25 research outputs found
Semantic Role Labeling as Dependency Parsing: Exploring Latent Tree Structures Inside Arguments
Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a fundamental yet challenging task in the NLP
community. Recent works of SRL mainly fall into two lines: 1) BIO-based; 2)
span-based. Despite ubiquity, they share some intrinsic drawbacks of not
considering internal argument structures, potentially hindering the model's
expressiveness. The key challenge is arguments are flat structures, and there
are no determined subtree realizations for words inside arguments. To remedy
this, in this paper, we propose to regard flat argument spans as latent
subtrees, accordingly reducing SRL to a tree parsing task. In particular, we
equip our formulation with a novel span-constrained TreeCRF to make tree
structures span-aware and further extend it to the second-order case. We
conduct extensive experiments on CoNLL05 and CoNLL12 benchmarks. Results reveal
that our methods perform favorably better than all previous syntax-agnostic
works, achieving new state-of-the-art under both end-to-end and w/ gold
predicates settings.Comment: COLING 202
Exploiting word embeddings for modeling bilexical relations
There has been an exponential surge of text data in the recent years. As a consequence, unsupervised methods that make use of this data have been steadily growing in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Word embeddings are low-dimensional vectors obtained using unsupervised techniques on the large unlabelled corpora, where words from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers. Word embeddings aim to capture syntactic and semantic properties of words.
In NLP, many tasks involve computing the compatibility between lexical items under some linguistic relation. We call this type of relation a bilexical relation. Our thesis defines statistical models for bilexical relations
that centrally make use of word embeddings. Our principle aim is that the word embeddings will favor generalization to words not seen during the training of the model.
The thesis is structured in four parts. In the first part of this thesis, we present a bilinear model over word embeddings that leverages a small supervised dataset for a binary linguistic relation. Our learning algorithm exploits low-rank bilinear forms and induces a low-dimensional embedding tailored for a target linguistic relation. This results in compressed task-specific embeddings.
In the second part of our thesis, we extend our bilinear model to a ternary
setting and propose a framework for resolving prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity using word embeddings. Our models perform competitively with state-of-the-art models. In addition, our method obtains significant improvements on out-of-domain tests by simply using word-embeddings induced from source and target domains.
In the third part of this thesis, we further extend the bilinear models for expanding vocabulary in the context of statistical phrase-based machine translation. Our model obtains a probabilistic list of possible translations of target language words, given a word in the source language. We do this by projecting pre-trained embeddings into a common subspace using a log-bilinear model. We empirically notice a significant improvement on an out-of-domain test set.
In the final part of our thesis, we propose a non-linear model that maps initial word embeddings to task-tuned word embeddings, in the context of a neural network dependency parser. We demonstrate its use for improved dependency parsing, especially for sentences with unseen words. We also show downstream improvements on a sentiment analysis task.En els darrers anys hi ha hagut un sorgiment notable de dades en format textual. Conseqüentment, en el camp del Processament del Llenguatge Natural (NLP, de l'anglès "Natural Language Processing") s'han desenvolupat mètodes no supervistats que fan ús d'aquestes dades. Els anomenats "word embeddings", o embeddings de paraules, són vectors de dimensionalitat baixa que s'obtenen mitjançant tècniques no supervisades aplicades a corpus textuals de grans volums. Com a resultat, cada paraula del diccionari es correspon amb un vector de nombres reals, el propòsit del qual és capturar propietats sintàctiques i semàntiques de la paraula corresponent. Moltes tasques de NLP involucren calcular la compatibilitat entre elements lèxics en l'àmbit d'una relació lingüística. D'aquest tipus de relació en diem relació bilèxica. Aquesta tesi proposa models estadístics per a relacions bilèxiques que fan ús central d'embeddings de paraules, amb l'objectiu de millorar la generalització del model lingüístic a paraules no vistes durant l'entrenament. La tesi s'estructura en quatre parts. A la primera part presentem un model bilineal sobre embeddings de paraules que explota un conjunt petit de dades anotades sobre una relaxió bilèxica. L'algorisme d'aprenentatge treballa amb formes bilineals de poc rang, i indueix embeddings de poca dimensionalitat que estan especialitzats per la relació bilèxica per la qual s'han entrenat. Com a resultat, obtenim embeddings de paraules que corresponen a compressions d'embeddings per a una relació determinada. A la segona part de la tesi proposem una extensió del model bilineal a trilineal, i amb això proposem un nou model per a resoldre ambigüitats de sintagmes preposicionals que usa només embeddings de paraules. En una sèrie d'avaluacións, els nostres models funcionen de manera similar a l'estat de l'art. A més, el nostre mètode