We describe a unified and coherent syntactic framework for supporting a semanticallyinformed syntactic approach to statistical machine translation. Semantically enriched syntactic tags assigned to the target-language training texts improved translation quality. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English translation task. This finding supports the hypothesis (posed by many researchers in the MT community, e.g., in DARPA GALE) that both syntactic and semantic information are critical for improving translation quality—and further demonstrates that large gains can be achieved for low-resource languages with different word order than English.
Our tree-grafting approach is related to a technique used for tree augmentation in @cite_0 , where parse-tree nodes are augmented with semantic categories. @ augment tree nodes with named entities and relations, while we used named entities and modalities. The parser is subsequently retrained for both semantic and syntactic processing. The semantic annotations were done manually by students following a set of guidelines and then merged with the syntactic trees automatically. In our work we tagged our corpus with entities and modalities automatically and then grafted them onto the syntactic trees automatically, for the purpose of training a statistical machine translation system. An added benefit of the extracted translation rules is that they are capable of producing semantically-tagged Urdu parses, despite that the training data were processed by only an English parser and tagger.
@cite_0
2115896319 2121127625 2168966090 130850236 2950462711 2153419563 2114609248 2175969983 2189149111 2762085884 2207937072 1551104980 2131986285 2100921762 2086959507 910440858 2585027717 2963636184 2610661645 2619818172
This article describes the resource-and system-building efforts of an 8-week Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically Informed Machine Translation (SIMT). We describe a new modality negation (MN) annotation scheme, the creation of a (publicly available) MN lexicon, and two automated MN taggers that we built using the annotation scheme and lexicon. Our annotation scheme isolates three components of modality and negation: a trigger (a word that conveys modality or negation), a target (an action associated with modality or negation), and a holder (an experiencer of modality). We describe how our MN lexicon was semi-automatically produced and we demonstrate that a structure-based MN tagger results in precision around 86 (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. We apply our MN annotation scheme to statistical machine translation using a syntactic framework that supports the inclusion of semantic annotations. Syntactic tags enriched with semantic annotations are assigned to parse trees in the target-language training texts through a process of tree grafting. Although the focus of our work is modality and negation, the tree grafting procedure is general and supports other types of semantic information. We exploit this capability by including named entities, produced by a pre-existing tagger, in addition to the MN elements produced by the taggers described here. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English test set. This finding supports the hypothesis that both syntactic and semantic information can improve translation quality. This article considers approaches which rerank the output of an existing probabilistic parser. The base parser produces a set of candidate parses for each input sentence, with associated probabilities that define an initial ranking of these parses. A second model then attempts to improve upon this initial ranking, using additional features of the tree as evidence. The strength of our approach is that it allows a tree to be represented as an arbitrary set of features, without concerns about how these features interact or overlap and without the need to define a derivation or a generative model which takes these features into account. We introduce a new method for the reranking task, based on the boosting approach to ranking problems described in (1998). We apply the boosting method to parsing the Wall Street Journal treebank. The method combined the log-likelihood under a baseline model (that of Collins [1999]) with evidence from an additional 500,000 features over parse trees that were not included in the original model. The new model achieved 89.75 F-measure, a 13 relative decrease in F measure error over the baseline model's score of 88.2 . The article also introduces a new algorithm for the boosting approach which takes advantage of the sparsity of the feature space in the parsing data. Experiments show significant efficiency gains for the new algorithm over the obvious implementation of the boosting approach. We argue that the method is an appealing alternative—in terms of both simplicity and efficiency—to work on feature selection methods within log-linear (maximum-entropy) models. Although the experiments in this article are on natural language parsing (NLP), the approach should be applicable to many other NLP problems which are naturally framed as ranking tasks, for example, speech recognition, machine translation, or natural language generation. We present translation results on the shared task "Exploiting Parallel Texts for Statistical Machine Translation" generated by a chart parsing decoder operating on phrase tables augmented and generalized with target language syntactic categories. We use a target language parser to generate parse trees for each sentence on the target side of the bilingual training corpus, matching them with phrase table lattices built for the corresponding source sentence. Considering phrases that correspond to syntactic categories in the parse trees we develop techniques to augment (declare a syntactically motivated category for a phrase pair) and generalize (form mixed terminal and nonterminal phrases) the phrase table into a synchronous bilingual grammar. We present results on the French-to-English task for this workshop, representing significant improvements over the workshop's baseline system. Our translation system is available open-source under the GNU General Public License. We present a technique for augmenting annotated training data with hierarchical word clusters that are automatically derived from a large unannotated corpus. Cluster membership is encoded in features that are