An important component of achieving language understanding is mastering the composition of sentence meaning, but an immediate challenge to solving this problem is the opacity of sentence vector representations produced by current neural sentence composition models. We present a method to address this challenge, developing tasks that directly target compositional meaning information in sentence vector representations with a high degree of precision and control. To enable the creation of these controlled tasks, we introduce a specialized sentence generation system that produces large, annotated sentence sets meeting specified syntactic, semantic and lexical constraints. We describe the details of the method and generation system, and then present results of experiments applying our method to probe for compositional information in embeddings from a number of existing sentence composition models. We find that the method is able to extract useful information about the differing capacities of these models, and we discuss the implications of our results with respect to these systems' capturing of sentence information. We make available for public use the datasets used for these experiments, as well as the generation system.
Our focus on assessing linguistically-motivated information relates to work on evaluations that aim for fine-grained analysis of systems' linguistic capacities @cite_17 @cite_22 @cite_20 . The present work contributes to this effort with new tasks that assess composition , and that do so in a highly targeted manner via careful controls. Our use of synthetically generated data to achieve this level of control relates to work like that of , which introduces synthetic question-answering tasks for evaluating the capacity of systems to reason with natural language input.
@cite_22 @cite_20 @cite_17
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In order to obtain a fine-grained evaluation of parser accuracy over naturally occurring text, we study 100 examples each of ten reasonably frequent linguistic phenomena, randomly selected from a parsed version of the English Wikipedia. We construct a corresponding set of gold-standard target dependencies for these 1000 sentences, operationalize mappings to these targets from seven state-of-the-art parsers, and evaluate the parsers against this data to measure their level of success in identifying these dependencies. Shared and internationally recognized benchmarks are fundamental for the development of any computational system. We aim to help the research community working on compositional distributional semantic models (CDSMs) by providing SICK (Sentences Involving Compositional Knowldedge), a large size English benchmark tailored for them. SICK consists of about 10,000 English sentence pairs that include many examples of the lexical, syntactic and semantic phenomena that CDSMs are expected to account for, but do not require dealing with other aspects of existing sentential data sets (idiomatic multiword expressions, named entities, telegraphic language) that are not within the scope of CDSMs. By means of crowdsourcing techniques, each pair was annotated for two crucial semantic tasks: relatedness in meaning (with a 5-point rating scale as gold score) and entailment relation between the two elements (with three possible gold labels: entailment, contradiction, and neutral). The SICK data set was used in SemEval-2014 Task 1, and it freely available for research purposes.