23 research outputs found
Matching Natural Language Sentences with Hierarchical Sentence Factorization
Semantic matching of natural language sentences or identifying the
relationship between two sentences is a core research problem underlying many
natural language tasks. Depending on whether training data is available, prior
research has proposed both unsupervised distance-based schemes and supervised
deep learning schemes for sentence matching. However, previous approaches
either omit or fail to fully utilize the ordered, hierarchical, and flexible
structures of language objects, as well as the interactions between them. In
this paper, we propose Hierarchical Sentence Factorization---a technique to
factorize a sentence into a hierarchical representation, with the components at
each different scale reordered into a "predicate-argument" form. The proposed
sentence factorization technique leads to the invention of: 1) a new
unsupervised distance metric which calculates the semantic distance between a
pair of text snippets by solving a penalized optimal transport problem while
preserving the logical relationship of words in the reordered sentences, and 2)
new multi-scale deep learning models for supervised semantic training, based on
factorized sentence hierarchies. We apply our techniques to text-pair
similarity estimation and text-pair relationship classification tasks, based on
multiple datasets such as STSbenchmark, the Microsoft Research paraphrase
identification (MSRP) dataset, the SICK dataset, etc. Extensive experiments
show that the proposed hierarchical sentence factorization can be used to
significantly improve the performance of existing unsupervised distance-based
metrics as well as multiple supervised deep learning models based on the
convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM).Comment: Accepted by WWW 2018, 10 page
SemEval-2017 Task 1: semantic textual similarity - multilingual and cross-lingual focused evaluation
Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the meaning similarity of sentences. Applications include machine translation (MT), summarization, generation, question answering (QA), short answer grading, semantic search, dialog and conversational systems. The STS shared task is a venue for assessing the current state-of-the-art. The 2017 task focuses on multilingual and cross-lingual pairs with one sub-track exploring MT quality estimation (MTQE) data. The task obtained strong participation from 31 teams, with 17 participating in all language tracks. We summarize performance and review a selection of well performing methods. Analysis highlights common errors, providing insight into the limitations of existing models. To support ongoing work on semantic representations, the STS Benchmark is introduced as a new shared training and evaluation set carefully selected from the corpus of English STS shared task data (2012-2017)
Logic Constrained Pointer Networks for Interpretable Textual Similarity
Systematically discovering semantic relationships in text is an important and
extensively studied area in Natural Language Processing, with various tasks
such as entailment, semantic similarity, etc. Decomposability of sentence-level
scores via subsequence alignments has been proposed as a way to make models
more interpretable. We study the problem of aligning components of sentences
leading to an interpretable model for semantic textual similarity. In this
paper, we introduce a novel pointer network based model with a sentinel gating
function to align constituent chunks, which are represented using BERT. We
improve this base model with a loss function to equally penalize misalignments
in both sentences, ensuring the alignments are bidirectional. Finally, to guide
the network with structured external knowledge, we introduce first-order logic
constraints based on ConceptNet and syntactic knowledge. The model achieves an
F1 score of 97.73 and 96.32 on the benchmark SemEval datasets for the chunk
alignment task, showing large improvements over the existing solutions. Source
code is available at
https://github.com/manishb89/interpretable_sentence_similarityComment: Accepted at IJCAI 2020 Main Track. Sole copyright holder is IJCAI,
all rights reserved. Available at https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2020/33
ParaNMT-50M: Pushing the Limits of Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings with Millions of Machine Translations
We describe PARANMT-50M, a dataset of more than 50 million English-English
sentential paraphrase pairs. We generated the pairs automatically by using
neural machine translation to translate the non-English side of a large
parallel corpus, following Wieting et al. (2017). Our hope is that ParaNMT-50M
can be a valuable resource for paraphrase generation and can provide a rich
source of semantic knowledge to improve downstream natural language
understanding tasks. To show its utility, we use ParaNMT-50M to train
paraphrastic sentence embeddings that outperform all supervised systems on
every SemEval semantic textual similarity competition, in addition to showing
how it can be used for paraphrase generation
Semantic textual similarity with siamese neural networks
Calculating the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) is an important research area in natural language processing which plays a
significant role in many applications such as question answering, document summarisation, information retrieval and information extraction. This paper evaluates Siamese recurrent architectures, a special type of neural networks, which are used here to measure STS. Several variants of the architecture are compared with existing method