In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.

We consider the problem of accurately recovering a matrix B of size M ×M , which represents a probability distribution overM outcomes, given access to an observed matrix of “counts” generated by taking independent samples from the distribution B. How can structural properties of the underlying matrix B be leveraged to yield computationally efficient and information theoretically optimal reconstruction algorithms? When can accurate reconstruction be accomplished in the sparse data regime? This basic problem lies at the core of a number of questions that are currently being considered by different communities, including community detection in sparse random graphs, learning structured models such as topic models or hidden Markov models, and the efforts from the natural language processing community to compute “word embeddings”. Many aspects of this problem—both in terms of learning and property testing/estimation and on both the algorithmic and information theoretic sides—remain open. Our results apply to the setting where B has a particular rank 2 structure. For this setting, we propose an efficient (and practically viable) algorithm that accurately recovers the underlying M × M matrix using Θ(M) samples. This result easily translates to Θ(M) sample algorithms for learning topic models with two topics over dictionaries of size M , and learning hidden Markov Models with two hidden states and observation distributions supported on M elements. These linear sample complexities are optimal, up to constant factors, in an extremely strong sense: even testing basic properties of the underlying matrix (such as whether it has rank 1 or 2) requires Ω(M) samples. Furthermore, we provide an even stronger lower bound where distinguishing whether a sequence of observations were drawn from the uniform distribution over M observations versus being generated by an HMM with two hidden states requires Ω(M) observations. This precludes sublinear-sample hypothesis tests for basic properties, such as identity or uniformity, as well as sublinear sample estimators for quantities such as the entropy rate of HMMs. This impossibility of sublinear-sample property testing in these settings is intriguing and underscores the significant differences between these structured settings and the standard setting of drawing i.i.d samples from an unstructured distribution of support size M . ∗MIT. Email: qqh@mit.edu. †University of Washington. Email: sham@cs.washington.edu ‡Stanford University. Email: kweihao@gmail.com §Stanford University. Email: valiant@stanford.edu. Gregory and Weihao’s contributions were supported by NSF CAREER Award CCF-1351108, and a research grant from the Okawa Foundation. ar X iv :1 60 2. 06 58 6v 1 [ cs .L G ] 2 1 Fe b 20 16
Recovering Structured Probability Matrices

We present paired learning and inference algorithms for significantly reducing computation and increasing speed of the vector dot products in the classifiers that are at the heart of many NLP components. This is accomplished by partitioning the features into a sequence of templates which are ordered such that high confidence can often be reached using only a small fraction of all features. Parameter estimation is arranged to maximize accuracy and early confidence in this sequence. Our approach is simpler and better suited to NLP than other related cascade methods. We present experiments in left-to-right part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and transition-based dependency parsing. On the typical benchmarking datasets we can preserve POS tagging accuracy above 97% and parsing LAS above 88.5% both with over a five-fold reduction in run-time, and NER F1 above 88 with more than 2x increase in speed.
Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction

In the context of natural language processing, representation learning has emerged as a newly active research subject because of its excellent performance in many applications. Learning representations of words is a pioneering study in this school of research. However, paragraph (or sentence and document) embedding learning is more suitable/reasonable for some tasks, such as sentiment classification and document summarization. Nevertheless, as far as we are aware, there is relatively less work focusing on the development of unsupervised paragraph embedding methods. Classic paragraph embedding methods infer the representation of a given paragraph by considering all of the words occurring in the paragraph. Consequently, those stop or function words that occur frequently may mislead the embedding learning process to produce a misty paragraph representation. Motivated by these observations, our major contributions in this paper are twofold. First, we propose a novel unsupervised paragraph embedding method, named the essence vector (EV) model, which aims at not only distilling the most representative information from a paragraph but also excluding the general background information to produce a more informative low-dimensional vector representation for the paragraph. We evaluate the proposed EV model on benchmark sentiment classification and multi-document summarization tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed embedding method. Second, in view of the increasing importance of spoken content processing, an extension of the EV model, named the denoising essence vector (D-EV) model, is proposed. The D-EV model not only inherits the advantages of the EV model but also can infer a more robust representation for a given spoken paragraph against imperfect speech recognition. The utility of the D-EV model is evaluated on a spoken document summarization task, confirming the practical merits of the proposed embedding method in relation to several wellpracticed and state-of-the-art summarization methods.

Learning to Distill: The Essence Vector Modeling Framework