Deep neural networks for natural language processing and its acceleration
This thesis by article consists of four articles which contribute to the field of deep learning, specifically in the acceleration of training through low-precision networks, and the application of deep neural networks on natural language processing.  In the first article, we investigate a neural network training scheme that eliminates most of the floating-point multiplications. This approach consists of binarizing or ternarizing the weights in the forward propagation and quantizing the hidden states in the backward propagation, which converts multiplications to sign changes and binary shifts. Experimental results on datasets from small to medium size show that this approach result in even better performance than standard stochastic gradient descent training, paving the way to fast, hardware-friendly training of neural networks.   In the second article, we proposed a structured self-attentive sentence embedding that extracts interpretable sentence representations in matrix form. We demonstrate improvements on 3 different tasks: author profiling, sentiment classification and textual entailment. Experimental results show that our model yields a significant performance gain compared to other sentence embedding methods in all of the 3 tasks.   In the third article, we propose a hierarchical model with dynamical computation graph for sequential data that learns to construct a tree while reading the sequence. The model learns to create adaptive skip-connections that ease the learning of long-term dependencies through constructing recurrent cells in a recursive manner. The training of the network can either be supervised training by giving golden tree structures, or through reinforcement learning. We provide preliminary experiments in 3 different tasks: a novel Math Expression Evaluation (MEE) task, a well-known propositional logic task, and language modelling tasks. Experimental results show the potential of the proposed approach.  In the fourth article, we propose a novel constituency parsing method with neural networks. The model predicts the parse tree structure by predicting a real valued scalar, named syntactic distance, for each split position in the input sentence. The order of the relative values of these syntactic distances then determine the parse tree structure by specifying the order in which the split points will be selected, recursively partitioning the input, in a top-down fashion. Our proposed approach was demonstrated with competitive performance on Penn Treebank dataset, and the state-of-the-art performance on Chinese Treebank dataset.
Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Deep Learning Neural Networks Syntactic Parser Constituency Parsing Recursive Networks Recurrent Networks Dynamic Computational Graph Sentiment Analysis Natural Language Inference Self-Attention Sentence Embedding Binary Connect Ternary Connect Quantized Neural Networks Réseaux Récurrents