1,721,292 research outputs found
Syntax-mediated semantic parsing
Full text linkQuerying a database to retrieve an answer, telling a robot to perform an action, or
teaching a computer to play a game are tasks requiring communication with machines
in a language interpretable by them. Semantic parsing is the task of converting human
language to a machine interpretable language. While human languages are sequential in
nature with latent structures, machine interpretable languages are formal with explicit
structures. The computational linguistics community have created several treebanks to
understand the formal syntactic structures of human languages. In this thesis, we use
these to obtain formal meaning representations of languages, and learn computational
models to convert these meaning representations to the target machine representation.
Our goal is to evaluate if existing treebank syntactic representations are useful for
semantic parsing.
Existing semantic parsing methods mainly learn domain-specific grammars which
can parse human languages to machine representation directly. We deviate from this
trend and make use of general-purpose syntactic grammar to help in semantic parsing.
We use two syntactic representations: Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) and
dependency syntax. CCG has a well established theory on deriving meaning representations
from its syntactic derivations. But there are no CCG treebanks for many languages
since these are difficult to annotate. In contrast, dependencies are easy to annotate and
have many treebanks. However, dependencies do not have a well established theory for
deriving meaning representations. In this thesis, we propose novel theories for deriving
meaning representations from dependencies.
Our evaluation task is question answering on a knowledge base. Given a question,
our goal is to answer it on the knowledge base by converting the question to an executable
query. We use Freebase, the knowledge source behind Google’s search engine,
as our knowledge base. Freebase contains millions of real world facts represented in a
graphical format. Inspired from the Freebase structure, we formulate semantic parsing
as a graph matching problem, i.e., given a natural language sentence, we convert it into
a graph structure from the meaning representation obtained from syntax, and find the
subgraph of Freebase that best matches the natural language graph.
Our experiments on Free917, WebQuestions and GraphQuestions semantic parsing
datasets conclude that general-purpose syntax is more useful for semantic parsing than
induced task-specific syntax and syntax-agnostic representations
Combined distributional and logical semantics
Full text linkUnderstanding natural language sentences requires interpreting words, and combining
the meanings of words into the meanings of sentences. Despite much work on lexical
and compositional semantics individually, existing approaches are unlikely to offer a
complete solution. This thesis introduces a new approach, which combines the benefits
of distributional lexical semantics and logical compositional semantics.
Linguistic theories of compositional semantics have shown how logical forms can
be built for sentences, and how to represent semantic operators such as negatives,
quantifiers and modals. However, computational implementations of such theories
have shown poor performance on applications, mainly due to a reliance on incomplete
hand-built ontologies for the meanings of content words. Conversely, distributional semantics
has been shown to be effective in learning the representations of content words
based on collocations in large unlabelled corpora, but there are major outstanding challenges
in representing function words and building representations for sentences.
I introduce a new model which captures the main advantages of logical and distributional
approaches. The proposal closely follows formal semantics, except for changing
the definitions of content words. In traditional formal semantics, each word would
express a different symbol. Instead, I allow multiple words to express the same symbol,
corresponding to underlying concepts. For example, both the verb write and the noun
author can be made to express the same relation. These symbols can be learnt by clustering
symbols based on distributional statistics—for example, write and author will
share many similar arguments. Crucially, the clustering means that the representations
are symbolic, so can easily be incorporated into standard logical approaches.
The simple model proves insufficient, and I develop several extensions. I develop
an unsupervised probabilistic model of ambiguity, and show how this model can be
built into compositional derivations to produce a distribution over logical forms. The
flat clustering approach does not model relations between concepts, for example that
buying implies owning. Instead, I show how to build graph structures over the clusters,
which allows such inferences. I also explore if the abstract concepts can be generalized
cross-lingually, for example mapping French verb ecrire to the same cluster as
the English verb write. The systems developed show good performance on question
answering and entailment tasks, and are capable of both sophisticated multi-sentence
inferences involving quantifiers, and subtle reasoning about lexical semantics.
These results show that distributional and formal logical semantics are not mutually
exclusive, and that a combined model can be built that captures the advantages of each
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Unsupervised Learning of Relational Entailment Graphs from Text
Full text linkRecognizing textual entailment and paraphrasing is critical to many core natural language processing applications including question answering and semantic parsing. The surface form of a sentence that answers a question such as “Does Facebook own Instagram?” frequently does not directly correspond to the form of the question, but is rather a paraphrase or an expression such as “Facebook bought Instagram”, that entails the answer. Relational entailments (e.g., buys entails owns) are crucial for bridging the gap between queries and text resources. In this thesis, we describe different unsupervised approaches to construct relational entailment graphs, with typed relations (e.g., company buys company) as nodes and entailment as directed edges. The entailment graphs provide an explainable resource for downstream tasks such as question answering; however, the existing methods suffer from noise and sparsity inherent to the data.
