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

Matrix-valued θ\theta-deformed bi-orthogonal polynomials, Non-commutative Toda theory and B\"acklund transformation

This paper is devoted to revealing the relationship between matrix-valued $\theta$-deformed bi-orthogonal polynomials and non-commutative Toda-type hierarchies. In this procedure, Wronski quasi-determinants are widely used and play the role of non-commutative $\tau$-functions. At the same time, B\"acklund transformations are realized by using a moment modification method and non-commutative $\theta$-deformed Volterra hierarchies are obtained, which contain the known examples of the Itoh-Narita-Bogoyavlensky lattices and the fractional Volterra hierarchy.Comment: 30 pages. Comments are welcom

Exact solution of the trigonometric SU(3) spin chain with generic off-diagonal boundary reflections

The nested off-diagonal Bethe ansatz is generalized to study the quantum spin chain associated with the $SU_q(3)$ R-matrix and generic integrable non-diagonal boundary conditions. By using the fusion technique, certain closed operator identities among the fused transfer matrices at the inhomogeneous points are derived. The corresponding asymptotic behaviors of the transfer matrices and their values at some special points are given in detail. Based on the functional analysis, a nested inhomogeneous T-Q relations and Bethe ansatz equations of the system are obtained. These results can be naturally generalized to cases related to the $SU_q(n)$ algebra.Comment: published version, 27 pages, 1 table, 1 figur