2,137 research outputs found
Nightmare at test time: How punctuation prevents parsers from generalizing
Punctuation is a strong indicator of syntactic structure, and parsers trained
on text with punctuation often rely heavily on this signal. Punctuation is a
diversion, however, since human language processing does not rely on
punctuation to the same extent, and in informal texts, we therefore often leave
out punctuation. We also use punctuation ungrammatically for emphatic or
creative purposes, or simply by mistake. We show that (a) dependency parsers
are sensitive to both absence of punctuation and to alternative uses; (b)
neural parsers tend to be more sensitive than vintage parsers; (c) training
neural parsers without punctuation outperforms all out-of-the-box parsers
across all scenarios where punctuation departs from standard punctuation. Our
main experiments are on synthetically corrupted data to study the effect of
punctuation in isolation and avoid potential confounds, but we also show
effects on out-of-domain data.Comment: Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP, EMNLP 2018
worksho
Comparing constituency and dependency representations for SMT phrase-extraction
We consider the value of replacing and/or combining string-based methods with syntax-based methods for phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT),
and we also consider the relative merits of using constituency-annotated vs. dependency-annotated training data. We automatically derive two subtree-aligned treebanks,
dependency-based and constituency-based, from a parallel EnglishâFrench corpus and extract syntactically motivated word- and phrase-pairs. We automatically measure PB-SMT quality. The results show that combining string-based and syntax-based word- and phrase-pairs can improve translation quality irrespective of the type of syntactic annotation. Furthermore, using dependency annotation yields greater translation quality than constituency annotation for PB-SMT
An Empirical Comparison of Parsing Methods for Stanford Dependencies
Stanford typed dependencies are a widely desired representation of natural
language sentences, but parsing is one of the major computational bottlenecks
in text analysis systems. In light of the evolving definition of the Stanford
dependencies and developments in statistical dependency parsing algorithms,
this paper revisits the question of Cer et al. (2010): what is the tradeoff
between accuracy and speed in obtaining Stanford dependencies in particular? We
also explore the effects of input representations on this tradeoff:
part-of-speech tags, the novel use of an alternative dependency representation
as input, and distributional representaions of words. We find that direct
dependency parsing is a more viable solution than it was found to be in the
past. An accompanying software release can be found at:
http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/TBSDComment: 13 pages, 2 figure
Improving dependency label accuracy using statistical post-editing: A cross-framework study
We present a statistical post-editing method for modifying the dependency labels in a dependency analysis. We test the method using two English datasets, three parsing systems and three labelled dependency schemes. We demonstrate how it can be used both to improve dependency label accuracy in parser output and highlight problems with and differences between constituency-to-dependency conversions
An attentive neural architecture for joint segmentation and parsing and its application to real estate ads
In processing human produced text using natural language processing (NLP)
techniques, two fundamental subtasks that arise are (i) segmentation of the
plain text into meaningful subunits (e.g., entities), and (ii) dependency
parsing, to establish relations between subunits. In this paper, we develop a
relatively simple and effective neural joint model that performs both
segmentation and dependency parsing together, instead of one after the other as
in most state-of-the-art works. We will focus in particular on the real estate
ad setting, aiming to convert an ad to a structured description, which we name
property tree, comprising the tasks of (1) identifying important entities of a
property (e.g., rooms) from classifieds and (2) structuring them into a tree
format. In this work, we propose a new joint model that is able to tackle the
two tasks simultaneously and construct the property tree by (i) avoiding the
error propagation that would arise from the subtasks one after the other in a
pipelined fashion, and (ii) exploiting the interactions between the subtasks.
For this purpose, we perform an extensive comparative study of the pipeline
methods and the new proposed joint model, reporting an improvement of over
three percentage points in the overall edge F1 score of the property tree.
Also, we propose attention methods, to encourage our model to focus on salient
tokens during the construction of the property tree. Thus we experimentally
demonstrate the usefulness of attentive neural architectures for the proposed
joint model, showcasing a further improvement of two percentage points in edge
F1 score for our application.Comment: Preprint - Accepted for publication in Expert Systems with
Application
Natural Language Processing with Small Feed-Forward Networks
We show that small and shallow feed-forward neural networks can achieve near
state-of-the-art results on a range of unstructured and structured language
processing tasks while being considerably cheaper in memory and computational
requirements than deep recurrent models. Motivated by resource-constrained
environments like mobile phones, we showcase simple techniques for obtaining
such small neural network models, and investigate different tradeoffs when
deciding how to allocate a small memory budget.Comment: EMNLP 2017 short pape
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