incorporated in a discriminatively trained tagging model. Active learning is used to select training examples. We evaluate the technique for named-entity tagging. Compared with a state-of-the-art HMM-based name finder, the presented technique requires only 13 as much annotated data to achieve the same level of performance. Given a large annotated training set of 1,000,000 words, the technique achieves a 25 reduction in error over the state-of-the-art HMM trained on the same material. Recent advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) show that adding syntactic information to NMT systems can improve the quality of their translations. Most existing work utilizes some specific types of linguistically-inspired tree structures, like constituency and dependency parse trees. This is often done via a standard RNN decoder that operates on a linearized target tree structure. However, it is an open question of what specific linguistic formalism, if any, is the best structural representation for NMT. In this paper, we (1) propose an NMT model that can naturally generate the topology of an arbitrary tree structure on the target side, and (2) experiment with various target tree structures. Our experiments show the surprising result that our model delivers the best improvements with balanced binary trees constructed without any linguistic knowledge; this model outperforms standard seq2seq models by up to 2.1 BLEU points, and other methods for incorporating target-side syntax by up to 0.7 BLEU. We introduce an approach to learn discriminative visual representations while exploiting external semantic knowledge about object category relationships. Given a hierarchical taxonomy that captures semantic similarity between the objects, we learn a corresponding tree of metrics (ToM). In this tree, we have one metric for each non-leaf node of the object hierarchy, and each metric is responsible for discriminating among its immediate subcategory children. Specifically, a Mahalanobis metric learned for a given node must satisfy the appropriate (dis)similarity constraints generated only among its subtree members' training instances. To further exploit the semantics, we introduce a novel regularizer coupling the metrics that prefers a sparse disjoint set of features to be selected for each metric relative to its ancestor (supercategory) nodes' metrics. Intuitively, this reflects that visual cues most useful to distinguish the generic classes (e.g., feline vs. canine) should be different than those cues most useful to distinguish their component fine-grained classes (e.g., Persian cat vs. Siamese cat). We validate our approach with multiple image datasets using the WordNet taxonomy, show its advantages over alternative metric learning approaches, and analyze the meaning of attribute features selected by our algorithm. We present a novel approach for inducing unsupervised dependency parsers for languages that have no labeled training data, but have translated text in a resourcerich language. We train probabilistic parsing models for resource-poor languages by transferring cross-lingual knowledge from resource-rich language with entropy regularization. Our method can be used as a purely monolingual dependency parser, requiring no human translations for the test data, thus making it applicable to a wide range of resource-poor languages. We perform experiments on three Data sets — Version 1.0 and version 2.0 of Google Universal Dependency Treebanks and Treebanks from CoNLL shared-tasks, across ten languages. We obtain stateof-the art performance of all the three data sets when compared with previously studied unsupervised and projected parsing systems. This paper proposes a method for learning a discriminative parser for machine translation reordering using only aligned parallel text. This is done by treating the parser's derivation tree as a latent variable in a model that is trained to maximize reordering accuracy. We demonstrate that efficient large-margin training is possible by showing that two measures of reordering accuracy can be factored over the parse tree. Using this model in the pre-ordering framework results in significant gains in translation accuracy over standard phrase-based SMT and previously proposed unsupervised syntax induction methods. The past decade has seen the emergence of web-scale structured and linked semantic knowledge resources (e.g., Freebase, DBPedia). These semantic knowledge graphs provide a scalable “schema for the web”, representing a significant opportunity for the spoken language understanding (SLU) research community. This paper leverages these resources to bootstrap a web-scale semantic parser with no requirement for semantic schema design, no data collection, and no manual annotations. Our approach is based on an iterative graph crawl algorithm. From an initial seed node (entity-type), the method learns the related entity-types from the graph structure, and automatically annotates documents that can be linked to the node (e.g., Wikipedia articles, web search documents). Following the branches, the graph is crawled and the procedure is repeated. The resulting collection of annotated documents is used to bootstrap webscale conditional random field (CRF) semantic parsers. Finally, we use a maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) unsupervised adaptation technique on sample data from a specific domain to refine the parsers. The scale of the unsupervised parsers is on the order of thousands of domains and entity-types, millions of entities, and hundreds of millions of relations. The precision-recall of the semantic parsers trained with our unsupervised method approaches those trained with supervised annotations. Sufficient training examples are the fundamental requirement for most of the learning tasks. However, collecting well-labelled training examples is costly. Inspired by Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) that can make use of visual attributes or natural language semantics as an intermediate level clue to associate low-level features with high-level classes, in a novel extension of this idea, we aim to synthesise training data for novel classes using only semantic attributes. Despite the simplicity of this idea, there are several challenges. First, how to prevent the synthesised data from over-fitting to training classes? Second, how to guarantee the synthesised data is