4,501 research outputs found
An attentive neural architecture for joint segmentation and parsing and its application to real estate ads
In processing human produced text using natural language processing (NLP)
techniques, two fundamental subtasks that arise are (i) segmentation of the
plain text into meaningful subunits (e.g., entities), and (ii) dependency
parsing, to establish relations between subunits. In this paper, we develop a
relatively simple and effective neural joint model that performs both
segmentation and dependency parsing together, instead of one after the other as
in most state-of-the-art works. We will focus in particular on the real estate
ad setting, aiming to convert an ad to a structured description, which we name
property tree, comprising the tasks of (1) identifying important entities of a
property (e.g., rooms) from classifieds and (2) structuring them into a tree
format. In this work, we propose a new joint model that is able to tackle the
two tasks simultaneously and construct the property tree by (i) avoiding the
error propagation that would arise from the subtasks one after the other in a
pipelined fashion, and (ii) exploiting the interactions between the subtasks.
For this purpose, we perform an extensive comparative study of the pipeline
methods and the new proposed joint model, reporting an improvement of over
three percentage points in the overall edge F1 score of the property tree.
Also, we propose attention methods, to encourage our model to focus on salient
tokens during the construction of the property tree. Thus we experimentally
demonstrate the usefulness of attentive neural architectures for the proposed
joint model, showcasing a further improvement of two percentage points in edge
F1 score for our application.Comment: Preprint - Accepted for publication in Expert Systems with
Application
Efficient Multi-Template Learning for Structured Prediction
Conditional random field (CRF) and Structural Support Vector Machine
(Structural SVM) are two state-of-the-art methods for structured prediction
which captures the interdependencies among output variables. The success of
these methods is attributed to the fact that their discriminative models are
able to account for overlapping features on the whole input observations. These
features are usually generated by applying a given set of templates on labeled
data, but improper templates may lead to degraded performance. To alleviate
this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel multiple template learning
paradigm to learn structured prediction and the importance of each template
simultaneously, so that hundreds of arbitrary templates could be added into the
learning model without caution. This paradigm can be formulated as a special
multiple kernel learning problem with exponential number of constraints. Then
we introduce an efficient cutting plane algorithm to solve this problem in the
primal, and its convergence is presented. We also evaluate the proposed
learning paradigm on two widely-studied structured prediction tasks,
\emph{i.e.} sequence labeling and dependency parsing. Extensive experimental
results show that the proposed method outperforms CRFs and Structural SVMs due
to exploiting the importance of each template. Our complexity analysis and
empirical results also show that our proposed method is more efficient than
OnlineMKL on very sparse and high-dimensional data. We further extend this
paradigm for structured prediction using generalized -block norm
regularization with , and experiments show competitive performances when
Globally Normalized Reader
Rapid progress has been made towards question answering (QA) systems that can
extract answers from text. Existing neural approaches make use of expensive
bi-directional attention mechanisms or score all possible answer spans,
limiting scalability. We propose instead to cast extractive QA as an iterative
search problem: select the answer's sentence, start word, and end word. This
representation reduces the space of each search step and allows computation to
be conditionally allocated to promising search paths. We show that globally
normalizing the decision process and back-propagating through beam search makes
this representation viable and learning efficient. We empirically demonstrate
the benefits of this approach using our model, Globally Normalized Reader
(GNR), which achieves the second highest single model performance on the
Stanford Question Answering Dataset (68.4 EM, 76.21 F1 dev) and is 24.7x faster
than bi-attention-flow. We also introduce a data-augmentation method to produce
semantically valid examples by aligning named entities to a knowledge base and
swapping them with new entities of the same type. This method improves the
performance of all models considered in this work and is of independent
interest for a variety of NLP tasks.Comment: Presented at EMNLP 201
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