Learning General Purpose Distributed Sentence Representations via Large Scale Multi-task Learning

A lot of the recent success in natural language processing (NLP) has been driven by distributed vector representations of words trained on large amounts of text in an unsupervised manner. These representations are typically used as general purpose features for words across a range of NLP problems. However, extending this success to learning representations of sequences of words, such as sentences, remains an open problem. Recent work has explored unsupervised as well as supervised learning techniques with different training objectives to learn general purpose fixed-length sentence representations. In this work, we present a simple, effective multi-task learning framework for sentence representations that combines the inductive biases of diverse training objectives in a single model. We train this model on several data sources with multiple training objectives on over 100 million sentences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that sharing a single recurrent sentence encoder across weakly related tasks leads to consistent improvements over previous methods. We present substantial improvements in the context of transfer learning and low-resource settings using our learned general-purpose representations.Comment: Accepted at ICLR 201

A Novel Distributed Representation of News (DRNews) for Stock Market Predictions

In this study, a novel Distributed Representation of News (DRNews) model is developed and applied in deep learning-based stock market predictions. With the merit of integrating contextual information and cross-documental knowledge, the DRNews model creates news vectors that describe both the semantic information and potential linkages among news events through an attributed news network. Two stock market prediction tasks, namely the short-term stock movement prediction and stock crises early warning, are implemented in the framework of the attention-based Long Short Term-Memory (LSTM) network. It is suggested that DRNews substantially enhances the results of both tasks comparing with five baselines of news embedding models. Further, the attention mechanism suggests that short-term stock trend and stock market crises both receive influences from daily news with the former demonstrates more critical responses on the information related to the stock market {\em per se}, whilst the latter draws more concerns on the banking sector and economic policies.Comment: 25 page

Attentive Convolution: Equipping CNNs with RNN-style Attention Mechanisms

In NLP, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have benefited less than recurrent neural networks (RNNs) from attention mechanisms. We hypothesize that this is because the attention in CNNs has been mainly implemented as attentive pooling (i.e., it is applied to pooling) rather than as attentive convolution (i.e., it is integrated into convolution). Convolution is the differentiator of CNNs in that it can powerfully model the higher-level representation of a word by taking into account its local fixed-size context in the input text t^x. In this work, we propose an attentive convolution network, ATTCONV. It extends the context scope of the convolution operation, deriving higher-level features for a word not only from local context, but also information extracted from nonlocal context by the attention mechanism commonly used in RNNs. This nonlocal context can come (i) from parts of the input text t^x that are distant or (ii) from extra (i.e., external) contexts t^y. Experiments on sentence modeling with zero-context (sentiment analysis), single-context (textual entailment) and multiple-context (claim verification) demonstrate the effectiveness of ATTCONV in sentence representation learning with the incorporation of context. In particular, attentive convolution outperforms attentive pooling and is a strong competitor to popular attentive RNNs.Comment: Camera-ready for TACL. 16 page