We extract predicate-argument structures from large multiple-source news corpora using a fast Combinatory Categorial Grammar parser. We compute entailment scores between relations based on the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis which states that a word (relation) p entails another word (relation) q if and only if in any context that p can be used, q can be used in its place. The entailment scores are used to build local entailment graphs. We then build global entailment graphs by exploiting the dependencies between the entailment rules. Previous work has used transitivity constraints, but these constraints are intractable on large graphs. We instead propose a scalable method that learns globally consistent similarity scores based on new soft constraints that consider both the structures across typed entailment graphs and inside each graph. We show that our method significantly improves the entailment graphs.
Additionally, we show the duality of entailment graph induction with the task of link prediction. The link prediction task infers missing relations between entities in an incomplete knowledge graph and discovers new facts. We present a new method in which link prediction on the knowledge graph of assertions extracted from raw text is used to improve entailment graphs which are learned from the same text. The entailment graphs are in turn used to improve the link prediction task.
Finally, we define the contextual link prediction task that uses both the structure of the knowledge graph of assertions and their textual contexts. We fine-tune pre-trained language models with an unsupervised contextual link prediction objective. We augment the existing assertions with novel predictions of our model and use them to build higher quality entailment graphs. Similarly, we show that the entailment graphs improve the contextual link prediction task
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Semi-supervised lexical acquisition for wide-coverage parsing
Full text linkState-of-the-art parsers suffer from incomplete lexicons, as evidenced by the fact
that they all contain built-in methods for dealing with out-of-lexicon items at parse
time. Since new labelled data is expensive to produce and no amount of it will conquer
the long tail, we attempt to address this problem by leveraging the enormous amount of
raw text available for free, and expanding the lexicon offline, with a semi-supervised
word learner. We accomplish this with a method similar to self-training, where a fully
trained parser is used to generate new parses with which the next generation of parser
is trained.
This thesis introduces Chart Inference (CI), a two-phase word-learning method
with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), operating on the level of the partial
parse as produced by a trained parser. CI uses the parsing model and lexicon to identify
the CCG category type for one unknown word in a context of known words by inferring
the type of the sentence using a model of end punctuation, then traversing the chart
from the top down, filling in each empty cell as a function of its mother and its sister.
We first specify the CI algorithm, and then compare it to two baseline wordlearning
systems over a battery of learning tasks. CI is shown to outperform the
baselines in every task, and to function in a number of applications, including grammar
acquisition and domain adaptation. This method performs consistently better than
self-training, and improves upon the standard POS-backoff strategy employed by the
baseline StatCCG parser by adding new entries to the lexicon.
The first learning task establishes lexical convergence over a toy corpus, showing
that CI’s ability to accurately model a target lexicon is more robust to initial conditions
than either of the baseline methods. We then introduce a novel natural language corpus
based on children’s educational materials, which is fully annotated with CCG derivations.
We use this corpus as a testbed to establish that CI is capable in principle of
recovering the whole range of category types necessary for a wide-coverage lexicon.
The complexity of the learning task is then increased, using the CCGbank corpus,
a version of the Penn Treebank, and showing that CI improves as its initial seed corpus
is increased. The next experiment uses CCGbank as the seed and attempts to recover
missing question-type categories in the TREC question answering corpus. The final
task extends the coverage of the CCGbank-trained parser by running CI over the raw
text of the Gigaword corpus. Where appropriate, a fine-grained error analysis is also
undertaken to supplement the quantitative evaluation of the parser performance with
deeper reasoning as to the linguistic points of the lexicon and parsing model
Disambiguating Temporal Connectors into TimeML relations
Full text linkThe project is about learning temporal relations from unannotated text.
This effort builds on the work of
Lapata M. and Lascarides, A. (2006): Learning sentence-internal temporal relations,
who developed a system that uses temporal connectors
(after, before, while, when, as, once, until and since)
in unannotated text to build a system to determine intra-sentential temporal relations.
In an extension of this approach,
they used their system to determine TimeML relations
(before, includes, begins, ends and simultaneous)
between events.
Since temporal connectors do not translate one-to-one to TimeML relations,
the main focus of this project is on disambiguating the temporal connectors into TimeML relations
to preprocess the training data and use the system to directly learn the TimeML relations.
This is done using a rule-based system and evaluated on the TimeBank corpus
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