Latent Tree Learning with Differentiable Parsers: Shift-Reduce Parsing and Chart Parsing

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.Comment: ACL 2018 workshop on Relevance of Linguistic Structure in Neural Architectures for NL

Inconstancy of finite and infinite sequences

In order to study large variations or fluctuations of finite or infinite sequences (time series), we bring to light an 1868 paper of Crofton and the (Cauchy-)Crofton theorem. After surveying occurrences of this result in the literature, we introduce the inconstancy of a sequence and we show why it seems more pertinent than other criteria for measuring its variational complexity. We also compute the inconstancy of classical binary sequences including some automatic sequences and Sturmian sequences.Comment: Accepted by Theoretical Computer Scienc

Diagonals of rational functions, pullbacked 2F1 hypergeometric functions and modular forms (unabrigded version)

We recall that diagonals of rational functions naturally occur in lattice statistical mechanics and enumerative combinatorics. We find that a seven-parameter rational function of three variables with a numerator equal to one (reciprocal of a polynomial of degree two at most) can be expressed as a pullbacked 2F1 hypergeometric function. This result can be seen as the simplest non-trivial family of diagonals of rational functions. We focus on some subcases such that the diagonals of the corresponding rational functions can be written as a pullbacked 2F1 hypergeometric function with two possible rational functions pullbacks algebraically related by modular equations, thus showing explicitely that the diagonal is a modular form. We then generalise this result to eight, nine and ten parameters families adding some selected cubic terms at the denominator of the rational function defining the diagonal. We finally show that each of these previous rational functions yields an infinite number of rational functions whose diagonals are also pullbacked 2F1 hypergeometric functions and modular forms.Comment: 39 page

Lattice Green Functions: the seven-dimensional face-centred cubic lattice

We present a recursive method to generate the expansion of the lattice Green function of the d-dimensional face-centred cubic (fcc) lattice. We produce a long series for d =7. Then we show (and recall) that, in order to obtain the linear differential equation annihilating such a long power series, the most economic way amounts to producing the non-minimal order differential equations. We use the method to obtain the minimal order linear differential equation of the lattice Green function of the seven-dimensional face-centred cubic (fcc) lattice. We give some properties of this irreducible order-eleven differential equation. We show that the differential Galois group of the corresponding operator is included in $SO(11, \mathbb{C})$. This order-eleven operator is non-trivially homomorphic to its adjoint, and we give a "decomposition" of this order-eleven operator in terms of four order-one self-adjoint operators and one order-seven self-adjoint operator. Furthermore, using the Landau conditions on the integral, we forward the regular singularities of the differential equation of the d-dimensional lattice and show that they are all rational numbers. We evaluate the return probability in random walks in the seven-dimensional fcc lattice. We show that the return probability in the d-dimensional fcc lattice decreases as $d^{-2}$ as the dimension d goes to infinity.Comment: 19 page