1,250 research outputs found
Text to 3D Scene Generation with Rich Lexical Grounding
The ability to map descriptions of scenes to 3D geometric representations has
many applications in areas such as art, education, and robotics. However, prior
work on the text to 3D scene generation task has used manually specified object
categories and language that identifies them. We introduce a dataset of 3D
scenes annotated with natural language descriptions and learn from this data
how to ground textual descriptions to physical objects. Our method successfully
grounds a variety of lexical terms to concrete referents, and we show
quantitatively that our method improves 3D scene generation over previous work
using purely rule-based methods. We evaluate the fidelity and plausibility of
3D scenes generated with our grounding approach through human judgments. To
ease evaluation on this task, we also introduce an automated metric that
strongly correlates with human judgments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. To appear in ACL-IJCNLP 201
Robust Grammatical Analysis for Spoken Dialogue Systems
We argue that grammatical analysis is a viable alternative to concept
spotting for processing spoken input in a practical spoken dialogue system. We
discuss the structure of the grammar, and a model for robust parsing which
combines linguistic sources of information and statistical sources of
information. We discuss test results suggesting that grammatical processing
allows fast and accurate processing of spoken input.Comment: Accepted for JNL
Getting Past the Language Gap: Innovations in Machine Translation
In this chapter, we will be reviewing state of the art machine translation systems, and will discuss innovative methods for machine translation, highlighting the most promising techniques and applications. Machine translation (MT) has benefited from a revitalization in the last 10 years or so, after a period of relatively slow activity. In 2005 the field received a jumpstart when a powerful complete experimental package for building MT systems from scratch became freely available as a result of the unified efforts of the MOSES international consortium. Around the same time, hierarchical methods had been introduced by Chinese researchers, which allowed the introduction and use of syntactic information in translation modeling. Furthermore, the advances in the related field of computational linguistics, making off-the-shelf taggers and parsers readily available, helped give MT an additional boost. Yet there is still more progress to be made. For example, MT will be enhanced greatly when both syntax and semantics are on board: this still presents a major challenge though many advanced research groups are currently pursuing ways to meet this challenge head-on. The next generation of MT will consist of a collection of hybrid systems. It also augurs well for the mobile environment, as we look forward to more advanced and improved technologies that enable the working of Speech-To-Speech machine translation on hand-held devices, i.e. speech recognition and speech synthesis. We review all of these developments and point out in the final section some of the most promising research avenues for the future of MT
Automatic Population of Structured Reports from Narrative Pathology Reports
There are a number of advantages for the use of structured pathology reports: they can ensure the accuracy and completeness of pathology reporting; it is easier for the referring doctors to glean pertinent information from them. The goal of this thesis is to extract pertinent information from free-text pathology reports and automatically populate structured reports for cancer diseases and identify the commonalities and differences in processing principles to obtain maximum accuracy. Three pathology corpora were annotated with entities and relationships between the entities in this study, namely the melanoma corpus, the colorectal cancer corpus and the lymphoma corpus. A supervised machine-learning based-approach, utilising conditional random fields learners, was developed to recognise medical entities from the corpora. By feature engineering, the best feature configurations were attained, which boosted the F-scores significantly from 4.2% to 6.8% on the training sets. Without proper negation and uncertainty detection, the quality of the structured reports will be diminished. The negation and uncertainty detection modules were built to handle this problem. The modules obtained overall F-scores ranging from 76.6% to 91.0% on the test sets. A relation extraction system was presented to extract four relations from the lymphoma corpus. The system achieved very good performance on the training set, with 100% F-score obtained by the rule-based module and 97.2% F-score attained by the support vector machines classifier. Rule-based approaches were used to generate the structured outputs and populate them to predefined templates. The rule-based system attained over 97% F-scores on the training sets. A pipeline system was implemented with an assembly of all the components described above. It achieved promising results in the end-to-end evaluations, with 86.5%, 84.2% and 78.9% F-scores on the melanoma, colorectal cancer and lymphoma test sets respectively
Human-in-the-Loop Question Answering with Natural Language Interaction
Generalizing beyond the training examples is the primary goal of machine learning. In natural language processing (NLP), impressive models struggle to generalize when faced with test examples that differ from the training examples: e.g., in genre, domain, or language. I study interactive methods that overcome such limitations by seeking feedback from human users to successfully complete the task at hand and improve over time while on the job. Unlike previous work that adopts simple forms of feedback (e.g., labeling predictions as correct/wrong or answering yes/no clarification questions), I focus on using free-form natural language as the communication interface for providing feedback which can convey richer information and offer a more flexible interaction.
