Syntactic Topic Models

The syntactic topic model (STM) is a Bayesian nonparametric model of language that discovers latent distributions of words (topics) that are both semantically and syntactically coherent. The STM models dependency parsed corpora where sentences are grouped into documents. It assumes that each word is drawn from a latent topic chosen by combining document-level features and the local syntactic context. Each document has a distribution over latent topics, as in topic models, which provides the semantic consistency. Each element in the dependency parse tree also has a distribution over the topics of its children, as in latent-state syntax models, which provides the syntactic consistency. These distributions are convolved so that the topic of each word is likely under both its document and syntactic context. We derive a fast posterior inference algorithm based on variational methods. We report qualitative and quantitative studies on both synthetic data and hand-parsed documents. We show that the STM is a more predictive model of language than current models based only on syntax or only on topics

A unifying representation for a class of dependent random measures

We present a general construction for dependent random measures based on thinning Poisson processes on an augmented space. The framework is not restricted to dependent versions of a specific nonparametric model, but can be applied to all models that can be represented using completely random measures. Several existing dependent random measures can be seen as specific cases of this framework. Interesting properties of the resulting measures are derived and the efficacy of the framework is demonstrated by constructing a covariate-dependent latent feature model and topic model that obtain superior predictive performance

Dependency parsing resources for French: Converting acquired lexical functional grammar F-Structure annotations and parsing F-Structures directly

Recent years have seen considerable success in the generation of automatically obtained wide-coverage deep grammars for natural language processing, given reliable and large CFG-like treebanks. For research within Lexical Functional Grammar framework, these deep grammars are typically based on an extended PCFG parsing scheme from which dependencies are extracted. However, increasing success in statistical dependency parsing suggests that such deep grammar approaches to statistical parsing could be streamlined. We explore this novel approach to deep grammar parsing within the framework of LFG in this paper, for French, showing that best results (an f-score of 69.46) for the established integrated architecture may be obtained for French

Generating Aspect-oriented Multi-document Summarization with Event-Aspect Model

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatic generation of aspect-oriented summaries from multiple documents. We first develop an event-aspect LDA model to cluster sentences into aspects. We then use extended LexRank algorithm to rank the sentences in each cluster. We use Integer Linear Programming for sentence selection. Key features of our method include automatic grouping of semantically related sentences and sentence ranking based on extension of random walk model. Also, we implement a new sentence compression algorithm which use dependency tree instead of parser tree. We compare our method with four baseline methods. Quantitative evaluation based on Rouge metric demonstrates the effectiveness and advantages of our method.

A Dependency-Based Neural Network for Relation Classification

Previous research on relation classification has verified the effectiveness of using dependency shortest paths or subtrees. In this paper, we further explore how to make full use of the combination of these dependency information. We first propose a new structure, termed augmented dependency path (ADP), which is composed of the shortest dependency path between two entities and the subtrees attached to the shortest path. To exploit the semantic representation behind the ADP structure, we develop dependency-based neural networks (DepNN): a recursive neural network designed to model the subtrees, and a convolutional neural network to capture the most important features on the shortest path. Experiments on the SemEval-2010 dataset show that our proposed method achieves state-of-art results.Comment: This preprint is the full version of a short paper accepted in the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2015 (Beijing, China

Dependency Grammar Induction with Neural Lexicalization and Big Training Data

We study the impact of big models (in terms of the degree of lexicalization) and big data (in terms of the training corpus size) on dependency grammar induction. We experimented with L-DMV, a lexicalized version of Dependency Model with Valence and L-NDMV, our lexicalized extension of the Neural Dependency Model with Valence. We find that L-DMV only benefits from very small degrees of lexicalization and moderate sizes of training corpora. L-NDMV can benefit from big training data and lexicalization of greater degrees, especially when enhanced with good model initialization, and it achieves a result that is competitive with the current state-of-the-art.Comment: EMNLP 201

Query-based extracting: how to support the answer?

Human-made query-based summaries commonly contain information not explicitly asked for. They answer the user query, but also provide supporting information. In order to find this information in the source text, a graph is used to model the strength and type of relations between sentences of the query and document cluster, based on various features. The resulting extracts rank second in overall readability in the DUC 2006 evaluation. Employment of better question answering methods is the key to improve also content-based evaluation results