795 research outputs found
Human-Level Performance on Word Analogy Questions by Latent Relational Analysis
This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and information retrieval. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason/stone is analogous to the pair carpenter/wood; the relations between mason and stone are highly similar to the relations between carpenter and wood. Past work on semantic similarity measures has mainly been concerned with attributional similarity. For instance, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can measure the degree of similarity between two words, but not between two relations. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to the task of measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus (they are not predefined), (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data (it is also used this way in LSA), and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore reformulations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying noun-modifier relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM, while using a smaller corpus
Unsupervised Extraction of Representative Concepts from Scientific Literature
This paper studies the automated categorization and extraction of scientific
concepts from titles of scientific articles, in order to gain a deeper
understanding of their key contributions and facilitate the construction of a
generic academic knowledgebase. Towards this goal, we propose an unsupervised,
domain-independent, and scalable two-phase algorithm to type and extract key
concept mentions into aspects of interest (e.g., Techniques, Applications,
etc.). In the first phase of our algorithm we propose PhraseType, a
probabilistic generative model which exploits textual features and limited POS
tags to broadly segment text snippets into aspect-typed phrases. We extend this
model to simultaneously learn aspect-specific features and identify academic
domains in multi-domain corpora, since the two tasks mutually enhance each
other. In the second phase, we propose an approach based on adaptor grammars to
extract fine grained concept mentions from the aspect-typed phrases without the
need for any external resources or human effort, in a purely data-driven
manner. We apply our technique to study literature from diverse scientific
domains and show significant gains over state-of-the-art concept extraction
techniques. We also present a qualitative analysis of the results obtained.Comment: Published as a conference paper at CIKM 201
Similarity of Semantic Relations
There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is
correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity,
which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high
degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs
of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their
relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason:stone is analogous
to the pair carpenter:wood. This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA),
a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many
areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation,
and information retrieval. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information
retrieval has been adapted to measuring relational similarity,
achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice
word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is
characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus.
LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically
from the corpus, (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency
data, and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore variations of the
word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the
average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying semantic relations, LRA
achieves similar gains over the VSM
Non-Compositional Term Dependence for Information Retrieval
Modelling term dependence in IR aims to identify co-occurring terms that are
too heavily dependent on each other to be treated as a bag of words, and to
adapt the indexing and ranking accordingly. Dependent terms are predominantly
identified using lexical frequency statistics, assuming that (a) if terms
co-occur often enough in some corpus, they are semantically dependent; (b) the
more often they co-occur, the more semantically dependent they are. This
assumption is not always correct: the frequency of co-occurring terms can be
separate from the strength of their semantic dependence. E.g. "red tape" might
be overall less frequent than "tape measure" in some corpus, but this does not
mean that "red"+"tape" are less dependent than "tape"+"measure". This is
especially the case for non-compositional phrases, i.e. phrases whose meaning
cannot be composed from the individual meanings of their terms (such as the
phrase "red tape" meaning bureaucracy). Motivated by this lack of distinction
between the frequency and strength of term dependence in IR, we present a
principled approach for handling term dependence in queries, using both lexical
frequency and semantic evidence. We focus on non-compositional phrases,
extending a recent unsupervised model for their detection [21] to IR. Our
approach, integrated into ranking using Markov Random Fields [31], yields
effectiveness gains over competitive TREC baselines, showing that there is
still room for improvement in the very well-studied area of term dependence in
IR
An ontology-aided, natural language-based approach for multi-constraint BIM model querying
Being able to efficiently retrieve the required building information is
critical for construction project stakeholders to carry out their engineering
and management activities. Natural language interface (NLI) systems are
emerging as a time and cost-effective way to query Building Information Models
(BIMs). However, the existing methods cannot logically combine different
constraints to perform fine-grained queries, dampening the usability of natural
language (NL)-based BIM queries. This paper presents a novel ontology-aided
semantic parser to automatically map natural language queries (NLQs) that
contain different attribute and relational constraints into computer-readable
codes for querying complex BIM models. First, a modular ontology was developed
to represent NL expressions of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) concepts and
relationships, and was then populated with entities from target BIM models to
assimilate project-specific information. Hereafter, the ontology-aided semantic
parser progressively extracts concepts, relationships, and value restrictions
from NLQs to fully identify constraint conditions, resulting in standard SPARQL
queries with reasoning rules to successfully retrieve IFC-based BIM models. The