discriminative for ZSL tasks? Third, we observe that only a few dimensions of the learnt features gain high variances whereas most of the remaining dimensions are not informative. Thus, the question is how to make the concentrated information diffuse to most of the dimensions of synthesised data. To address the above issues, we propose a novel embedding algorithm named Unseen Visual Data Synthesis (UVDS) that projects semantic features to the high-dimensional visual feature space. Two main techniques are introduced in our proposed algorithm. (1) We introduce a latent embedding space which aims to reconcile the structural difference between the visual and semantic spaces, meanwhile preserve the local structure. (2) We propose a novel Diffusion Regularisation (DR) that explicitly forces the variances to diffuse over most dimensions of the synthesised data. By an orthogonal rotation (more precisely, an orthogonal transformation), DR can remove the redundant correlated attributes and further alleviate the over-fitting problem. On four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the benefit of using synthesised unseen data for zero-shot learning. Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Abstract Integrating semantic features into parse trees is an active research topic in open-domain natural language processing (NLP). We study six different parse tree structures enriched with various semantic features for determining entity relations in clinical notes using a tree kernel-based relation extraction system. We used the relation extraction task definition and the dataset from the popular 2010 i2b2 VA challenge for our evaluation. We found that the parse tree structure enriched with entity type suffixes resulted in the highest F1 score of 0.7725 and was the fastest. In terms of reducing the number of feature vectors in trained models, the entity type feature was most effective among the semantic features while adding semantic feature node was better than adding feature suffixes to the labels. Our study demonstrates that parse tree enhancements with semantic features are effective for clinical relation extraction. The kinds of tree representations used in a treebank corpus can have a dramatic effect on performance of a parser based on the PCFG estimated from that corpus, causing the estimated likelihood of a tree to differ substantially from its frequency in the training corpus. This paper points out that the Penn II treebank representations are of the kind predicted to have such an effect, and describes a simple node relabeling transformation that improves a treebank PCFG-based parser's average precision and recall by around 8 , or approximately half of the performance difference between a simple PCFG model and the best broad-coverage parsers available today. This performance variation comes about because any PCFG, and hence the corpus of trees from which the PCFG is induced, embodies independence assumptions about the distribution of words and phrases. The particular independence assumptions implicit in a tree representation can be studied theoretically and investigated empirically by means of a tree transformation detransformation process. In this paper we present a general parsing strategy that arose from the development of an Earley-type parsing algorithm for TAGs (Schabes and Joshi 1988) and from recent linguistic work in TAGs (Abeille 1988).In our approach elementary structures are associated with their lexical heads. These structures specify extended domains of locality (as compared to a context-free grammar) over which constraints can be stated. These constraints either hold within the elementary structure itself or specify what other structures can be composed with a given elementary structure.We state the conditions under which context-free based grammars can be 'lexicalized' without changing the linguistic structures originally produced. We argue that even if one extends the domain of locality of CFGs to trees, using only substitution does not give the freedom to choose the head of each structure. We show how adjunction allows us to 'lexicalize' a CFG freely.We then show how a 'lexicalized' grammar naturally follows from the extended domain of locality of TAGs and present some of the linguistic advantages of our approach.A novel general parsing strategy for 'lexicalized' grammars is discussed. In a first stage, the parser builds a set structures corresponding to the input sentence and in a second stage, the sentence is parsed with respect to this set. The strategy is independent of the linguistic theory adopted and of the underlying grammar formalism. However, we focus our attention on TAGs. Since the set of trees needed to parse an input sentence is supposed to be finite, the parser can use in principle any search strategy. Thus, in particular, a top-down strategy can be used since problems due to recursive structures are eliminated. The parser is also able to use non-local information to guide the search.We then explain how the Earley-type parser for TAGs can be modified to take advantage of this approach. We present a simple and effective framework for exploiting multiple monolingual treebanks with different annotation guidelines for parsing. Several types of transformation patterns (TP) are designed to capture the systematic annotation inconsistencies among different tree-banks. Based on such TPs, we design quasi-synchronous grammar features to augment the baseline parsing models. Our approach can significantly advance the state-of-the-art parsing accuracy on two widely used target tree-banks (Penn Chinese Treebank 5.1 and 6.0) using the Chinese Dependency Treebank as the source treebank. The improvements are respectively 1.37 and 1.10 with automatic part-of-speech tags. Moreover, an indirect comparison indicates that our approach also outperforms previous work based on treebank conversion. A characterization is given of the class of tree translations definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO), in terms of macro tree transducers. The first main result is that the MSO definable tree translations are exactly those tree translations realized by macro tree transducers (MTTs) with regular look-ahead that are single use restricted. For this the single use restriction known from attribute grammars is generalized to MTTs. Since MTTs are closed under regular look-ahead, this implies that every MSO definable