3,231 research outputs found
Learning to Reason: End-to-End Module Networks for Visual Question Answering
Natural language questions are inherently compositional, and many are most
easily answered by reasoning about their decomposition into modular
sub-problems. For example, to answer "is there an equal number of balls and
boxes?" we can look for balls, look for boxes, count them, and compare the
results. The recently proposed Neural Module Network (NMN) architecture
implements this approach to question answering by parsing questions into
linguistic substructures and assembling question-specific deep networks from
smaller modules that each solve one subtask. However, existing NMN
implementations rely on brittle off-the-shelf parsers, and are restricted to
the module configurations proposed by these parsers rather than learning them
from data. In this paper, we propose End-to-End Module Networks (N2NMNs), which
learn to reason by directly predicting instance-specific network layouts
without the aid of a parser. Our model learns to generate network structures
(by imitating expert demonstrations) while simultaneously learning network
parameters (using the downstream task loss). Experimental results on the new
CLEVR dataset targeted at compositional question answering show that N2NMNs
achieve an error reduction of nearly 50% relative to state-of-the-art
attentional approaches, while discovering interpretable network architectures
specialized for each question
An Efficient Distribution of Labor in a Two Stage Robust Interpretation Process
Although Minimum Distance Parsing (MDP) offers a theoretically attractive
solution to the problem of extragrammaticality, it is often computationally
infeasible in large scale practical applications. In this paper we present an
alternative approach where the labor is distributed between a more restrictive
partial parser and a repair module. Though two stage approaches have grown in
popularity in recent years because of their efficiency, they have done so at
the cost of requiring hand coded repair heuristics. In contrast, our two stage
approach does not require any hand coded knowledge sources dedicated to repair,
thus making it possible to achieve a similar run time advantage over MDP
without losing the quality of domain independence.Comment: 9 pages, 1 Postscript figure, uses aclap.sty and psfig.tex, In
Proceedings of EMNLP 199
A Hierarchical Neural Autoencoder for Paragraphs and Documents
Natural language generation of coherent long texts like paragraphs or longer
documents is a challenging problem for recurrent networks models. In this
paper, we explore an important step toward this generation task: training an
LSTM (Long-short term memory) auto-encoder to preserve and reconstruct
multi-sentence paragraphs. We introduce an LSTM model that hierarchically
builds an embedding for a paragraph from embeddings for sentences and words,
then decodes this embedding to reconstruct the original paragraph. We evaluate
the reconstructed paragraph using standard metrics like ROUGE and Entity Grid,
showing that neural models are able to encode texts in a way that preserve
syntactic, semantic, and discourse coherence. While only a first step toward
generating coherent text units from neural models, our work has the potential
to significantly impact natural language generation and
summarization\footnote{Code for the three models described in this paper can be
found at www.stanford.edu/~jiweil/
A Robust Transformation-Based Learning Approach Using Ripple Down Rules for Part-of-Speech Tagging
In this paper, we propose a new approach to construct a system of
transformation rules for the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging task. Our approach is
based on an incremental knowledge acquisition method where rules are stored in
an exception structure and new rules are only added to correct the errors of
existing rules; thus allowing systematic control of the interaction between the
rules. Experimental results on 13 languages show that our approach is fast in
terms of training time and tagging speed. Furthermore, our approach obtains
very competitive accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art POS and
morphological taggers.Comment: Version 1: 13 pages. Version 2: Submitted to AI Communications - the
European Journal on Artificial Intelligence. Version 3: Resubmitted after
major revisions. Version 4: Resubmitted after minor revisions. Version 5: to
appear in AI Communications (accepted for publication on 3/12/2015
Rhetorical relations for information retrieval
Typically, every part in most coherent text has some plausible reason for its
presence, some function that it performs to the overall semantics of the text.
Rhetorical relations, e.g. contrast, cause, explanation, describe how the parts
of a text are linked to each other. Knowledge about this socalled discourse
structure has been applied successfully to several natural language processing
tasks. This work studies the use of rhetorical relations for Information
Retrieval (IR): Is there a correlation between certain rhetorical relations and
retrieval performance? Can knowledge about a document's rhetorical relations be
useful to IR? We present a language model modification that considers
rhetorical relations when estimating the relevance of a document to a query.
Empirical evaluation of different versions of our model on TREC settings shows
that certain rhetorical relations can benefit retrieval effectiveness notably
(> 10% in mean average precision over a state-of-the-art baseline)
Applications of Natural Language Processing in Biodiversity Science
Centuries of biological knowledge are contained in the massive body of scientific literature, written for human-readability but too big for any one person to consume. Large-scale mining of information from the literature is necessary if biology is to transform into a data-driven science.
A computer can handle the volume but cannot make sense of the language. This paper reviews and discusses the use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning algorithms to extract information from systematic literature. NLP algorithms have been used for decades, but require special development for application in the biological realm due to the special nature of the language. Many tools exist for biological information extraction (cellular processes, taxonomic names, and morphological characters), but none have been applied life wide and most still require testing and development. Progress has been made in developing algorithms for automated annotation of taxonomic text, identification of taxonomic names in text, and extraction of morphological character information from taxonomic descriptions. This manuscript will briefly discuss the key steps in applying information extraction tools to enhance biodiversity science
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