Enhanced sequence labeling based on latent variable conditional random fields

Natural language processing is a useful processing technique of language data, such as text and speech. Sequence labeling represents the upstream task of many natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text classification, and sentiment classification. In this paper, the focus is on the sequence labeling task, in which semantic labels are assigned to each unit of a given input sequence. Two frameworks of latent variable conditional random fields (CRF) models (called LVCRF-I and LVCRF-II) are proposed, which use the encoding schema as a latent variable to capture the latent structure of the hidden variables and the observed data. Among the two designed models, the LVCRF-I model focuses on the sentence level, while the LVCRF-II works in the word level, to choose the best encoding schema for a given input sequence automatically without handcraft features. In the experiments, the two proposed models are verified by four sequence prediction tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), chunking, reference parsing and POS tagging. The proposed frameworks achieve better performance without using other handcraft features than the conventional CRF model. Moreover, these designed frameworks can be viewed as a substitution of the conventional CRF models. In the commonly used LSTM-CRF models, the CRF layer can be replaced with our proposed framework as they use the same training and inference procedure. The experimental results show that the proposed models exhibit latent variable and provide competitive and robust performance on all three sequence prediction tasks

Radical-Enhanced Chinese Character Embedding

We present a method to leverage radical for learning Chinese character embedding. Radical is a semantic and phonetic component of Chinese character. It plays an important role as characters with the same radical usually have similar semantic meaning and grammatical usage. However, existing Chinese processing algorithms typically regard word or character as the basic unit but ignore the crucial radical information. In this paper, we fill this gap by leveraging radical for learning continuous representation of Chinese character. We develop a dedicated neural architecture to effectively learn character embedding and apply it on Chinese character similarity judgement and Chinese word segmentation. Experiment results show that our radical-enhanced method outperforms existing embedding learning algorithms on both tasks.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Lexicon Infused Phrase Embeddings for Named Entity Resolution

Most state-of-the-art approaches for named-entity recognition (NER) use semi supervised information in the form of word clusters and lexicons. Recently neural network-based language models have been explored, as they as a byproduct generate highly informative vector representations for words, known as word embeddings. In this paper we present two contributions: a new form of learning word embeddings that can leverage information from relevant lexicons to improve the representations, and the first system to use neural word embeddings to achieve state-of-the-art results on named-entity recognition in both CoNLL and Ontonotes NER. Our system achieves an F1 score of 90.90 on the test set for CoNLL 2003---significantly better than any previous system trained on public data, and matching a system employing massive private industrial query-log data.Comment: Accepted in CoNLL 201

Partial sequence labeling with structured Gaussian Processes

Existing partial sequence labeling models mainly focus on max-margin framework which fails to provide an uncertainty estimation of the prediction. Further, the unique ground truth disambiguation strategy employed by these models may include wrong label information for parameter learning. In this paper, we propose structured Gaussian Processes for partial sequence labeling (SGPPSL), which encodes uncertainty in the prediction and does not need extra effort for model selection and hyperparameter learning. The model employs factor-as-piece approximation that divides the linear-chain graph structure into the set of pieces, which preserves the basic Markov Random Field structure and effectively avoids handling large number of candidate output sequences generated by partially annotated data. Then confidence measure is introduced in the model to address different contributions of candidate labels, which enables the ground-truth label information to be utilized in parameter learning. Based on the derived lower bound of the variational lower bound of the proposed model, variational parameters and confidence measures are estimated in the framework of alternating optimization. Moreover, weighted Viterbi algorithm is proposed to incorporate confidence measure to sequence prediction, which considers label ambiguity arose from multiple annotations in the training data and thus helps improve the performance. SGPPSL is evaluated on several sequence labeling tasks and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model

A hybrid representation based simile component extraction

Simile, a special type of metaphor, can help people to express their ideas more clearly. Simile component extraction is to extract tenors and vehicles from sentences. This task has a realistic significance since it is useful for building cognitive knowledge base. With the development of deep neural networks, researchers begin to apply neural models to component extraction. Simile components should be in cross-domain. According to our observations, words in cross-domain always have different concepts. Thus, concept is important when identifying whether two words are simile components or not. However, existing models do not integrate concept into their models. It is difficult for these models to identify the concept of a word. What’s more, corpus about simile component extraction is limited. There are a number of rare words or unseen words, and the representations of these words are always not proper enough. Exiting models can hardly extract simile components accurately when there are low-frequency words in sentences. To solve these problems, we propose a hybrid representation-based component extraction (HRCE) model. Each word in HRCE is represented in three different levels: word level, concept level and character level. Concept representations (representations in concept level) can help HRCE to identify the words in cross-domain more accurately. Moreover, with the help of character representations (representations in character levels), HRCE can represent the meaning of a word more properly since words are consisted of characters and these characters can partly represent the meaning of words. We conduct experiments to compare the performance between HRCE and existing models. The experiment results show that HRCE significantly outperforms current models

Gaussian Process Pseudo-Likelihood Models for Sequence Labeling

Several machine learning problems arising in natural language processing can be modeled as a sequence labeling problem. We provide Gaussian process models based on pseudo-likelihood approximation to perform sequence labeling. Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a Bayesian approach to learning in a kernel based framework. The pseudo-likelihood model enables one to capture long range dependencies among the output components of the sequence without becoming computationally intractable. We use an efficient variational Gaussian approximation method to perform inference in the proposed model. We also provide an iterative algorithm which can effectively make use of the information from the neighboring labels to perform prediction. The ability to capture long range dependencies makes the proposed approach useful for a wide range of sequence labeling problems. Numerical experiments on some sequence labeling data sets demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

A Joint Model for Definition Extraction with Syntactic Connection and Semantic Consistency

Definition Extraction (DE) is one of the well-known topics in Information Extraction that aims to identify terms and their corresponding definitions in unstructured texts. This task can be formalized either as a sentence classification task (i.e., containing term-definition pairs or not) or a sequential labeling task (i.e., identifying the boundaries of the terms and definitions). The previous works for DE have only focused on one of the two approaches, failing to model the inter-dependencies between the two tasks. In this work, we propose a novel model for DE that simultaneously performs the two tasks in a single framework to benefit from their inter-dependencies. Our model features deep learning architectures to exploit the global structures of the input sentences as well as the semantic consistencies between the terms and the definitions, thereby improving the quality of the representation vectors for DE. Besides the joint inference between sentence classification and sequential labeling, the proposed model is fundamentally different from the prior work for DE in that the prior work has only employed the local structures of the input sentences (i.e., word-to-word relations), and not yet considered the semantic consistencies between terms and definitions. In order to implement these novel ideas, our model presents a multi-task learning framework that employs graph convolutional neural networks and predicts the dependency paths between the terms and the definitions. We also seek to enforce the consistency between the representations of the terms and definitions both globally (i.e., increasing semantic consistency between the representations of the entire sentences and the terms/definitions) and locally (i.e., promoting the similarity between the representations of the terms and the definitions)