approach was evaluated based on 225 NLQs collected from BIM users, with a 91%
accuracy rate. Finally, a case study about the design-checking of a real-world
residential building demonstrates the practical value of the proposed approach
in the construction industry
Statistical parsing of noun phrase structure
Noun phrases (NPs) are a crucial part of natural language, exhibiting in many cases an extremely complex structure. However, NP structure is largely ignored by the statistical parsing field, as the most widely-used corpus is not annotated with it. This lack of gold-standard data has restricted all previous efforts to parse NPs, making it impossible to perform the supervised experiments that have achieved high performance in so many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. We comprehensively solve this problem by manually annotating NP structure for the entire Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank. The inter-annotator agreement scores that we attain refute the belief that the task is too difficult, and demonstrate that consistent NP annotation is possible. Our gold-standard NP data is now available and will be useful for all parsers. We present three statistical methods for parsing NP structure. Firstly, we apply the Collins (2003) model, and find that its recovery of NP structure is significantly worse than its overall performance. Through much experimentation, we determine that this is not a result of the special base-NP model used by the parser, but primarily caused by a lack of lexical information. Secondly, we construct a wide-coverage, large-scale NP Bracketing system, applying a supervised model to achieve excellent results. Our Penn Treebank data set, which is orders of magnitude larger than those used previously, makes this possible for the first time. We then implement and experiment with a wide variety of features in order to determine an optimal model. Having achieved this, we use the NP Bracketing system to reanalyse NPs outputted by the Collins (2003) parser. Our post-processor outperforms this state-of-the-art parser. For our third model, we convert the NP data to CCGbank (Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2007), a corpus that uses the Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) formalism. We experiment with a CCG parser and again, implement features that improve performance. We also evaluate the CCG parser against the Briscoe and Carroll (2006) reannotation of DepBank (King et al., 2003), another corpus that annotates NP structure. This supplies further evidence that parser performance is increased by improving the representation of NP structure. Finally, the error analysis we carry out on the CCG data shows that again, a lack of lexicalisation causes difficulties for the parser. We find that NPs are particularly reliant on this lexical information, due to their exceptional productivity and the reduced explicitness present in modifier sequences. Our results show that NP parsing is a significantly harder task than parsing in general. This thesis comprehensively analyses the NP parsing task. Our contributions allow wide-coverage, large-scale NP parsers to be constructed for the first time, and motivate further NP parsing research for the future. The results of our work can provide significant benefits for many NLP tasks, as the crucial information contained in NP structure is now available for all downstream systems
Action Modifiers:Learning from Adverbs in Instructional Videos
We present a method to learn a representation for adverbs from instructional
videos using weak supervision from the accompanying narrations. Key to our
method is the fact that the visual representation of the adverb is highly
dependant on the action to which it applies, although the same adverb will
modify multiple actions in a similar way. For instance, while 'spread quickly'
and 'mix quickly' will look dissimilar, we can learn a common representation
that allows us to recognize both, among other actions. We formulate this as an
embedding problem, and use scaled dot-product attention to learn from
weakly-supervised video narrations. We jointly learn adverbs as invertible
transformations operating on the embedding space, so as to add or remove the
effect of the adverb. As there is no prior work on weakly supervised learning
from adverbs, we gather paired action-adverb annotations from a subset of the
HowTo100M dataset for 6 adverbs: quickly/slowly, finely/coarsely, and
partially/completely. Our method outperforms all baselines for video-to-adverb
retrieval with a performance of 0.719 mAP. We also demonstrate our model's
ability to attend to the relevant video parts in order to determine the adverb
for a given action.Comment: CVPR 202
Joint Video and Text Parsing for Understanding Events and Answering Queries
We propose a framework for parsing video and text jointly for understanding
events and answering user queries. Our framework produces a parse graph that
represents the compositional structures of spatial information (objects and
scenes), temporal information (actions and events) and causal information
(causalities between events and fluents) in the video and text. The knowledge
representation of our framework is based on a spatial-temporal-causal And-Or
graph (S/T/C-AOG), which jointly models possible hierarchical compositions of
objects, scenes and events as well as their interactions and mutual contexts,
and specifies the prior probabilistic distribution of the parse graphs. We
present a probabilistic generative model for joint parsing that captures the
relations between the input video/text, their corresponding parse graphs and
the joint parse graph. Based on the probabilistic model, we propose a joint
parsing system consisting of three modules: video parsing, text parsing and
joint inference. Video parsing and text parsing produce two parse graphs from
the input video and text respectively. The joint inference module produces a
joint parse graph by performing matching, deduction and revision on the video
and text parse graphs. The proposed framework has the following objectives:
Firstly, we aim at deep semantic parsing of video and text that goes beyond the
traditional bag-of-words approaches; Secondly, we perform parsing and reasoning
across the spatial, temporal and causal dimensions based on the joint S/T/C-AOG
representation; Thirdly, we show that deep joint parsing facilitates subsequent
applications such as generating narrative text descriptions and answering
queries in the forms of who, what, when, where and why. We empirically
evaluated our system based on comparison against ground-truth as well as
accuracy of query answering and obtained satisfactory results
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