Self-Adaptive Hierarchical Sentence Model

The ability to accurately model a sentence at varying stages (e.g., word-phrase-sentence) plays a central role in natural language processing. As an effort towards this goal we propose a self-adaptive hierarchical sentence model (AdaSent). AdaSent effectively forms a hierarchy of representations from words to phrases and then to sentences through recursive gated local composition of adjacent segments. We design a competitive mechanism (through gating networks) to allow the representations of the same sentence to be engaged in a particular learning task (e.g., classification), therefore effectively mitigating the gradient vanishing problem persistent in other recursive models. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that AdaSent can automatically form and select the representations suitable for the task at hand during training, yielding superior classification performance over competitor models on 5 benchmark data sets.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted as a full paper at IJCAI 201

Modeling Financial Time Series with Artificial Neural Networks

Financial time series convey the decisions and actions of a population of human actors over time. Econometric and regressive models have been developed in the past decades for analyzing these time series. More recently, biologically inspired artificial neural network models have been shown to overcome some of the main challenges of traditional techniques by better exploiting the non-linear, non-stationary, and oscillatory nature of noisy, chaotic human interactions. This review paper explores the options, benefits, and weaknesses of the various forms of artificial neural networks as compared with regression techniques in the field of financial time series analysis.CELEST, a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center (SBE-0354378); SyNAPSE program of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (HR001109-03-0001

Adversarial Connective-exploiting Networks for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Implicit discourse relation classification is of great challenge due to the lack of connectives as strong linguistic cues, which motivates the use of annotated implicit connectives to improve the recognition. We propose a feature imitation framework in which an implicit relation network is driven to learn from another neural network with access to connectives, and thus encouraged to extract similarly salient features for accurate classification. We develop an adversarial model to enable an adaptive imitation scheme through competition between the implicit network and a rival feature discriminator. Our method effectively transfers discriminability of connectives to the implicit features, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PDTB benchmark.Comment: To appear in ACL201