Document-Wide Decoding for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation

Independence between sentences is an assumption deeply entrenched in the models and algorithms used for statistical machine translation (SMT), particularly in the popular dynamic programming beam search decoding algorithm. This restriction is an obstacle to research on more sophisticated discourse-level models for SMT. We propose a stochastic local search decoding method for phrase-based SMT, which permits free document-wide dependencies in the models. We explore the stability and the search parameters of this method and demonstrate that it can be successfully used to optimise a document-level semantic language model.

Learning Semantic Correspondences in Technical Documentation

We consider the problem of translating high-level textual descriptions to formal representations in technical documentation as part of an effort to model the meaning of such documentation. We focus specifically on the problem of learning translational correspondences between text descriptions and grounded representations in the target documentation, such as formal representation of functions or code templates. Our approach exploits the parallel nature of such documentation, or the tight coupling between high-level text and the low-level representations we aim to learn. Data is collected by mining technical documents for such parallel text-representation pairs, which we use to train a simple semantic parsing model. We report new baseline results on sixteen novel datasets, including the standard library documentation for nine popular programming languages across seven natural languages, and a small collection of Unix utility manuals.Comment: accepted to ACL-201

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

DivGraphPointer: A Graph Pointer Network for Extracting Diverse Keyphrases

Keyphrase extraction from documents is useful to a variety of applications such as information retrieval and document summarization. This paper presents an end-to-end method called DivGraphPointer for extracting a set of diversified keyphrases from a document. DivGraphPointer combines the advantages of traditional graph-based ranking methods and recent neural network-based approaches. Specifically, given a document, a word graph is constructed from the document based on word proximity and is encoded with graph convolutional networks, which effectively capture document-level word salience by modeling long-range dependency between words in the document and aggregating multiple appearances of identical words into one node. Furthermore, we propose a diversified point network to generate a set of diverse keyphrases out of the word graph in the decoding process. Experimental results on five benchmark data sets show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: Accepted to SIGIR 201