Learning Bilingual Word Representations by Marginalizing Alignments

We present a probabilistic model that simultaneously learns alignments and distributed representations for bilingual data. By marginalizing over word alignments the model captures a larger semantic context than prior work relying on hard alignments. The advantage of this approach is demonstrated in a cross-lingual classification task, where we outperform the prior published state of the art.Comment: Proceedings of ACL 2014 (Short Papers

Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend

Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now large scale training and test datasets have been missing for this type of evaluation. In this work we define a new methodology that resolves this bottleneck and provides large scale supervised reading comprehension data. This allows us to develop a class of attention based deep neural networks that learn to read real documents and answer complex questions with minimal prior knowledge of language structure.Comment: Appears in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28 (NIPS 2015). 14 pages, 13 figure

Deep learning for reading and understanding language

This thesis presents novel tasks and deep learning methods for machine reading comprehension and question answering with the goal of achieving natural language understanding. First, we consider a semantic parsing task where the model understands sentences and translates them into a logical form or instructions. We present a novel semi-supervised sequential autoencoder that considers language as a discrete sequential latent variable and semantic parses as the observations. This model allows us to leverage synthetically generated unpaired logical forms, and thereby alleviate the lack of supervised training data. We show the semi-supervised model outperforms a supervised model when trained with the additional generated data. Second, reading comprehension requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering is conventionally used to assess reading comprehension ability, in both artificial agents and children learning to read. We propose a new, challenging, supervised reading comprehension task. We gather a large-scale dataset of news stories from the CNN and Daily Mail websites with Cloze-style questions created from the highlights. This dataset allows for the first time training deep learning models for reading comprehension. We also introduce novel attention-based models for this task and present qualitative analysis of the attention mechanism. Finally, following the recent advances in reading comprehension in both models and task design, we further propose a new task for understanding complex narratives, NarrativeQA, consisting of full texts of books and movie scripts. We collect human written questions and answers based on high-level plot summaries. This task is designed to encourage development of models for language understanding; it is designed so that successfully answering their questions requires understanding the underlying narrative rather than relying on shallow pattern matching or salience. We show that although humans solve the tasks easily, standard reading comprehension models struggle on the tasks presented here.</p