18,166 research outputs found
A Syntactic Neural Model for General-Purpose Code Generation
We consider the problem of parsing natural language descriptions into source
code written in a general-purpose programming language like Python. Existing
data-driven methods treat this problem as a language generation task without
considering the underlying syntax of the target programming language. Informed
by previous work in semantic parsing, in this paper we propose a novel neural
architecture powered by a grammar model to explicitly capture the target syntax
as prior knowledge. Experiments find this an effective way to scale up to
generation of complex programs from natural language descriptions, achieving
state-of-the-art results that well outperform previous code generation and
semantic parsing approaches.Comment: To appear in ACL 201
On Tree-Based Neural Sentence Modeling
Neural networks with tree-based sentence encoders have shown better results
on many downstream tasks. Most of existing tree-based encoders adopt syntactic
parsing trees as the explicit structure prior. To study the effectiveness of
different tree structures, we replace the parsing trees with trivial trees
(i.e., binary balanced tree, left-branching tree and right-branching tree) in
the encoders. Though trivial trees contain no syntactic information, those
encoders get competitive or even better results on all of the ten downstream
tasks we investigated. This surprising result indicates that explicit syntax
guidance may not be the main contributor to the superior performances of
tree-based neural sentence modeling. Further analysis show that tree modeling
gives better results when crucial words are closer to the final representation.
Additional experiments give more clues on how to design an effective tree-based
encoder. Our code is open-source and available at
https://github.com/ExplorerFreda/TreeEnc.Comment: To Appear at EMNLP 201
Correlating neural and symbolic representations of language
Analysis methods which enable us to better understand the representations and
functioning of neural models of language are increasingly needed as deep
learning becomes the dominant approach in NLP. Here we present two methods
based on Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and Tree Kernels (TK) which
allow us to directly quantify how strongly the information encoded in neural
activation patterns corresponds to information represented by symbolic
structures such as syntax trees. We first validate our methods on the case of a
simple synthetic language for arithmetic expressions with clearly defined
syntax and semantics, and show that they exhibit the expected pattern of
results. We then apply our methods to correlate neural representations of
English sentences with their constituency parse trees.Comment: ACL 201
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