An essential skill that language-based interactive systems should have is to understand user utterances in conversational contexts. I study conversational question answering (CQA) in which humans interact with a question answering (QA) system by asking a sequence of related questions. CQA requires models to link questions together to resolve the conversational dependencies between them such as coreference and ellipsis. I introduce question-in-context rewriting to reduce context-dependent conversational questions to independent stand-alone questions that can be answered with existing QA models. I collect a large dataset of human rewrites and I use it to evaluate a set of models for the question rewriting task.
Next, I study semantic parsing in interactive settings in which users correct parsing errors using natural language feedback. Most existing work frames semantic parsing as a one-shot mapping task. I establish that the majority of parsing mistakes that recent neural text-to-SQL parsers make are minor. Hence, it is often feasible for humans to detect and suggest corrections for such mistakes if they have the opportunity to provide precise feedback. I describe an interactive text-to-SQL parsing system that enables users to inspect the inferred parses and correct any errors they find by providing feedback in free-form natural language. I construct SPLASH: a large dataset of SQL correction instances paired with a diverse set of human-authored natural language feedback utterances. Using SPLASH, I posed a new task: given a question paired with an initial erroneous SQL parse, to what extent can we correct the parse based on a provided natural language feedback?
Then, I present NL-EDIT: a neural model for the correction task. NL-EDIT combines two key ideas: 1) interpreting the feedback in the context of the other elements of the interaction and, 2) explicitly generating edit operations to correct the initial query instead of re-generating the full query from scratch. I create a simple SQL editing language whose basic units are add/delete operations applied to different SQL clauses. I discuss evaluation methods that help understand the usefulness and limitations of semantic parse correction models.
I conclude this thesis by identifying three broad research directions for further advancing collaborative human-computer NLP: (1) developing user-centered explanations, (2) designing and evaluating interaction mechanisms, and (3) learning from interactions
Combination Strategies for Semantic Role Labeling
This paper introduces and analyzes a battery of inference models for the
problem of semantic role labeling: one based on constraint satisfaction, and
several strategies that model the inference as a meta-learning problem using
discriminative classifiers. These classifiers are developed with a rich set of
novel features that encode proposition and sentence-level information. To our
knowledge, this is the first work that: (a) performs a thorough analysis of
learning-based inference models for semantic role labeling, and (b) compares
several inference strategies in this context. We evaluate the proposed
inference strategies in the framework of the CoNLL-2005 shared task using only
automatically-generated syntactic information. The extensive experimental
evaluation and analysis indicates that all the proposed inference strategies
are successful -they all outperform the current best results reported in the
CoNLL-2005 evaluation exercise- but each of the proposed approaches has its
advantages and disadvantages. Several important traits of a state-of-the-art
SRL combination strategy emerge from this analysis: (i) individual models
should be combined at the granularity of candidate arguments rather than at the
granularity of complete solutions; (ii) the best combination strategy uses an
inference model based in learning; and (iii) the learning-based inference
benefits from max-margin classifiers and global feedback
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Advances in statistical script learning
When humans encode information into natural language, they do so with the
clear assumption that the reader will be able to seamlessly make inferences
based on world knowledge. For example, given the sentence ``Mrs. Dalloway said
she would buy the flowers herself,'' one can make a number of probable
inferences based on event co-occurrences: she bought flowers, she went to a
store, she took the flowers home, and so on.
Observing this, it is clear that many different useful natural language
end-tasks could benefit from models of events as they typically co-occur
(so-called script models).
Robust question-answering systems must be able to infer highly-probable implicit
events from what is explicitly stated in a text, as must robust
information-extraction systems that map from unstructured text to formal
assertions about relations expressed in the text. Coreference resolution
systems, semantic role labeling, and even syntactic parsing systems could, in
principle, benefit from event co-occurrence models.
To this end, we present a number of contributions related to statistical
event co-occurrence models. First, we investigate a method of incorporating
multiple entities into events in a count-based co-occurrence model. We find that
modeling multiple entities interacting across events allows for improved
empirical performance on the task of modeling sequences of events in documents.
Second, we give a method of applying Recurrent Neural Network sequence models
to the task of predicting held-out predicate-argument structures from documents.
This model allows us to easily incorporate entity noun information, and can
allow for more complex, higher-arity events than a count-based co-occurrence
model. We find the neural model improves performance considerably over the
count-based co-occurrence model.
Third, we investigate the performance of a sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder
neural model on the task of predicting held-out predicate-argument events from
text. This model does not explicitly model any external syntactic information,
and does not require a parser. We find the text-level model to be competitive in
predictive performance with an event level model directly mediated by an
external syntactic analysis.
Finally, motivated by this result, we investigate incorporating features derived
from these models into a baseline noun coreference resolution system. We find
that, while our additional features do not appreciably improve top-level
performance, we can nonetheless provide empirical improvement on a number of
restricted classes of difficult coreference decisions.Computer Science
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