitate scientific, fact-based discussion about a topic that is often dominated by politics and emotion. We describe our efforts to automate the construction of the database using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technologies, eventually enabling a fully-automated, highly-scalable resource for research on this important public health problem. |
EMNLP | Fluency detection on communication networks | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1107 | Although existing image caption models can produce promising results using recurrent neural networks (RNNs), it is difficult to guarantee that an object we care about is contained in generated descriptions, for example in the case that the object is inconspicuous in image. Problems become even harder when these objects did not appear in training stage. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for generating image captions with guiding objects (CGO). The CGO constrains the model to involve a human-concerned object, when the object is in the image, in the generated description while maintaining fluency. Instead of generating the sequence from left to right, we start description with a selected object and generate other parts of the sequence based on this object. To achieve this, we design a novel framework combining two LSTMs in opposite directions. We demonstrate the characteristics of our method on MSCOCO to generate descriptions for each detected object in images. With CGO, we can extend the ability of description to the objects being neglected in image caption labels and provide a set of more comprehensive and diverse descriptions for an image. CGO shows obvious advantages when applied to the task of describing novel objects. We show experiment results on both MSCOCO and ImageNet datasets. Evaluations show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models in the task with average F1 75.8, leading to better descriptions in terms of both content accuracy and fluency. |
EMNLP | A Neural Network Architecture for Multilingual Punctuation Generation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1111 | Punctuation is a strong indicator of syntactic structure, and parsers trained on text with punctuation often rely heavily on this signal. Punctuation is a diversion, however, since human language processing does not rely on punctuation to the same extent, and in informal texts, we therefore often leave out punctuation. We also use punctuation ungrammatically for emphatic or creative purposes, or simply by mistake. We show that (a) dependency parsers are sensitive to both absence of punctuation and to alternative uses; (b) neural parsers tend to be more sensitive than vintage parsers; (c) training neural parsers without punctuation outperforms all out-of-the-box parsers across all scenarios where punctuation departs from standard punctuation. Our main experiments are on synthetically corrupted data to study the effect of punctuation in isolation and avoid potential confounds, but we also show effects on out-of-domain data. |
EMNLP | Neural Headline Generation on Abstract Meaning Representation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1112 | Recent neural headline generation models have shown great results, but are generally trained on very large datasets. We focus our efforts on improving headline quality on smaller datasets by the means of pretraining. We propose new methods that enable pre-training all the parameters of the model and utilize all available text, resulting in improvements by up to 32.4% relative in perplexity and 2.84 points in ROUGE. |
EMNLP | Robust Gram Embeddings | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1113 | Any-gram kernels are a flexible and efficient way to employ bag-of-n-gram features when learning from textual data. They are also compatible with the use of word embeddings so that word similarities can be accounted for. While the original any-gram kernels are implemented on top of tree kernels, we propose a new approach which is independent of tree kernels and is more efficient. We also propose a more effective way to make use of word embeddings than the original any-gram formulation. When applied to the task of sentiment classification, our new formulation achieves significantly better performance. |
EMNLP | SimpleScience: Lexical Simplification of Scientific Terminology | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1114 | This paper describes and evaluates the Metalinguistic Operation Processor (MOP) system for automatic compilation of metalinguistic information from technical and scientific documents. This system is designed to extract non-standard terminological resources that we have called Metalinguistic Information Databases (or MIDs), in order to help update changing glossaries, knowledge bases and ontologies, as well as to reflect the metastable dynamics of special-domain knowledge. |
EMNLP | Automatic Features for Essay Scoring – An Empirical Study | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1115 | Automatic essay scoring (AES) refers to the process of scoring free text responses to given prompts, considering human grader scores as the gold standard. Writing such essays is an essential component of many language and aptitude exams. Hence, AES became an active and established area of research, and there are many proprietary systems used in real life applications today. However, not much is known about which specific linguistic features are useful for prediction and how much of this is consistent across datasets. This article addresses that by exploring the role of various linguistic features in automatic essay scoring using two publicly available datasets of non-native English essays written in test taking scenarios. The linguistic properties are modeled by encoding lexical, syntactic, discourse and error types of learner language in the feature set. Predictive models are then developed using these features on both datasets and the most predictive features are compared. While the results show that the feature set used results in good predictive models with both datasets, the question "what are the most predictive features?" has a different answer for each dataset. |
