Learning to Parse and Translate Improves Neural Machine Translation

There has been relatively little attention to incorporating linguistic prior to neural machine translation. Much of the previous work was further constrained to considering linguistic prior on the source side. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model, called NMT+RNNG, that learns to parse and translate by combining the recurrent neural network grammar into the attention-based neural machine translation. Our approach encourages the neural machine translation model to incorporate linguistic prior during training, and lets it translate on its own afterward. Extensive experiments with four language pairs show the effectiveness of the proposed NMT+RNNG.Comment: Accepted as a short paper at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017

Domain Adaptation for Neural Networks by Parameter Augmentation

We propose a simple domain adaptation method for neural networks in a supervised setting. Supervised domain adaptation is a way of improving the generalization performance on the target domain by using the source domain dataset, assuming that both of the datasets are labeled. Recently, recurrent neural networks have been shown to be successful on a variety of NLP tasks such as caption generation; however, the existing domain adaptation techniques are limited to (1) tune the model parameters by the target dataset after the training by the source dataset, or (2) design the network to have dual output, one for the source domain and the other for the target domain. Reformulating the idea of the domain adaptation technique proposed by Daume (2007), we propose a simple domain adaptation method, which can be applied to neural networks trained with a cross-entropy loss. On captioning datasets, we show performance improvements over other domain adaptation methods.Comment: 9 page. To appear in the first ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NL

Improving the performance of dictionary-based approaches in protein name recognition

AbstractDictionary-based protein name recognition is often a first step in extracting information from biomedical documents because it can provide ID information on recognized terms. However, dictionary-based approaches present two fundamental difficulties: (1) false recognition mainly caused by short names; (2) low recall due to spelling variations. In this paper, we tackle the former problem using machine learning to filter out false positives and present two alternative methods for alleviating the latter problem of spelling variations. The first is achieved by using approximate string searching, and the second by expanding the dictionary with a probabilistic variant generator, which we propose in this paper. Experimental results using the GENIA corpus revealed that filtering using a naive Bayes classifier greatly improved precision with only a slight loss of recall, resulting in 10.8% improvement in F-measure, and dictionary expansion with the variant generator gave further 1.6% improvement and achieved an F-measure of 66.6%