2,547 research outputs found
A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods
Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or
longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information.
Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract
pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts)
the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is
also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and
methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful,
at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing
applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and
machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering
in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to
prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of
Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201
Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are
trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper
presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound
commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the
capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language
(VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into
VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for
validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data;
Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the
synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles
that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply
these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual
assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support
compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie
achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's
generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the
art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201
Paraphrase Generation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Automatic generation of paraphrases from a given sentence is an important yet
challenging task in natural language processing (NLP), and plays a key role in
a number of applications such as question answering, search, and dialogue. In
this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to paraphrase
generation. Specifically, we propose a new framework for the task, which
consists of a \textit{generator} and an \textit{evaluator}, both of which are
learned from data. The generator, built as a sequence-to-sequence learning
model, can produce paraphrases given a sentence. The evaluator, constructed as
a deep matching model, can judge whether two sentences are paraphrases of each
other. The generator is first trained by deep learning and then further
fine-tuned by reinforcement learning in which the reward is given by the
evaluator. For the learning of the evaluator, we propose two methods based on
supervised learning and inverse reinforcement learning respectively, depending
on the type of available training data. Empirical study shows that the learned
evaluator can guide the generator to produce more accurate paraphrases.
Experimental results demonstrate the proposed models (the generators)
outperform the state-of-the-art methods in paraphrase generation in both
automatic evaluation and human evaluation.Comment: EMNLP 201
Exploiting Rich Syntactic Information for Semantic Parsing with Graph-to-Sequence Model
Existing neural semantic parsers mainly utilize a sequence encoder, i.e., a
sequential LSTM, to extract word order features while neglecting other valuable
syntactic information such as dependency graph or constituent trees. In this
paper, we first propose to use the \textit{syntactic graph} to represent three
types of syntactic information, i.e., word order, dependency and constituency
features. We further employ a graph-to-sequence model to encode the syntactic
graph and decode a logical form. Experimental results on benchmark datasets
show that our model is comparable to the state-of-the-art on Jobs640, ATIS and
Geo880. Experimental results on adversarial examples demonstrate the robustness
of the model is also improved by encoding more syntactic information.Comment: EMNLP'1
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