arXiv subjects

Jonathan Berant

Publications and source records attributed to Jonathan Berant.

111 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Hierarchical Question Answering for Long Documents

We present a framework for question answering that can efficiently scale to longer documents while maintaining or even improving performance of state-of-the-art models. While most successful approaches for reading comprehension rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), running them over long documents is prohibitively slow because it is difficult to parallelize over sequences. Inspired by how people first skim the document, identify relevant parts, and carefully read these parts to produce an answer, we combine a coarse, fast model for selecting relevant sentences and a more expensive RNN for producing the answer from those sentences. We treat sentence selection as a latent variable trained jointly from the answer only using reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate the state of the art performance on a challenging subset of the Wikireading and on a new dataset, while speeding up the model by 3.5x-6.7x.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision (Short Version)

Extending the success of deep neural networks to natural language understanding and symbolic reasoning requires complex operations and external memory. Recent neural program induction approaches have attempted to address this problem, but are typically limited to differentiable memory, and consequently cannot scale beyond small synthetic tasks. In this work, we propose the Manager-Programmer-Computer framework, which integrates neural networks with non-differentiable memory to support abstract, scalable and precise operations through a friendly neural computer interface. Specifically, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains a sequence-to-sequence neural "programmer", and a non-differentiable "computer" that is a Lisp interpreter with code assist. To successfully apply REINFORCE for training, we augment it with approximate gold programs found by an iterative maximum likelihood training process. NSM is able to learn a semantic parser from weak supervision over a large knowledge base. It achieves new state-of-the-art performance on WebQuestionsSP, a challenging semantic parsing dataset, with weak supervision. Compared to previous approaches, NSM is end-to-end, therefore does not rely on feature engineering or domain specific knowledge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Learning to generalize to new compositions in image understanding

Recurrent neural networks have recently been used for learning to describe images using natural language. However, it has been observed that these models generalize poorly to scenes that were not observed during training, possibly depending too strongly on the statistics of the text in the training data. Here we propose to describe images using short structured representations, aiming to capture the crux of a description. These structured representations allow us to tease-out and evaluate separately two types of generalization: standard generalization to new images with similar scenes, and generalization to new combinations of known entities. We compare two learning approaches on the MS-COCO dataset: a state-of-the-art recurrent network based on an LSTM (Show, Attend and Tell), and a simple structured prediction model on top of a deep network. We find that the structured model generalizes to new compositions substantially better than the LSTM, ~7 times the accuracy of predicting structured representations. By providing a concrete method to quantify generalization for unseen combinations, we argue that structured representations and compositional splits are a useful benchmark for image captioning, and advocate compositional models that capture linguistic and visual structure.

cs.CV↗