4,455 research outputs found
Acquiring Word-Meaning Mappings for Natural Language Interfaces
This paper focuses on a system, WOLFIE (WOrd Learning From Interpreted
Examples), that acquires a semantic lexicon from a corpus of sentences paired
with semantic representations. The lexicon learned consists of phrases paired
with meaning representations. WOLFIE is part of an integrated system that
learns to transform sentences into representations such as logical database
queries. Experimental results are presented demonstrating WOLFIE's ability to
learn useful lexicons for a database interface in four different natural
languages. The usefulness of the lexicons learned by WOLFIE are compared to
those acquired by a similar system, with results favorable to WOLFIE. A second
set of experiments demonstrates WOLFIE's ability to scale to larger and more
difficult, albeit artificially generated, corpora. In natural language
acquisition, it is difficult to gather the annotated data needed for supervised
learning; however, unannotated data is fairly plentiful. Active learning
methods attempt to select for annotation and training only the most informative
examples, and therefore are potentially very useful in natural language
applications. However, most results to date for active learning have only
considered standard classification tasks. To reduce annotation effort while
maintaining accuracy, we apply active learning to semantic lexicons. We show
that active learning can significantly reduce the number of annotated examples
required to achieve a given level of performance
A Continuously Growing Dataset of Sentential Paraphrases
A major challenge in paraphrase research is the lack of parallel corpora. In
this paper, we present a new method to collect large-scale sentential
paraphrases from Twitter by linking tweets through shared URLs. The main
advantage of our method is its simplicity, as it gets rid of the classifier or
human in the loop needed to select data before annotation and subsequent
application of paraphrase identification algorithms in the previous work. We
present the largest human-labeled paraphrase corpus to date of 51,524 sentence
pairs and the first cross-domain benchmarking for automatic paraphrase
identification. In addition, we show that more than 30,000 new sentential
paraphrases can be easily and continuously captured every month at ~70%
precision, and demonstrate their utility for downstream NLP tasks through
phrasal paraphrase extraction. We make our code and data freely available.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to EMNLP 201
Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations
Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically
equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence
pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be
trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our
semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface
features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for
neural machine translation.Comment: Accepted as a full paper to NAACL 201
Comparing knowledge sources for nominal anaphora resolution
We compare two ways of obtaining lexical knowledge for antecedent selection in other-anaphora
and definite noun phrase coreference. Specifically, we compare an algorithm that relies on links
encoded in the manually created lexical hierarchy WordNet and an algorithm that mines corpora
by means of shallow lexico-semantic patterns. As corpora we use the British National
Corpus (BNC), as well as the Web, which has not been previously used for this task. Our
results show that (a) the knowledge encoded in WordNet is often insufficient, especially for
anaphor-antecedent relations that exploit subjective or context-dependent knowledge; (b) for
other-anaphora, the Web-based method outperforms the WordNet-based method; (c) for definite
NP coreference, the Web-based method yields results comparable to those obtained using
WordNet over the whole dataset and outperforms the WordNet-based method on subsets of the
dataset; (d) in both case studies, the BNC-based method is worse than the other methods because
of data sparseness. Thus, in our studies, the Web-based method alleviated the lexical knowledge
gap often encountered in anaphora resolution, and handled examples with context-dependent relations
between anaphor and antecedent. Because it is inexpensive and needs no hand-modelling
of lexical knowledge, it is a promising knowledge source to integrate in anaphora resolution systems
Ontology Enrichment from Free-text Clinical Documents: A Comparison of Alternative Approaches
While the biomedical informatics community widely acknowledges the utility of domain ontologies, there remain many barriers to their effective use. One important requirement of domain ontologies is that they achieve a high degree of coverage of the domain concepts and concept relationships. However, the development of these ontologies is typically a manual, time-consuming, and often error-prone process. Limited resources result in missing concepts and relationships, as well as difficulty in updating the ontology as domain knowledge changes. Methodologies developed in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Extraction (IE), Information Retrieval (IR), and Machine Learning (ML) provide techniques for automating the enrichment of ontology from free-text documents. In this dissertation, I extended these methodologies into biomedical ontology development. First, I reviewed existing methodologies and systems developed in the fields of NLP, IR, and IE, and discussed how existing methods can benefit the development of biomedical ontologies. This previously unconducted review was published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Second, I compared the effectiveness of three methods from two different approaches, the symbolic (the Hearst method) and the statistical (the Church and Lin methods), using clinical free-text documents. Third, I developed a methodological framework for Ontology Learning (OL) evaluation and comparison. This framework permits evaluation of the two types of OL approaches that include three OL methods. The significance of this work is as follows: 1) The results from the comparative study showed the potential of these methods for biomedical ontology enrichment. For the two targeted domains (NCIT and RadLex), the Hearst method revealed an average of 21% and 11% new concept acceptance rates, respectively. The Lin method produced a 74% acceptance rate for NCIT; the Church method, 53%. As a result of this study (published in the Journal of Methods of Information in Medicine), many suggested candidates have been incorporated into the NCIT; 2) The evaluation framework is flexible and general enough that it can analyze the performance of ontology enrichment methods for many domains, thus expediting the process of automation and minimizing the likelihood that key concepts and relationships would be missed as domain knowledge evolves
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework
Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies
heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call
centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer
support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses
great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from
native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve
the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system,
we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we
assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking
annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any
form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher,
which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and
transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We
specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus
and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies
accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the
teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and
achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc
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