Dependency Parsing with Dilated Iterated Graph CNNs

Dependency parses are an effective way to inject linguistic knowledge into many downstream tasks, and many practitioners wish to efficiently parse sentences at scale. Recent advances in GPU hardware have enabled neural networks to achieve significant gains over the previous best models, these models still fail to leverage GPUs' capability for massive parallelism due to their requirement of sequential processing of the sentence. In response, we propose Dilated Iterated Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (DIG-CNNs) for graph-based dependency parsing, a graph convolutional architecture that allows for efficient end-to-end GPU parsing. In experiments on the English Penn TreeBank benchmark, we show that DIG-CNNs perform on par with some of the best neural network parsers.Comment: 2nd Workshop on Structured Prediction for Natural Language Processing (at EMNLP '17

Modeling the Spread of Biologically-Inspired Internet Worms

Infections by malicious software, such as Internet worms, spreading on computer networks can have devastating consequences, resulting in loss of information, time, and money. To better understand how these worms spread, and thus how to more effectively limit future infections, we apply the household model from epidemiology to simulate the proliferation of adaptive and non-adaptive preference-scanning worms, which take advantage of biologically-inspired strategies. From scans of the actual distribution of Web servers on the Internet, we find that vulnerable machines seem to be highly clustered in Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address space, and our simulations suggest that this organization fosters the quick and comprehensive proliferation of preference-scanning Internet worms

Machine Learning Models for Efficient and Robust Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) has come of age. For example, semantic role labeling (SRL), which automatically annotates sentences with a labeled graph representing who did what to whom, has in the past ten years seen nearly 40% reduction in error, bringing it to useful accuracy. As a result, a myriad of practitioners now want to deploy NLP systems on billions of documents across many domains. However, state-of-the-art NLP systems are typically not optimized for cross-domain robustness nor computational efficiency. In this dissertation I develop machine learning methods to facilitate fast and robust inference across many common NLP tasks. First, I describe paired learning and inference algorithms for dynamic feature selection which accelerate inference in linear classifiers, the heart of the fastest NLP models, by 5-10 times. I then present iterated dilated convolutional neural networks (ID-CNNs), a distinct combination of network structure, parameter sharing and training procedures that increase inference speed by 14-20 times with accuracy matching bidirectional LSTMs, the most accurate models for NLP sequence labeling. Finally, I describe linguistically-informed self-attention (LISA), a neural network model that combines multi-head self-attention with multi-task learning to facilitate improved generalization to new domains. We show that incorporating linguistic structure in this way leads to substantial improvements over the previous state-of-the-art (syntax-free) neural network models for SRL, especially when evaluating out-of-domain. I conclude with a brief discussion of potential future directions stemming from my thesis work

Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction

We present paired learning and inference algorithms for significantly reducing computation and increasing speed of the vector dot products in the classifiers that are at the heart of many NLP components. This is accomplished by partitioning the features into a sequence of templates which are ordered such that high confidence can often be reached using only a small fraction of all features. Parameter estimation is arranged to maximize accuracy and early confidence in this sequence. Our approach is simpler and better suited to NLP than other related cascade methods. We present experiments in left-to-right part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and transition-based dependency parsing. On the typical benchmarking datasets we can preserve POS tagging accuracy above 97% and parsing LAS above 88.5% both with over a five-fold reduction in run-time, and NER F1 above 88 with more than 2x increase in speed.Comment: Appears in The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Beijing, China, July 201

La pressió social i el català a Europa

El treball parteix d'una afirmació: la pressió social (exercida de vegades per una persona influent, de vegades per milers) pot facilitar canvis en el règim lingüístic de la Unió Europea (o, més ben dit, en el de les institucions de la Unió) o, si més no, en elements de la seva política lingüística. Al llarg d'aquest treball hom justificarà aquesta afirmació amb una sèrie d'exemples, en què la pressió popular ha volgut deixar clar, davant d'Europa, la importància que donem a la llengua catalana.El trabajo parte de una afirmación: la presión social-ejercida a veces por una persona influyente, a veces por miles-puede facilitar cambios en el régimen lingüístico de la Unión Europea (o, mejor dicho, en el de las instituciones de la unión) o, al menos, en elementos de su política lingüística. A lo largo de este trabajo se justificará esta afirmación con una serie de ejemplos, en los que la presión popular ha querido dejar claro, ante Europa, la importancia que damos a la lengua catalana.This research stars with an affirmation: the social pressure practised by an influent persona, sometimes thousand, can produce changes in the linguistic system of the European Union or, at least, in elements of its linguistic policy

Psicologia social

Visió de la sociolingüística catalana actual des d'una perspectiva psicosocialOverview of current research in Catalan sociolinguistics from a sociopsychological perspectiveVisión de la sociolinguística catalana actual des de una prespectiva psicosocia