9,526 research outputs found
Islands in the grammar? Standards of evidence
When considering how a complex system operates, the observable behavior depends upon both architectural properties of the system and the principles governing its operation. As a simple example, the behavior of computer chess programs depends upon both the processing speed and resources of the computer and the programmed rules that determine how the computer selects its next move. Despite having very similar search techniques, a computer from the 1990s might make a move that its 1970s forerunner would overlook simply because it had more raw computational power. From the naïve observer’s perspective, however, it is not superficially evident if a particular move is dispreferred or overlooked because of computational limitations or the search strategy and decision algorithm. In the case of computers, evidence for the source of any particular behavior can ultimately be found by inspecting the code and tracking the decision process of the computer. But with the human mind, such options are not yet available. The preference for certain behaviors and the dispreference for others may theoretically follow from cognitive limitations or from task-related principles that preclude certain kinds of cognitive operations, or from some combination of the two. This uncertainty gives rise to the fundamental problem of finding evidence for one explanation over the other. Such a problem arises in the analysis of syntactic island effects – the focu
Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths
The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity:
dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate
two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend
arises from an independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings
practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that
crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths, i.e. sentences with shorter
dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We are able to reject
the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative
hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of language.Comment: the discussion section has been expanded significantly; in press in
Complexity (Wiley
Deep learning for extracting protein-protein interactions from biomedical literature
State-of-the-art methods for protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction are
primarily feature-based or kernel-based by leveraging lexical and syntactic
information. But how to incorporate such knowledge in the recent deep learning
methods remains an open question. In this paper, we propose a multichannel
dependency-based convolutional neural network model (McDepCNN). It applies one
channel to the embedding vector of each word in the sentence, and another
channel to the embedding vector of the head of the corresponding word.
Therefore, the model can use richer information obtained from different
channels. Experiments on two public benchmarking datasets, AIMed and BioInfer,
demonstrate that McDepCNN compares favorably to the state-of-the-art
rich-feature and single-kernel based methods. In addition, McDepCNN achieves
24.4% relative improvement in F1-score over the state-of-the-art methods on
cross-corpus evaluation and 12% improvement in F1-score over kernel-based
methods on "difficult" instances. These results suggest that McDepCNN
generalizes more easily over different corpora, and is capable of capturing
long distance features in the sentences.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on
Biomedical Natural Language Processing, 10 pages, 2 figures, 6 table
Tracking Typological Traits of Uralic Languages in Distributed Language Representations
Although linguistic typology has a long history, computational approaches
have only recently gained popularity. The use of distributed representations in
computational linguistics has also become increasingly popular. A recent
development is to learn distributed representations of language, such that
typologically similar languages are spatially close to one another. Although
empirical successes have been shown for such language representations, they
have not been subjected to much typological probing. In this paper, we first
look at whether this type of language representations are empirically useful
for model transfer between Uralic languages in deep neural networks. We then
investigate which typological features are encoded in these representations by
attempting to predict features in the World Atlas of Language Structures, at
various stages of fine-tuning of the representations. We focus on Uralic
languages, and find that some typological traits can be automatically inferred
with accuracies well above a strong baseline.Comment: Finnish abstract included in the pape
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