arXiv subjects

Yoav Goldberg

Publications and source records attributed to Yoav Goldberg.

159 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Assessing the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Syntax-Sensitive Dependencies

The success of long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks in language processing is typically attributed to their ability to capture long-distance statistical regularities. Linguistic regularities are often sensitive to syntactic structure; can such dependencies be captured by LSTMs, which do not have explicit structural representations? We begin addressing this question using number agreement in English subject-verb dependencies. We probe the architecture's grammatical competence both using training objectives with an explicit grammatical target (number prediction, grammaticality judgments) and using language models. In the strongly supervised settings, the LSTM achieved very high overall accuracy (less than 1% errors), but errors increased when sequential and structural information conflicted. The frequency of such errors rose sharply in the language-modeling setting. We conclude that LSTMs can capture a non-trivial amount of grammatical structure given targeted supervision, but stronger architectures may be required to further reduce errors; furthermore, the language modeling signal is insufficient for capturing syntax-sensitive dependencies, and should be supplemented with more direct supervision if such dependencies need to be captured.

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arXiv2016

A Neural Network for Coordination Boundary Prediction

We propose a neural-network based model for coordination boundary prediction. The network is designed to incorporate two signals: the similarity between conjuncts and the observation that replacing the whole coordination phrase with a conjunct tends to produce a coherent sentences. The modeling makes use of several LSTM networks. The model is trained solely on conjunction annotations in a Treebank, without using external resources. We show improvements on predicting coordination boundaries on the PTB compared to two state-of-the-art parsers; as well as improvement over previous coordination boundary prediction systems on the Genia corpus.

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arXiv2016

Training with Exploration Improves a Greedy Stack-LSTM Parser

We adapt the greedy Stack-LSTM dependency parser of Dyer et al. (2015) to support a training-with-exploration procedure using dynamic oracles(Goldberg and Nivre, 2013) instead of cross-entropy minimization. This form of training, which accounts for model predictions at training time rather than assuming an error-free action history, improves parsing accuracies for both English and Chinese, obtaining very strong results for both languages. We discuss some modifications needed in order to get training with exploration to work well for a probabilistic neural-network.

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arXiv2016

Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Models and Auxiliary Loss

Bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) networks have recently proven successful for various NLP sequence modeling tasks, but little is known about their reliance to input representations, target languages, data set size, and label noise. We address these issues and evaluate bi-LSTMs with word, character, and unicode byte embeddings for POS tagging. We compare bi-LSTMs to traditional POS taggers across languages and data sizes. We also present a novel bi-LSTM model, which combines the POS tagging loss function with an auxiliary loss function that accounts for rare words. The model obtains state-of-the-art performance across 22 languages, and works especially well for morphologically complex languages. Our analysis suggests that bi-LSTMs are less sensitive to training data size and label corruptions (at small noise levels) than previously assumed.

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arXiv2016

Simple and Accurate Dependency Parsing Using Bidirectional LSTM Feature Representations

We present a simple and effective scheme for dependency parsing which is based on bidirectional-LSTMs (BiLSTMs). Each sentence token is associated with a BiLSTM vector representing the token in its sentential context, and feature vectors are constructed by concatenating a few BiLSTM vectors. The BiLSTM is trained jointly with the parser objective, resulting in very effective feature extractors for parsing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by applying it to a greedy transition-based parser as well as to a globally optimized graph-based parser. The resulting parsers have very simple architectures, and match or surpass the state-of-the-art accuracies on English and Chinese.

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arXiv2016

Coordination Annotation Extension in the Penn Tree Bank

Coordination is an important and common syntactic construction which is not handled well by state of the art parsers. Coordinations in the Penn Treebank are missing internal structure in many cases, do not include explicit marking of the conjuncts and contain various errors and inconsistencies. In this work, we initiated manual annotation process for solving these issues. We identify the different elements in a coordination phrase and label each element with its function. We add phrase boundaries when these are missing, unify inconsistencies, and fix errors. The outcome is an extension of the PTB that includes consistent and detailed structures for coordinations. We make the coordination annotation publicly available, in hope that they will facilitate further research into coordination disambiguation.

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arXiv2016

Improving Hypernymy Detection with an Integrated Path-based and Distributional Method

Detecting hypernymy relations is a key task in NLP, which is addressed in the literature using two complementary approaches. Distributional methods, whose supervised variants are the current best performers, and path-based methods, which received less research attention. We suggest an improved path-based algorithm, in which the dependency paths are encoded using a recurrent neural network, that achieves results comparable to distributional methods. We then extend the approach to integrate both path-based and distributional signals, significantly improving upon the state-of-the-art on this task.

