A summary of the 2012 JHU CLSP Workshop on Zero Resource Speech Technologies and Models of Early Language Acquisition

We summarize the accomplishments of a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring the computational and scientific issues surrounding zero resource (unsupervised) speech technologies and related models of early language acquisition. Centered around the tasks of phonetic and lexical discovery, we consider unified evaluation metrics, present two new approaches for improving speaker independence in the absence of supervision, and evaluate the application of Bayesian word segmentation algorithms to automatic subword unit tokenizations. Finally, we present two strategies for integrating zero resource techniques into supervised settings, demonstrating the potential of unsupervised methods to improve mainstream technologies.5 page(s

Reducing grounded learning tasks to grammatical inference

It is often assumed that ‘grounded’ learning tasks are beyond the scope of grammatical inference techniques. In this paper, we show that the grounded task of learning a semantic parser from ambiguous training data as discussed in Kim and Mooney (2010) can be reduced to a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar learning task in a way that gives state of the art results. We further show that additionally letting our model learn the language’s canonical word order improves its performance and leads to the highest semantic parsing f-scores previously reported in the literature.10 page(s

Collocations in multilingual natural language generation : Lexical functions meet Lexical functional grammar

In a collocation, the choice of one lexical item depends on the choice made for another. This poses a problem for simple approaches to lexicalisation in natural language generation systems. In the Meaning-Text framework, recurrent patterns of collocations have been characterised by lexical functions, which offer an elegant way of describing these relationships. Previous work has shown that using lexical functions in the context of multilingual natural language generation allows for a more efficient development of linguistic resources. We propose a way to encode lexical functions in the Lexical Functional Grammar framework.10 page(s

Modeling online word segmentation performance in structured artificial languages

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Meta Answering for Machine Reading

We investigate a framework for machine reading, inspired by real world information-seeking problems, where a meta question answering system interacts with a black box environment. The environment encapsulates a competitive machine reader based on BERT, providing candidate answers to questions, and possibly some context. To validate the realism of our formulation, we ask humans to play the role of a meta-answerer. With just a small snippet of text around an answer, humans can outperform the machine reader, improving recall. Similarly, a simple machine meta-answerer outperforms the environment, improving both precision and recall on the Natural Questions dataset. The system relies on joint training of answer scoring and the selection of conditioning information