60,513 research outputs found
Knowledge Base Population using Semantic Label Propagation
A crucial aspect of a knowledge base population system that extracts new
facts from text corpora, is the generation of training data for its relation
extractors. In this paper, we present a method that maximizes the effectiveness
of newly trained relation extractors at a minimal annotation cost. Manual
labeling can be significantly reduced by Distant Supervision, which is a method
to construct training data automatically by aligning a large text corpus with
an existing knowledge base of known facts. For example, all sentences
mentioning both 'Barack Obama' and 'US' may serve as positive training
instances for the relation born_in(subject,object). However, distant
supervision typically results in a highly noisy training set: many training
sentences do not really express the intended relation. We propose to combine
distant supervision with minimal manual supervision in a technique called
feature labeling, to eliminate noise from the large and noisy initial training
set, resulting in a significant increase of precision. We further improve on
this approach by introducing the Semantic Label Propagation method, which uses
the similarity between low-dimensional representations of candidate training
instances, to extend the training set in order to increase recall while
maintaining high precision. Our proposed strategy for generating training data
is studied and evaluated on an established test collection designed for
knowledge base population tasks. The experimental results show that the
Semantic Label Propagation strategy leads to substantial performance gains when
compared to existing approaches, while requiring an almost negligible manual
annotation effort.Comment: Submitted to Knowledge Based Systems, special issue on Knowledge
Bases for Natural Language Processin
Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation
In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse
structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware
similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse
trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show
that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various
existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with
human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests
that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of
the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when
developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined
metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of
various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine
translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST
tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii)
the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively
correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse
analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201
Error-tolerant Finite State Recognition with Applications to Morphological Analysis and Spelling Correction
Error-tolerant recognition enables the recognition of strings that deviate
mildly from any string in the regular set recognized by the underlying finite
state recognizer. Such recognition has applications in error-tolerant
morphological processing, spelling correction, and approximate string matching
in information retrieval. After a description of the concepts and algorithms
involved, we give examples from two applications: In the context of
morphological analysis, error-tolerant recognition allows misspelled input word
forms to be corrected, and morphologically analyzed concurrently. We present an
application of this to error-tolerant analysis of agglutinative morphology of
Turkish words. The algorithm can be applied to morphological analysis of any
language whose morphology is fully captured by a single (and possibly very
large) finite state transducer, regardless of the word formation processes and
morphographemic phenomena involved. In the context of spelling correction,
error-tolerant recognition can be used to enumerate correct candidate forms
from a given misspelled string within a certain edit distance. Again, it can be
applied to any language with a word list comprising all inflected forms, or
whose morphology is fully described by a finite state transducer. We present
experimental results for spelling correction for a number of languages. These
results indicate that such recognition works very efficiently for candidate
generation in spelling correction for many European languages such as English,
Dutch, French, German, Italian (and others) with very large word lists of root
and inflected forms (some containing well over 200,000 forms), generating all
candidate solutions within 10 to 45 milliseconds (with edit distance 1) on a
SparcStation 10/41. For spelling correction in Turkish, error-tolerantComment: Replaces 9504031. gzipped, uuencoded postscript file. To appear in
Computational Linguistics Volume 22 No:1, 1996, Also available as
ftp://ftp.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/ko/clpaper9512.ps.
Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are
trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper
presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound
commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the
capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language
(VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into
VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for
validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data;
Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the
synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles
that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply
these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual
assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support
compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie
achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's
generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the
art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201
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