We introduce the syntactic scaffold, an approach to incorporating syntactic information into semantic tasks. Syntactic scaffolds avoid expensive syntactic processing at runtime, only making use of a treebank during training, through a multitask objective. We improve over strong baselines on PropBank semantics, frame semantics, and coreference resolution, achieving competitive performance on all three tasks.
Neural architectures have often yielded performance gains when trained for multiple tasks together @cite_44 @cite_26 @cite_38 @cite_41 . In particular, performance of semantic role labeling tasks improves when done jointly with other semantic tasks @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_9 . Contemporaneously with this work, proposed a multitask learning setting for universal syntactic dependencies and UCCA semantics @cite_15 . Syntactic scaffolds focus on a primary semantic task, treating syntax as an auxillary, eventually forgettable prediction task.
@cite_38 @cite_26 @cite_41 @cite_29 @cite_9 @cite_32 @cite_44 @cite_15
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We describe a single convolutional neural network architecture that, given a sentence, outputs a host of language processing predictions: part-of-speech tags, chunks, named entity tags, semantic roles, semantically similar words and the likelihood that the sentence makes sense (grammatically and semantically) using a language model. The entire network is trained jointly on all these tasks using weight-sharing, an instance of multitask learning. All the tasks use labeled data except the language model which is learnt from unlabeled text and represents a novel form of semi-supervised learning for the shared tasks. We show how both multitask learning and semi-supervised learning improve the generalization of the shared tasks, resulting in state-of-the-art-performance. The current state-of-the-art end-to-end semantic role labeling (SRL) model is a deep neural network architecture with no explicit linguistic features. However, prior work has shown that gold syntax trees can dramatically improve SRL, suggesting that neural network models could see great improvements from explicit modeling of syntax. In this work, we present linguistically-informed self-attention (LISA): a new neural network model that combines multi-head self-attention with multi-task learning across dependency parsing, part-of-speech, predicate detection and SRL. For example, syntax is incorporated by training one of the attention heads to attend to syntactic parents for each token. Our model can predict all of the above tasks, but it is also trained such that if a high-quality syntactic parse is already available, it can be beneficially injected at test time without re-training our SRL model. In experiments on the CoNLL-2005 SRL dataset LISA achieves an increase of 2.5 F1 absolute over the previous state-of-the-art on newswire with predicted predicates and more than 2.0 F1 on out-of-domain data. On ConLL-2012 English SRL we also show an improvement of more than 3.0 F1, a 13 reduction in error. Recent approaches for instance-aware semantic labeling have augmented convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with complex multi-task architectures or computationally expensive graphical models. We present a method that leverages a fully convolutional network (FCN) to predict semantic labels, depth and an instance-based encoding using each pixel’s direction towards its corresponding instance center. Subsequently, we apply low-level computer vision techniques to generate state-of-the-art instance segmentation on the street scene datasets KITTI and Cityscapes. Our approach outperforms existing works by a large margin and can additionally predict absolute distances of individual instances from a monocular image as well as a pixel-level semantic labeling. Most approaches for instance-aware semantic labeling traditionally focus on accuracy. Other aspects like runtime and memory footprint are arguably as important for real-time applications such as autonomous driving. Motivated by this observation and inspired by recent works that tackle multiple tasks with a single integrated architecture, in this paper we present a real-time efficient implementation based on ENet that solves three autonomous driving related tasks at once: semantic scene segmentation, instance segmentation and monocular depth estimation. Our approach builds upon a branched ENet architecture with a shared encoder but different decoder branches for each of the three tasks. The presented method can run at 21 fps at a resolution of 1024x512 on the Cityscapes dataset without sacrificing accuracy compared to running each task separately.