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arXiv2016

Improved Parsing for Argument-Clusters Coordination

Syntactic parsers perform poorly in prediction of Argument-Cluster Coordination (ACC). We change the PTB representation of ACC to be more suitable for learning by a statistical PCFG parser, affecting 125 trees in the training set. Training on the modified trees yields a slight improvement in EVALB scores on sections 22 and 23. The main evaluation is on a corpus of 4th grade science exams, in which ACC structures are prevalent. On this corpus, we obtain an impressive x2.7 improvement in recovering ACC structures compared to a parser trained on the original PTB trees.

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arXiv2016

Easy-First Dependency Parsing with Hierarchical Tree LSTMs

We suggest a compositional vector representation of parse trees that relies on a recursive combination of recurrent-neural network encoders. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we use the representation as the backbone of a greedy, bottom-up dependency parser, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies for English and Chinese, without relying on external word embeddings. The parser's implementation is available for download at the first author's webpage.

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arXiv2016

Improving sentence compression by learning to predict gaze

We show how eye-tracking corpora can be used to improve sentence compression models, presenting a novel multi-task learning algorithm based on multi-layer LSTMs. We obtain performance competitive with or better than state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2016

Getting More Out Of Syntax with PropS

Semantic NLP applications often rely on dependency trees to recognize major elements of the proposition structure of sentences. Yet, while much semantic structure is indeed expressed by syntax, many phenomena are not easily read out of dependency trees, often leading to further ad-hoc heuristic post-processing or to information loss. To directly address the needs of semantic applications, we present PropS -- an output representation designed to explicitly and uniformly express much of the proposition structure which is implied from syntax, and an associated tool for extracting it from dependency trees.

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arXiv2015

A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing

Over the past few years, neural networks have re-emerged as powerful machine-learning models, yielding state-of-the-art results in fields such as image recognition and speech processing. More recently, neural network models started to be applied also to textual natural language signals, again with very promising results. This tutorial surveys neural network models from the perspective of natural language processing research, in an attempt to bring natural-language researchers up to speed with the neural techniques. The tutorial covers input encoding for natural language tasks, feed-forward networks, convolutional networks, recurrent networks and recursive networks, as well as the computation graph abstraction for automatic gradient computation.

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arXiv2014

word2vec Explained: deriving Mikolov et al.'s negative-sampling word-embedding method

The word2vec software of Tomas Mikolov and colleagues (https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/ ) has gained a lot of traction lately, and provides state-of-the-art word embeddings. The learning models behind the software are described in two research papers. We found the description of the models in these papers to be somewhat cryptic and hard to follow. While the motivations and presentation may be obvious to the neural-networks language-modeling crowd, we had to struggle quite a bit to figure out the rationale behind the equations. This note is an attempt to explain equation (4) (negative sampling) in "Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality" by Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean.

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arXiv2012

Precision-biased Parsing and High-Quality Parse Selection

We introduce precision-biased parsing: a parsing task which favors precision over recall by allowing the parser to abstain from decisions deemed uncertain. We focus on dependency-parsing and present an ensemble method which is capable of assigning parents to 84% of the text tokens while being over 96% accurate on these tokens. We use the precision-biased parsing task to solve the related high-quality parse-selection task: finding a subset of high-quality (accurate) trees in a large collection of parsed text. We present a method for choosing over a third of the input trees while keeping unlabeled dependency parsing accuracy of 97% on these trees. We also present a method which is not based on an ensemble but rather on directly predicting the risk associated with individual parser decisions. In addition to its efficiency, this method demonstrates that a parsing system can provide reasonable estimates of confidence in its predictions without relying on ensembles or aggregate corpus counts.

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arXiv2012

Task-specific Word-Clustering for Part-of-Speech Tagging

While the use of cluster features became ubiquitous in core NLP tasks, most cluster features in NLP are based on distributional similarity. We propose a new type of clustering criteria, specific to the task of part-of-speech tagging. Instead of distributional similarity, these clusters are based on the beha vior of a baseline tagger when applied to a large corpus. These cluster features provide similar gains in accuracy to those achieved by distributional-similarity derived clusters. Using both types of cluster features together further improve tagging accuracies. We show that the method is effective for both the in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios for English, and for French, German and Italian. The effect is larger for out-of-domain text.

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