EMNLP | Semantic Parsing with Semi-Supervised Sequential Autoencoders | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1116 | We present a novel semi-supervised approach for sequence transduction and apply it to semantic parsing. The unsupervised component is based on a generative model in which latent sentences generate the unpaired logical forms. We apply this method to a number of semantic parsing tasks focusing on domains with limited access to labelled training data and extend those datasets with synthetically generated logical forms. |
EMNLP | Equation Parsing : Mapping Sentences to Grounded Equations | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1117 | Identifying mathematical relations expressed in text is essential to understanding a broad range of natural language text from election reports, to financial news, to sport commentaries to mathematical word problems. This paper focuses on identifying and understanding mathematical relations described within a single sentence. We introduce the problem of Equation Parsing -- given a sentence, identify noun phrases which represent variables, and generate the mathematical equation expressing the relation described in the sentence. We introduce the notion of projective equation parsing and provide an efficient algorithm to parse text to projective equations. Our system makes use of a high precision lexicon of mathematical expressions and a pipeline of structured predictors, and generates correct equations in $70\%$ of the cases. In $60\%$ of the time, it also identifies the correct noun phrase $\rightarrow$ variables mapping, significantly outperforming baselines. We also release a new annotated dataset for task evaluation. |
EMNLP | Automatic Extraction of Implicit Interpretations from Modal Constructions | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1118 | Propositional term modal logic is interpreted over Kripke structures with unboundedly many accessibility relations and hence the syntax admits variables indexing modalities and quantification over them. This logic is undecidable, and we consider a variable-free propositional bi-modal logic with implicit quantification. Thus $[\forall] \alpha$ asserts necessity over all accessibility relations and $[\exists]\alpha$ is classical necessity over some accessibility relation. The logic is associated with a natural bisimulation relation over models and we show that the logic is exactly the bisimulation invariant fragment of a two sorted first order logic. The logic is easily seen to be decidable and admits a complete axiomatization of valid formulas. Moreover the decision procedure extends naturally to the `bundled fragment' of full term modal logic. |
EMNLP | Understanding Negation in Positive Terms Using Syntactic Dependencies | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1119 | This paper describes the resource- and system-building efforts of an eight-week Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically-Informed Machine Translation (SIMT). We describe a new modality/negation (MN) annotation scheme, the creation of a (publicly available) MN lexicon, and two automated MN taggers that we built using the annotation scheme and lexicon. Our annotation scheme isolates three components of modality and negation: a trigger (a word that conveys modality or negation), a target (an action associated with modality or negation) and a holder (an experiencer of modality). We describe how our MN lexicon was semi-automatically produced and we demonstrate that a structure-based MN tagger results in precision around 86% (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. We apply our MN annotation scheme to statistical machine translation using a syntactic framework that supports the inclusion of semantic annotations. Syntactic tags enriched with semantic annotations are assigned to parse trees in the target-language training texts through a process of tree grafting. While the focus of our work is modality and negation, the tree grafting procedure is general and supports other types of semantic information. We exploit this capability by including named entities, produced by a pre-existing tagger, in addition to the MN elements produced by the taggers described in this paper. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English test set. This finding supports the hypothesis that both syntactic and semantic information can improve translation quality. |
EMNLP | Detecting and Characterizing Events | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1122 | This paper shows that characterizing co-occurrence between events is an important but non-trivial and neglected aspect of discovering potential causal relationships in multimedia event streams. First an introduction to the notion of event co-occurrence and its relation to co-occurrence pattern detection is given. Then a finite state automaton extended with a time model and event parameterization is introduced to convert high level co-occurrence pattern definition to its corresponding pattern matching automaton. Finally a processing algorithm is applied to count the occurrence frequency of a collection of patterns with only one pass through input event streams. The method proposed in this paper can be used for detecting co-occurrences between both events of one event stream (Auto co-occurrence), and events from multiple event streams (Cross co-occurrence). Some fundamental results concerning the characterization of event co-occurrence are presented in form of a visual co- occurrence matrix. Reusable causality rules can be extracted easily from co-occurrence matrix and fed into various analysis tools, such as recommendation systems and complex event processing systems for further analysis. |
