1,907 research outputs found
Explicit diversification of event aspects for temporal summarization
During major events, such as emergencies and disasters, a large volume of information is reported on newswire and social media platforms. Temporal summarization (TS) approaches are used to automatically produce concise overviews of such events by extracting text snippets from related articles over time. Current TS approaches rely on a combination of event relevance and textual novelty for snippet selection. However, for events that span multiple days, textual novelty is often a poor criterion for selecting snippets, since many snippets are textually unique but are semantically redundant or non-informative. In this article, we propose a framework for the diversification of snippets using explicit event aspects, building on recent works in search result diversification. In particular, we first propose two techniques to identify explicit aspects that a user might want to see covered in a summary for different types of event. We then extend a state-of-the-art explicit diversification framework to maximize the coverage of these aspects when selecting summary snippets for unseen events. Through experimentation over the TREC TS 2013, 2014, and 2015 datasets, we show that explicit diversification for temporal summarization significantly outperforms classical novelty-based diversification, as the use of explicit event aspects reduces the amount of redundant and off-topic snippets returned, while also increasing summary timeliness
Learning Analogies and Semantic Relations
We present an algorithm for learning from unlabeled text, based on the
Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval, that can solve verbal
analogy questions of the kind found in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
A verbal analogy has the form A:B::C:D, meaning "A is to B as C is to D";
for example, mason:stone::carpenter:wood. SAT analogy questions provide
a word pair, A:B, and the problem is to select the most analogous word
pair, C:D, from a set of five choices. The VSM algorithm correctly
answers 47% of a collection of 374 college-level analogy questions
(random guessing would yield 20% correct). We motivate this research by
relating it to work in cognitive science and linguistics, and by applying
it to a difficult problem in natural language processing, determining
semantic relations in noun-modifier pairs. The problem is to classify a
noun-modifier pair, such as "laser printer", according to the semantic
relation between the noun (printer) and the modifier (laser). We use a
supervised nearest-neighbour algorithm that assigns a class to a given
noun-modifier pair by finding the most analogous noun-modifier pair in
the training data. With 30 classes of semantic relations, on a collection
of 600 labeled noun-modifier pairs, the learning algorithm attains an F
value of 26.5% (random guessing: 3.3%). With 5 classes of semantic
relations, the F value is 43.2% (random: 20%). The performance is
state-of-the-art for these challenging problems
Similarity of Semantic Relations
There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is
correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity,
which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high
degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs
of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their
relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason:stone is analogous
to the pair carpenter:wood. This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA),
a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many
areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation,
and information retrieval. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information
retrieval has been adapted to measuring relational similarity,
achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice
word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is
characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus.
LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically
from the corpus, (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency
data, and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore variations of the
word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the
average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying semantic relations, LRA
achieves similar gains over the VSM
Different Shades of Green: Estimating the Green Bond Premium using Natural Language Processing
We document the existence of a premium in the green bond market based on the greenness of green bonds. Using BERT, a natural language processing method for textual analysis, we develop a novel measure for bonds’ greenness and document that a 10 percent increase in the bond’s greenness corresponds to a decrease in annualized yield by between 4.86 to 8.71 basis points. In addition to greener bonds enjoying higher premiums, we find evidence that issuing a green bond has positive spillover effects on the pricing of subsequent conventional bonds’ issuance. Overall, our findings are consistent with firms relying on 'green' debt instruments to lower capital costs and raise cheaper financing.
Keywords: Green bonds, BERT model, Sustainable Finance, Bond premiu
Correlating neural and symbolic representations of language
Analysis methods which enable us to better understand the representations and
functioning of neural models of language are increasingly needed as deep
learning becomes the dominant approach in NLP. Here we present two methods
based on Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and Tree Kernels (TK) which
allow us to directly quantify how strongly the information encoded in neural
activation patterns corresponds to information represented by symbolic
structures such as syntax trees. We first validate our methods on the case of a
simple synthetic language for arithmetic expressions with clearly defined
syntax and semantics, and show that they exhibit the expected pattern of
results. We then apply our methods to correlate neural representations of
English sentences with their constituency parse trees.Comment: ACL 201
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