Inductive learning in Shared Neural Multi-Spaces

The learning of rules from examples is of continuing interest to machine learning since it allows generalization from fewer training ex- amples. Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) generates hypothetical rules (clauses) from a knowledge base augmented with (positive and negative) examples. A successful hypothesis entails all positive examples and does not entail any negative example. The Shared Neural Multi-Space (Shared NeMuS) structure encodes first order expressions in a graph suitable for ILP-style learning. This paper explores the NeMuS structure and its re- lationship with the Herbrand Base of a knowledge-base to generate hy- potheses inductively. It is demonstrated that inductive learning driven by the knowledge-base structure can be implementated successfully in the Amao cognitive agent framework, including the learning of recursive hypotheses

Latent Multi-task Architecture Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) allows deep neural networks to learn from related tasks by sharing parameters with other networks. In practice, however, MTL involves searching an enormous space of possible parameter sharing architectures to find (a) the layers or subspaces that benefit from sharing, (b) the appropriate amount of sharing, and (c) the appropriate relative weights of the different task losses. Recent work has addressed each of the above problems in isolation. In this work we present an approach that learns a latent multi-task architecture that jointly addresses (a)--(c). We present experiments on synthetic data and data from OntoNotes 5.0, including four different tasks and seven different domains. Our extension consistently outperforms previous approaches to learning latent architectures for multi-task problems and achieves up to 15% average error reductions over common approaches to MTL.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of AAAI 201

Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in another language, with little or no re-training data. Transfer learning is closely related to multi-task learning (cross-lingual vs. multilingual), and is traditionally studied in the name of `model adaptation'. Recent advance in deep learning shows that transfer learning becomes much easier and more effective with high-level abstract features learned by deep models, and the `transfer' can be conducted not only between data distributions and data types, but also between model structures (e.g., shallow nets and deep nets) or even model types (e.g., Bayesian models and neural models). This review paper summarizes some recent prominent research towards this direction, particularly for speech and language processing. We also report some results from our group and highlight the potential of this very interesting research field.Comment: 13 pages, APSIPA 201

Multi-task Learning of Pairwise Sequence Classification Tasks Over Disparate Label Spaces

We combine multi-task learning and semi-supervised learning by inducing a joint embedding space between disparate label spaces and learning transfer functions between label embeddings, enabling us to jointly leverage unlabelled data and auxiliary, annotated datasets. We evaluate our approach on a variety of sequence classification tasks with disparate label spaces. We outperform strong single and multi-task baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art for topic-based sentiment analysis.Comment: To appear at NAACL 2018 (long

Symbolic inductive bias for visually grounded learning of spoken language

A widespread approach to processing spoken language is to first automatically transcribe it into text. An alternative is to use an end-to-end approach: recent works have proposed to learn semantic embeddings of spoken language from images with spoken captions, without an intermediate transcription step. We propose to use multitask learning to exploit existing transcribed speech within the end-to-end setting. We describe a three-task architecture which combines the objectives of matching spoken captions with corresponding images, speech with text, and text with images. We show that the addition of the speech/text task leads to substantial performance improvements on image retrieval when compared to training the speech/image task in isolation. We conjecture that this is due to a strong inductive bias transcribed speech provides to the model, and offer supporting evidence for this.Comment: ACL 201