Integrating Weakly Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation into Neural Machine Translation

This paper demonstrates that word sense disambiguation (WSD) can improve neural machine translation (NMT) by widening the source context considered when modeling the senses of potentially ambiguous words. We first introduce three adaptive clustering algorithms for WSD, based on k-means, Chinese restaurant processes, and random walks, which are then applied to large word contexts represented in a low-rank space and evaluated on SemEval shared-task data. We then learn word vectors jointly with sense vectors defined by our best WSD method, within a state-of-the-art NMT system. We show that the concatenation of these vectors, and the use of a sense selection mechanism based on the weighted average of sense vectors, outperforms several baselines including sense-aware ones. This is demonstrated by translation on five language pairs. The improvements are above one BLEU point over strong NMT baselines, +4% accuracy over all ambiguous nouns and verbs, or +20% when scored manually over several challenging words.Comment: To appear in TAC

Non-Compositional Term Dependence for Information Retrieval

Modelling term dependence in IR aims to identify co-occurring terms that are too heavily dependent on each other to be treated as a bag of words, and to adapt the indexing and ranking accordingly. Dependent terms are predominantly identified using lexical frequency statistics, assuming that (a) if terms co-occur often enough in some corpus, they are semantically dependent; (b) the more often they co-occur, the more semantically dependent they are. This assumption is not always correct: the frequency of co-occurring terms can be separate from the strength of their semantic dependence. E.g. "red tape" might be overall less frequent than "tape measure" in some corpus, but this does not mean that "red"+"tape" are less dependent than "tape"+"measure". This is especially the case for non-compositional phrases, i.e. phrases whose meaning cannot be composed from the individual meanings of their terms (such as the phrase "red tape" meaning bureaucracy). Motivated by this lack of distinction between the frequency and strength of term dependence in IR, we present a principled approach for handling term dependence in queries, using both lexical frequency and semantic evidence. We focus on non-compositional phrases, extending a recent unsupervised model for their detection [21] to IR. Our approach, integrated into ranking using Markov Random Fields [31], yields effectiveness gains over competitive TREC baselines, showing that there is still room for improvement in the very well-studied area of term dependence in IR

Noise or music? Investigating the usefulness of normalisation for robust sentiment analysis on social media data

In the past decade, sentiment analysis research has thrived, especially on social media. While this data genre is suitable to extract opinions and sentiment, it is known to be noisy. Complex normalisation methods have been developed to transform noisy text into its standard form, but their effect on tasks like sentiment analysis remains underinvestigated. Sentiment analysis approaches mostly include spell checking or rule-based normalisation as preprocess- ing and rarely investigate its impact on the task performance. We present an optimised sentiment classifier and investigate to what extent its performance can be enhanced by integrating SMT-based normalisation as preprocessing. Experiments on a test set comprising a variety of user-generated content genres revealed that normalisation improves sentiment classification performance on tweets and blog posts, showing the model’s ability to generalise to other data genres

Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing

Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that suffer from the lack of human labeled resources. We present an extensive literature survey on the use of typological information in the development of NLP techniques. Our survey demonstrates that to date, the use of information in existing typological databases has resulted in consistent but modest improvements in system performance. We show that this is due to both intrinsic limitations of databases (in terms of coverage and feature granularity) and under-employment of the typological features included in them. We advocate for a new approach that adapts the broad and discrete nature of typological categories to the contextual and continuous nature of machine learning algorithms used in contemporary NLP. In particular, we suggest that such approach could be facilitated by recent developments in data-driven induction of typological knowledge

Injecting Inductive Biases into Distributed Representations of Text

Distributed real-valued vector representations of text (a.k.a. embeddings), learned by neural networks, encode various (linguistic) knowledge. To encode this knowledge into the embeddings the common approach is to train a large neural network on large corpora. There is, however, a growing concern regarding the sustainability and rationality of pursuing this approach further. We depart from the mainstream trend and instead, to incorporate the desired properties into embeddings, use inductive biases. First, we use Knowledge Graphs (KGs) as a data-based inductive bias to derive the semantic representation of words and sentences. The explicit semantics that is encoded in a structure of a KG allows us to acquire the semantic representations without the need of employing a large amount of text. We use graph embedding techniques to learn the semantic representation of words and the sequence-to-sequence model to learn the semantic representation of sentences. We demonstrate the efficacy of the inductive bias for learning embeddings for rare words and the ability of sentence embeddings to encode topological dependencies that exist between entities of a KG. Then, we explore the amount of information and sparsity as two key (data-agnostic) inductive biases to regulate the utilisation of the representation space. We impose these properties with Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). First, we regulate the amount of information encoded in a sentence embedding via constraint optimisation of a VAE objective function. We show that increasing amount of information allows to better discriminate sentences. Afterwards, to impose distributed sparsity we design a state-of-the-art Hierarchical Sparse VAE with a flexible posterior which captures the statistical characteristics of text effectively. While sparsity, in general, has desired computational and statistical representational properties, it is known to compensate task performance. We illustrate that with distributed sparsity, task performance could be maintained or even improved. The findings of the thesis advocate further development of inductive biases that could mitigate the dependence of representation learning quality on large data and model sizes