EMNLP | Convolutional Neural Network Language Models | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1123 | We introduce a class of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that utilize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as convolution filters. A convolution filter is typically implemented as a linear affine transformation followed by a non-linear function, which fails to account for language compositionality. As a result, it limits the use of high-order filters that are often warranted for natural language processing tasks. In this work, we model convolution filters with RNNs that naturally capture compositionality and long-term dependencies in language. We show that simple CNN architectures equipped with recurrent neural filters (RNFs) achieve results that are on par with the best published ones on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and two answer sentence selection datasets. |
EMNLP | Generalizing and Hybridizing Count-based and Neural Language Models | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1124 | Language models (LMs) are statistical models that calculate probabilities over sequences of words or other discrete symbols. Currently two major paradigms for language modeling exist: count-based n-gram models, which have advantages of scalability and test-time speed, and neural LMs, which often achieve superior modeling performance. We demonstrate how both varieties of models can be unified in a single modeling framework that defines a set of probability distributions over the vocabulary of words, and then dynamically calculates mixture weights over these distributions. This formulation allows us to create novel hybrid models that combine the desirable features of count-based and neural LMs, and experiments demonstrate the advantages of these approaches. |
EMNLP | Reasoning about Pragmatics with Neural Listeners and Speakers | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1125 | We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a simple feature-driven architecture (here a pair of neural "listener" and "speaker" models) to ground language in the world. Like inference-driven approaches to pragmatics, our model actively reasons about listener behavior when selecting utterances. For training, our approach requires only ordinary captions, annotated _without_ demonstration of the pragmatic behavior the model ultimately exhibits. In human evaluations on a referring expression game, our approach succeeds 81% of the time, compared to a 69% success rate using existing techniques. |
EMNLP | Generating Topical Poetry | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1126 | With the recent advances of neural models and natural language processing, automatic generation of classical Chinese poetry has drawn significant attention due to its artistic and cultural value. Previous works mainly focus on generating poetry given keywords or other text information, while visual inspirations for poetry have been rarely explored. Generating poetry from images is much more challenging than generating poetry from text, since images contain very rich visual information which cannot be described completely using several keywords, and a good poem should convey the image accurately. In this paper, we propose a memory based neural model which exploits images to generate poems. Specifically, an Encoder-Decoder model with a topic memory network is proposed to generate classical Chinese poetry from images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work attempting to generate classical Chinese poetry from images with neural networks. A comprehensive experimental investigation with both human evaluation and quantitative analysis demonstrates that the proposed model can generate poems which convey images accurately. |
EMNLP | Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1127 | Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted, predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of dialogue to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to model future reward in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates dialogues between two virtual agents, using policy gradient methods to reward sequences that display three useful conversational properties: informativity (non-repetitive turns), coherence, and ease of answering (related to forward-looking function). We evaluate our model on diversity, length as well as with human judges, showing that the proposed algorithm generates more interactive responses and manages to foster a more sustained conversation in dialogue simulation. This work marks a first step towards learning a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues. |
EMNLP | Antecedent Selection for Sluicing: Structure and Content | 2016 | http://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1131 | Deep neural network models for Chinese zero pronoun resolution learn semantic information for zero pronoun and candidate antecedents, but tend to be short-sighted---they often make local decisions. They typically predict coreference chains between the zero pronoun and one single candidate antecedent one link at a time, while overlooking their long-term influence on future decisions. Ideally, modeling useful information of preceding potential antecedents is critical when later predicting zero pronoun-candidate antecedent pairs. In this study, we show how to integrate local and global decision-making by exploiting deep reinforcement learning models. With the help of the reinforcement learning agent, our model learns the policy of selecting antecedents in a sequential manner, where useful information provided by earlier predicted antecedents could be utilized for making later coreference decisions. Experimental results on OntoNotes 5.0 dataset show that our technique surpasses the state-of-the-art models. |
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