obté millores significatives en avaluacions en textos de dominis diferents al d'entrenament, simplement usant embeddings induïts amb textos dels dominis d'entrenament i d'avaluació. A la tercera part d'aquesta tesi proposem una altra extensió dels models bilineals per ampliar la cobertura lèxica en el context de models estadístics de traducció automàtica. El nostre model probabilístic obté, donada una paraula en la llengua d'origen, una llista de possibles traduccions en la llengua de destí. Fem això mitjançant una projecció d'embeddings pre-entrenats a un sub-espai comú, usant un model log-bilineal. Empíricament, observem una millora significativa en avaluacions en dominis diferents al d'entrenament. Finalment, a la quarta part de la tesi proposem un model no lineal que indueix una correspondència entre embeddings inicials i embeddings especialitzats, en el context de tasques d'anàlisi sintàctica de dependències amb models neuronals. Mostrem que aquest mètode millora l'analisi de dependències, especialment en oracions amb paraules no vistes durant l'entrenament. També mostrem millores en un tasca d'anàlisi de sentiment
Empirical studies on word representations
One of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing is representing words with mathematical objects (such as vectors). The word representations, which are most often estimated from data, allow capturing the meaning of words. They enable comparing words according to their semantic similarity, and have been shown to work extremely well when included in complex real-world applications. A large part of our work deals with ways of estimating word representations directly from large quantities of text. Our methods exploit the idea that words which occur in similar contexts have a similar meaning. How we define the context is an important focus of our thesis. The context can consist of a number of words to the left and to the right of the word in question, but, as we show, obtaining context words via syntactic links (such as the link between the verb and its subject) often works better. We furthermore investigate word representations that accurately capture multiple meanings of a single word. We show that translation of a word in context contains information that can be used to disambiguate the meaning of that word
Logistic Normal Priors for Unsupervised Probabilistic Grammar Induction
We explore a new Bayesian model for probabilistic grammars, a family of distributions over discrete structures that includes hidden Markov models and probabilistic context-free grammars. Our model extends the correlated topic model framework to probabilistic grammars, exploiting the logistic normal distribution as a prior over the grammar parameters. We derive a variational EM algorithm for that model, and then experiment with the task of unsupervised grammar induction for natural language dependency parsing. We show that our model achieves superior results over previous models that use different priors.
Inducing Tree-Substitution Grammars
Inducing a grammar from text has proven to be a notoriously challenging learning task despite decades of research. The primary reason for its difficulty is that in order to induce plausible grammars, the underlying model must be capable of representing the intricacies of language while also ensuring that it can be readily learned from data. The majority of existing work on grammar induction has favoured model simplicity (and thus learnability) over representational capacity by using context free grammars and first order dependency grammars, which are not sufficiently expressive to model many common linguistic constructions. We propose a novel compromise by inferring a probabilistic tree substitution grammar, a formalism which allows for arbitrarily large tree fragments and thereby better represent complex linguistic structures. To limit the model's complexity we employ a Bayesian non-parametric prior which biases the model towards a sparse grammar with shallow productions. We demonstrate the model's efficacy on supervised phrase-structure parsing, where we induce a latent segmentation of the training treebank, and on unsupervised dependency grammar induction. In both cases the model uncovers interesting latent linguistic structures while producing competitive results. © 2010 Evangelos Theodorou, Jonas Buchli and Stefan Schaal
Backpropagating through Structured Argmax using a SPIGOT
We introduce the structured projection of intermediate gradients optimization
technique (SPIGOT), a new method for backpropagating through neural networks
that include hard-decision structured predictions (e.g., parsing) in
intermediate layers. SPIGOT requires no marginal inference, unlike structured
attention networks (Kim et al., 2017) and some reinforcement learning-inspired
solutions (Yogatama et al., 2017). Like so-called straight-through estimators
(Hinton, 2012), SPIGOT defines gradient-like quantities associated with
intermediate nondifferentiable operations, allowing backpropagation before and
after them; SPIGOT's proxy aims to ensure that, after a parameter update, the
intermediate structure will remain well-formed.
We experiment on two structured NLP pipelines: syntactic-then-semantic
dependency parsing, and semantic parsing followed by sentiment classification.
We show that training with SPIGOT leads to a larger improvement on the
downstream task than a modularly-trained pipeline, the straight-through
estimator, and structured attention, reaching a new state of the art on
semantic dependency parsing.Comment: ACL 201