Exploiting word embeddings for modeling bilexical relations

There has been an exponential surge of text data in the recent years. As a consequence, unsupervised methods that make use of this data have been steadily growing in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Word embeddings are low-dimensional vectors obtained using unsupervised techniques on the large unlabelled corpora, where words from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers. Word embeddings aim to capture syntactic and semantic properties of words. In NLP, many tasks involve computing the compatibility between lexical items under some linguistic relation. We call this type of relation a bilexical relation. Our thesis defines statistical models for bilexical relations that centrally make use of word embeddings. Our principle aim is that the word embeddings will favor generalization to words not seen during the training of the model. The thesis is structured in four parts. In the first part of this thesis, we present a bilinear model over word embeddings that leverages a small supervised dataset for a binary linguistic relation. Our learning algorithm exploits low-rank bilinear forms and induces a low-dimensional embedding tailored for a target linguistic relation. This results in compressed task-specific embeddings. In the second part of our thesis, we extend our bilinear model to a ternary setting and propose a framework for resolving prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity using word embeddings. Our models perform competitively with state-of-the-art models. In addition, our method obtains significant improvements on out-of-domain tests by simply using word-embeddings induced from source and target domains. In the third part of this thesis, we further extend the bilinear models for expanding vocabulary in the context of statistical phrase-based machine translation. Our model obtains a probabilistic list of possible translations of target language words, given a word in the source language. We do this by projecting pre-trained embeddings into a common subspace using a log-bilinear model. We empirically notice a significant improvement on an out-of-domain test set. In the final part of our thesis, we propose a non-linear model that maps initial word embeddings to task-tuned word embeddings, in the context of a neural network dependency parser. We demonstrate its use for improved dependency parsing, especially for sentences with unseen words. We also show downstream improvements on a sentiment analysis task.En els darrers anys hi ha hagut un sorgiment notable de dades en format textual. Conseqüentment, en el camp del Processament del Llenguatge Natural (NLP, de l'anglès "Natural Language Processing") s'han desenvolupat mètodes no supervistats que fan ús d'aquestes dades. Els anomenats "word embeddings", o embeddings de paraules, són vectors de dimensionalitat baixa que s'obtenen mitjançant tècniques no supervisades aplicades a corpus textuals de grans volums. Com a resultat, cada paraula del diccionari es correspon amb un vector de nombres reals, el propòsit del qual és capturar propietats sintàctiques i semàntiques de la paraula corresponent. Moltes tasques de NLP involucren calcular la compatibilitat entre elements lèxics en l'àmbit d'una relació lingüística. D'aquest tipus de relació en diem relació bilèxica. Aquesta tesi proposa models estadístics per a relacions bilèxiques que fan ús central d'embeddings de paraules, amb l'objectiu de millorar la generalització del model lingüístic a paraules no vistes durant l'entrenament. La tesi s'estructura en quatre parts. A la primera part presentem un model bilineal sobre embeddings de paraules que explota un conjunt petit de dades anotades sobre una relaxió bilèxica. L'algorisme d'aprenentatge treballa amb formes bilineals de poc rang, i indueix embeddings de poca dimensionalitat que estan especialitzats per la relació bilèxica per la qual s'han entrenat. Com a resultat, obtenim embeddings de paraules que corresponen a compressions d'embeddings per a una relació determinada. A la segona part de la tesi proposem una extensió del model bilineal a trilineal, i amb això proposem un nou model per a resoldre ambigüitats de sintagmes preposicionals que usa només embeddings de paraules. En una sèrie d'avaluacións, els nostres models funcionen de manera similar a l'estat de l'art. A més, el nostre mètode obté millores significatives en avaluacions en textos de dominis diferents al d'entrenament, simplement usant embeddings induïts amb textos dels dominis d'entrenament i d'avaluació. A la tercera part d'aquesta tesi proposem una altra extensió dels models bilineals per ampliar la cobertura lèxica en el context de models estadístics de traducció automàtica. El nostre model probabilístic obté, donada una paraula en la llengua d'origen, una llista de possibles traduccions en la llengua de destí. Fem això mitjançant una projecció d'embeddings pre-entrenats a un sub-espai comú, usant un model log-bilineal. Empíricament, observem una millora significativa en avaluacions en dominis diferents al d'entrenament. Finalment, a la quarta part de la tesi proposem un model no lineal que indueix una correspondència entre embeddings inicials i embeddings especialitzats, en el context de tasques d'anàlisi sintàctica de dependències amb models neuronals. Mostrem que aquest mètode millora l'analisi de dependències, especialment en oracions amb paraules no vistes durant l'entrenament. També mostrem millores en un tasca d'anàlisi de sentiment

