Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences

Natural language sentence matching is a fundamental technology for a variety of tasks. Previous approaches either match sentences from a single direction or only apply single granular (word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence) matching. In this work, we propose a bilateral multi-perspective matching (BiMPM) model under the "matching-aggregation" framework. Given two sentences $P$ and $Q$, our model first encodes them with a BiLSTM encoder. Next, we match the two encoded sentences in two directions $P \rightarrow Q$ and $P \leftarrow Q$. In each matching direction, each time step of one sentence is matched against all time-steps of the other sentence from multiple perspectives. Then, another BiLSTM layer is utilized to aggregate the matching results into a fix-length matching vector. Finally, based on the matching vector, the decision is made through a fully connected layer. We evaluate our model on three tasks: paraphrase identification, natural language inference and answer sentence selection. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all tasks.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of IJCAI 201

Multi-turn Inference Matching Network for Natural Language Inference

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a fundamental and challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Most existing methods only apply one-pass inference process on a mixed matching feature, which is a concatenation of different matching features between a premise and a hypothesis. In this paper, we propose a new model called Multi-turn Inference Matching Network (MIMN) to perform multi-turn inference on different matching features. In each turn, the model focuses on one particular matching feature instead of the mixed matching feature. To enhance the interaction between different matching features, a memory component is employed to store the history inference information. The inference of each turn is performed on the current matching feature and the memory. We conduct experiments on three different NLI datasets. The experimental results show that our model outperforms or achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all the three datasets

Entity Synonym Discovery via Multipiece Bilateral Context Matching

Being able to automatically discover synonymous entities in an open-world setting benefits various tasks such as entity disambiguation or knowledge graph canonicalization. Existing works either only utilize entity features, or rely on structured annotations from a single piece of context where the entity is mentioned. To leverage diverse contexts where entities are mentioned, in this paper, we generalize the distributional hypothesis to a multi-context setting and propose a synonym discovery framework that detects entity synonyms from free-text corpora with considerations on effectiveness and robustness. As one of the key components in synonym discovery, we introduce a neural network model SYNONYMNET to determine whether or not two given entities are synonym with each other. Instead of using entities features, SYNONYMNET makes use of multiple pieces of contexts in which the entity is mentioned, and compares the context-level similarity via a bilateral matching schema. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is able to detect synonym sets that are not observed during training on both generic and domain-specific datasets: Wiki+Freebase, PubMed+UMLS, and MedBook+MKG, with up to 4.16% improvement in terms of Area Under the Curve and 3.19% in terms of Mean Average Precision compared to the best baseline method.Comment: In IJCAI 2020 as a long paper. Code and data are available at https://github.com/czhang99/SynonymNe

Neural Paraphrase Identification of Questions with Noisy Pretraining

We present a solution to the problem of paraphrase identification of questions. We focus on a recent dataset of question pairs annotated with binary paraphrase labels and show that a variant of the decomposable attention model (Parikh et al., 2016) results in accurate performance on this task, while being far simpler than many competing neural architectures. Furthermore, when the model is pretrained on a noisy dataset of automatically collected question paraphrases, it obtains the best reported performance on the dataset