4,325 research outputs found
Large-scale Hierarchical Alignment for Data-driven Text Rewriting
We propose a simple unsupervised method for extracting pseudo-parallel
monolingual sentence pairs from comparable corpora representative of two
different text styles, such as news articles and scientific papers. Our
approach does not require a seed parallel corpus, but instead relies solely on
hierarchical search over pre-trained embeddings of documents and sentences. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through automatic and extrinsic
evaluation on text simplification from the normal to the Simple Wikipedia. We
show that pseudo-parallel sentences extracted with our method not only
supplement existing parallel data, but can even lead to competitive performance
on their own.Comment: RANLP 201
Revisiting Recurrent Networks for Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings
We consider the problem of learning general-purpose, paraphrastic sentence
embeddings, revisiting the setting of Wieting et al. (2016b). While they found
LSTM recurrent networks to underperform word averaging, we present several
developments that together produce the opposite conclusion. These include
training on sentence pairs rather than phrase pairs, averaging states to
represent sequences, and regularizing aggressively. These improve LSTMs in both
transfer learning and supervised settings. We also introduce a new recurrent
architecture, the Gated Recurrent Averaging Network, that is inspired by
averaging and LSTMs while outperforming them both. We analyze our learned
models, finding evidence of preferences for particular parts of speech and
dependency relations.Comment: Published as a long paper at ACL 201
Generating Natural Language from Linked Data:Unsupervised template extraction
We propose an architecture for generating natural language from Linked Data that automatically learns sentence templates and statistical document planning from parallel RDF datasets and text. We have built a proof-of-concept system (LOD-DEF) trained on un-annotated text from the Simple English Wikipedia and RDF triples from DBpedia, focusing exclusively on factual, non-temporal information. The goal of the system is to generate short descriptions, equivalent to Wikipedia stubs, of entities found in Linked Datasets. We have evaluated the LOD-DEF system against a simple generate-from-triples baseline and human-generated output. In evaluation by humans, LOD-DEF significantly outperforms the baseline on two of three measures: non-redundancy and structure and coherence.
Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification
Progress in Sentence Simplification has been hindered by the lack of
supervised data, particularly in languages other than English. Previous work
has aligned sentences from original and simplified corpora such as English
Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia, but this limits corpus size, domain,
and language. In this work, we propose using unsupervised mining techniques to
automatically create training corpora for simplification in multiple languages
from raw Common Crawl web data. When coupled with a controllable generation
mechanism that can flexibly adjust attributes such as length and lexical
complexity, these mined paraphrase corpora can be used to train simplification
systems in any language. We further incorporate multilingual unsupervised
pretraining methods to create even stronger models and show that by training on
mined data rather than supervised corpora, we outperform the previous best
results. We evaluate our approach on English, French, and Spanish
simplification benchmarks and reach state-of-the-art performance with a totally
unsupervised approach. We will release our models and code to mine the data in
any language included in Common Crawl
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
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