Structured Prediction of Sequences and Trees using Infinite Contexts

Linguistic structures exhibit a rich array of global phenomena, however commonly used Markov models are unable to adequately describe these phenomena due to their strong locality assumptions. We propose a novel hierarchical model for structured prediction over sequences and trees which exploits global context by conditioning each generation decision on an unbounded context of prior decisions. This builds on the success of Markov models but without imposing a fixed bound in order to better represent global phenomena. To facilitate learning of this large and unbounded model, we use a hierarchical Pitman-Yor process prior which provides a recursive form of smoothing. We propose prediction algorithms based on A* and Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. Empirical results demonstrate the potential of our model compared to baseline finite-context Markov models on part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing

Spectral Analysis of Kernel and Neural Embeddings: Optimization and Generalization

We extend the recent results of (Arora et al. 2019). by spectral analysis of the representations corresponding to the kernel and neural embeddings. They showed that in a simple single-layer network, the alignment of the labels to the eigenvectors of the corresponding Gram matrix determines both the convergence of the optimization during training as well as the generalization properties. We generalize their result to the kernel and neural representations and show these extensions improve both optimization and generalization of the basic setup studied in (Arora et al. 2019). In particular, we first extend the setup with the Gaussian kernel and the approximations by random Fourier features as well as with the embeddings produced by two-layer networks trained on different tasks. We then study the use of more sophisticated kernels and embeddings, those designed optimally for deep neural networks and those developed for the classification task of interest given the data and the training labels, independent of any specific classification model

Active classification with comparison queries

We study an extension of active learning in which the learning algorithm may ask the annotator to compare the distances of two examples from the boundary of their label-class. For example, in a recommendation system application (say for restaurants), the annotator may be asked whether she liked or disliked a specific restaurant (a label query); or which one of two restaurants did she like more (a comparison query). We focus on the class of half spaces, and show that under natural assumptions, such as large margin or bounded bit-description of the input examples, it is possible to reveal all the labels of a sample of size $n$ using approximately $O(\log n)$ queries. This implies an exponential improvement over classical active learning, where only label queries are allowed. We complement these results by showing that if any of these assumptions is removed then, in the worst case, $\Omega(n)$ queries are required. Our results follow from a new general framework of active learning with additional queries. We identify a combinatorial dimension, called the \emph{inference dimension}, that captures the query complexity when each additional query is determined by $O(1)$ examples (such as comparison queries, each of which is determined by the two compared examples). Our results for half spaces follow by bounding the inference dimension in the cases discussed above.Comment: 23 pages (not including references), 1 figure. The new version contains a minor fix in the proof of Lemma 4.