tree translation can be realized by an MTT. The second main result is that the class of MSO definable tree translations can also be obtained by restricting MTTs with regular look-ahead to be finite copying, i.e., to require that each input subtree is processed only a bounded number of times. The single use restriction is a rather strong, static restriction on the rules of an MTT, whereas the finite copying restriction is a more liberal, dynamic restriction on the derivations of an MTT. The goal of relation extraction is to detect relations between two entities in free text. In a sentence, a relation instance usually comprises a small number of words, which yields a sparse feature representation. To make better use of limited information in a relation instance, parsing trees and combined features are employed widely to capture the local dependencies of relation instances. However, the performance of parsing tree-based systems is often degraded by chunking or parsing errors. Combined features are used widely, but few studies have addressed how features can be combined to achieve optimal performance. Thus, in this study, we propose a feature assembly method for relation extraction. Six types of candidate features (head noun, POS tag, n-gram, omni-word, etc.) are employed as atomic features and six constraint conditions (singleton, position, syntax, etc.) are used to combine these features in different settings. Depending on the utilization of candidate features, different constraint conditions can be explored to achieve the optimal extraction performance. Our method is effective for capturing local dependencies and it reduces the errors caused by inaccurate parsing. We tested the proposed method using the ACE 2005 Chinese and English corpora, and it achieved state-of-the-art performance, where it was significantly superior to existing methods. We consider the problem of data augmentation, i.e., generating artificial samples to extend a given corpus of training data. Specifically, we propose attributed-guided augmentation (AGA) which learns a mapping that allows to synthesize data such that an attribute of a synthesized sample is at a desired value or strength. This is particularly interesting in situations where little data with no attribute annotation is available for learning, but we have access to a large external corpus of heavily annotated samples. While prior works primarily augment in the space of images, we propose to perform augmentation in feature space instead. We implement our approach as a deep encoder-decoder architecture that learns the synthesis function in an end-to-end manner. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on the problems of (1) one-shot object recognition in a transfer-learning setting where we have no prior knowledge of the new classes, as well as (2) object-based one-shot scene recognition. As external data, we leverage 3D depth and pose information from the SUN RGB-D dataset. Our experiments show that attribute-guided augmentation of high-level CNN features considerably improves one-shot recognition performance on both problems. We consider the problem of data augmentation, i.e., generating artificial samples to extend a given corpus of training data. Specifically, we propose attributed-guided augmentation (AGA) which learns a mapping that allows to synthesize data such that an attribute of a synthesized sample is at a desired value or strength. This is particularly interesting in situations where little data with no attribute annotation is available for learning, but we have access to a large external corpus of heavily annotated samples. While prior works primarily augment in the space of images, we propose to perform augmentation in feature space instead. We implement our approach as a deep encoder-decoder architecture that learns the synthesis function in an end-to-end manner. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on the problems of (1) one-shot object recognition in a transfer-learning setting where we have no prior knowledge of the new classes, as well as (2) object-based one-shot scene recognition. As external data, we leverage 3D depth and pose information from the SUN RGB-D dataset. Our experiments show that attribute-guided augmentation of high-level CNN features considerably improves one-shot recognition performance on both problems. Even though a linguistics-free sequence to sequence model in neural machine translation (NMT) has certain capability of implicitly learning syntactic information of source sentences, this paper shows that source syntax can be explicitly incorporated into NMT effectively to provide further improvements. Specifically, we linearize parse trees of source sentences to obtain structural label sequences. On the basis, we propose three different sorts of encoders to incorporate source syntax into NMT: 1) Parallel RNN encoder that learns word and label annotation vectors parallelly; 2) Hierarchical RNN encoder that learns word and label annotation vectors in a two-level hierarchy; and 3) Mixed RNN encoder that stitchingly learns word and label annotation vectors over sequences where words and labels are mixed. Experimentation on Chinese-to-English translation demonstrates that all the three proposed syntactic encoders are able to improve translation accuracy. It is interesting to note that the simplest RNN encoder, i.e., Mixed RNN encoder yields the best performance with an significant improvement of 1.4 BLEU points. Moreover, an in-depth analysis from several perspectives is provided to reveal how source syntax benefits NMT. We introduce a neural network that represents sentences by composing their words according to induced binary parse trees. We use Tree-LSTM as our composition function, applied along a tree structure found by a fully differentiable natural language chart parser. Our model simultaneously optimises both the composition function and the parser, thus eliminating the need for externally-provided parse trees which are normally required for Tree-LSTM. It can therefore be seen as a tree-based RNN that is unsupervised with respect to the parse trees. As it is fully differentiable, our model is easily trained with an off-the-shelf gradient descent method and backpropagation. We demonstrate that it achieves better performance compared to various supervised Tree-LSTM architectures on a textual entailment task and a reverse dictionary task.