A survey on opinion summarization technique s for social media

The volume of data on the social media is huge and even keeps increasing. The need for efficient processing of this extensive information resulted in increasing research interest in knowledge engineering tasks such as Opinion Summarization. This survey shows the current opinion summarization challenges for social media, then the necessary pre-summarization steps like preprocessing, features extraction, noise elimination, and handling of synonym features. Next, it covers the various approaches used in opinion summarization like Visualization, Abstractive, Aspect based, Query-focused, Real Time, Update Summarization, and highlight other Opinion Summarization approaches such as Contrastive, Concept-based, Community Detection, Domain Specific, Bilingual, Social Bookmarking, and Social Media Sampling. It covers the different datasets used in opinion summarization and future work suggested in each technique. Finally, it provides different ways for evaluating opinion summarization

Exploiting Cross-Lingual Representations For Natural Language Processing

Traditional approaches to supervised learning require a generous amount of labeled data for good generalization. While such annotation-heavy approaches have proven useful for some Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in high-resource languages (like English), they are unlikely to scale to languages where collecting labeled data is di cult and time-consuming. Translating supervision available in English is also not a viable solution, because developing a good machine translation system requires expensive to annotate resources which are not available for most languages. In this thesis, I argue that cross-lingual representations are an effective means of extending NLP tools to languages beyond English without resorting to generous amounts of annotated data or expensive machine translation. These representations can be learned in an inexpensive manner, often from signals completely unrelated to the task of interest. I begin with a review of different ways of inducing such representations using a variety of cross-lingual signals and study algorithmic approaches of using them in a diverse set of downstream tasks. Examples of such tasks covered in this thesis include learning representations to transfer a trained model across languages for document classification, assist in monolingual lexical semantics like word sense induction, identify asymmetric lexical relationships like hypernymy between words in different languages, or combining supervision across languages through a shared feature space for cross-lingual entity linking. In all these applications, the representations make information expressed in other languages available in English, while requiring minimal additional supervision in the language of interest

A Cross-Lingual Similarity Measure for Detecting Biomedical Term Translations

Bilingual dictionaries for technical terms such as biomedical terms are an important resource for machine translation systems as well as for humans who would like to understand a concept described in a foreign language. Often a biomedical term is first proposed in English and later it is manually translated to other languages. Despite the fact that there are large monolingual lexicons of biomedical terms, only a fraction of those term lexicons are translated to other languages. Manually compiling large-scale bilingual dictionaries for technical domains is a challenging task because it is difficult to find a sufficiently large number of bilingual experts. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting most similar translation candidates for a biomedical term specified in one language (source) from another language (target). Specifically, a biomedical term in a language is represented using two types of features: (a) intrinsic features that consist of character n-grams extracted from the term under consideration, and (b) extrinsic features that consist of unigrams and bigrams extracted from the contextual windows surrounding the term under consideration. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure using each of those feature types. First, to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space in each language, we propose prototype vector projection (PVP)—a non-negative lower-dimensional vector projection method. Second, we propose a method to learn a mapping between the feature spaces in the source and target language using partial least squares regression (PLSR). The proposed method requires only a small number of training instances to learn a cross-lingual similarity measure. The proposed PVP method outperforms popular dimensionality reduction methods such as the singular value decomposition (SVD) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) in a nearest neighbor prediction task. Moreover, our experimental results covering several language pairs such as English–French, English–Spanish, English–Greek, and English–Japanese show that the proposed method outperforms several other feature projection methods in biomedical term translation prediction tasks

D7.4 Third evaluation report. Evaluation of PANACEA v3 and produced resources

D7.4 reports on the evaluation of the different components integrated in the PANACEA third cycle of development as well as the final validation of the platform itself. All validation and evaluation experiments follow the evaluation criteria already described in D7.1. The main goal of WP7 tasks was to test the (technical) functionalities and capabilities of the middleware that allows the integration of the various resource-creation components into an interoperable distributed environment (WP3) and to evaluate the quality of the components developed in WP5 and WP6. The content of this deliverable is thus complementary to D8.2 and D8.3 that tackle advantages and usability in industrial scenarios. It has to be noted that the PANACEA third cycle of development addressed many components that are still under research. The main goal for this evaluation cycle thus is to assess the methods experimented with and their potentials for becoming actual production tools to be exploited outside research labs. For most of the technologies, an attempt was made to re-interpret standard evaluation measures, usually in terms of accuracy, precision and recall, as measures related to a reduction of costs (time and human resources) in the current practices based on the manual production of resources. In order to do so, the different tools had to be tuned and adapted to maximize precision and for some tools the possibility to offer confidence measures that could allow a separation of the resources that still needed manual revision has been attempted. Furthermore, the extension to other languages in addition to English, also a PANACEA objective, has been evaluated. The main facts about the evaluation results are now summarized