20,140 research outputs found
Statistical Learning and Prosodic Bootstrapping Differentially Affect Neural Synchronization during Speech Segmentation
Neural oscillations constitute an intrinsic property of functional brain organization that facilitates the tracking of linguistic units at multiple time scales through brain-to-stimulus alignment. This ubiquitous neural principle has been shown to facilitate speech segmentation and word learning based on statistical regularities. However, there is no common agreement yet on whether speech segmentation is mediated by a transition of neural synchronization from syllable to word rate, or whether the two time scales are concurrently tracked. Furthermore, it is currently unknown whether syllable transition probability contributes to speech segmentation when lexical stress cues can be directly used to extract word forms. Using inter-trial coherence (ITC) analyses in combinations with Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), we showed that speech segmentation based on both statistical regularities and lexical stress cues was accompanied by concurrent neural synchronization to syllables and words. In particular, ITC at the word rate was generally higher in structured compared to random sequences, and this effect was particularly pronounced in the flat condition. Furthermore, ITC at the syllable rate dynamically increased across the blocks of the flat condition, whereas a similar modulation was not observed in the stressed condition. Notably, in the flat condition ITC at both time scales correlated with each other, and changes in neural synchronization were accompanied by a rapid reconfiguration of the P200 and N400 components with a close relationship between ITC and ERPs. These results highlight distinct computational principles governing neural synchronization to pertinent linguistic units while segmenting speech under different listening conditions
Neural Word Segmentation with Rich Pretraining
Neural word segmentation research has benefited from large-scale raw texts by
leveraging them for pretraining character and word embeddings. On the other
hand, statistical segmentation research has exploited richer sources of
external information, such as punctuation, automatic segmentation and POS. We
investigate the effectiveness of a range of external training sources for
neural word segmentation by building a modular segmentation model, pretraining
the most important submodule using rich external sources. Results show that
such pretraining significantly improves the model, leading to accuracies
competitive to the best methods on six benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201
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
Fast and Accurate Neural Word Segmentation for Chinese
Neural models with minimal feature engineering have achieved competitive
performance against traditional methods for the task of Chinese word
segmentation. However, both training and working procedures of the current
neural models are computationally inefficient. This paper presents a greedy
neural word segmenter with balanced word and character embedding inputs to
alleviate the existing drawbacks. Our segmenter is truly end-to-end, capable of
performing segmentation much faster and even more accurate than
state-of-the-art neural models on Chinese benchmark datasets.Comment: To appear in ACL201
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