On Robustness of Neural Semantic Parsers

Semantic parsing maps natural language (NL) utterances into logical forms (LFs), which underpins many advanced NLP problems. Semantic parsers gain performance boosts with deep neural networks, but inherit vulnerabilities against adversarial examples. In this paper, we provide the empirical study on the robustness of semantic parsers in the presence of adversarial attacks. Formally, adversaries of semantic parsing are considered to be the perturbed utterance-LF pairs, whose utterances have exactly the same meanings as the original ones. A scalable methodology is proposed to construct robustness test sets based on existing benchmark corpora. Our results answered five research questions in measuring the sate-of-the-art parsers' performance on robustness test sets, and evaluating the effect of data augmentation.

Few-Shot Semantic Parsing for New Predicates

In this work, we investigate the problems of semantic parsing in a few-shot learning setting. In this setting, we are provided with utterance-logical form pairs per new predicate. The state-of-the-art neural semantic parsers achieve less than 25% accuracy on benchmark datasets when k= 1. To tackle this problem, we proposed to i) apply a designated meta-learning method to train the model; ii) regularize attention scores with alignment statistics; iii) apply a smoothing technique in pre-training. As a result, our method consistently outperforms all the baselines in both one and two-shot settings.

Context Dependent Semantic Parsing: A Survey

Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into machine-readable meaning representations. Currently, most semantic parsing methods are not able to utilize contextual information (e.g. dialogue and comments history), which has a great potential to boost semantic parsing performance. To address this issue, context dependent semantic parsing has recently drawn a lot of attention. In this survey, we investigate progress on the methods for the context dependent semantic parsing, together with the current datasets and tasks. We then point out open problems and challenges for future research in this area. The collected resources for this topic are available at:https://github.com/zhuang-li/Contextual-Semantic-Parsing-Paper-List.

COSMO: Conditional SEQ2SEQ-based Mixture Model for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering

Commonsense reasoning refers to the ability of evaluating a social situation and acting accordingly. Identification of the implicit causes and effects of a social context is the driving capability which can enable machines to perform commonsense reasoning. The dynamic world of social interactions requires context-dependent on-demand systems to infer such underlying information. However, current approaches in this realm lack the ability to perform commonsense reasoning upon facing an unseen situation, mostly due to incapability of identifying a diverse range of implicit social relations. Hence they fail to estimate the correct reasoning path. In this paper, we present Conditional SEQ2SEQ-based Mixture model (COSMO), which provides us with the capabilities of dynamic and diverse content generation. We use COSMO to generate context-dependent clauses, which form a dynamic Knowledge Graph (KG) on-the-fly for commonsense reasoning. To show the adaptability of our model to context-dependant knowledge generation, we address the task of zero-shot commonsense question answering. The empirical results indicate an improvement of up to +5.2% over the state-of-the-art models.

ALTER: Auxiliary Text Rewriting Tool for Natural Language Generation

In this paper, we describe ALTER, an auxiliary text rewriting tool that facilitates the rewriting process for natural language generation tasks, such as paraphrasing, text simplification, fairness-aware text rewriting, and text style transfer. Our tool is characterized by two features, i) recording of word-level revision histories and ii) flexible auxiliary edit support and feedback to annotators. The text rewriting assist and traceable rewriting history are potentially beneficial to the future research of natural language generation.

D-PAGE: Diverse Paraphrase Generation

In this paper, we investigate the diversity aspect of paraphrase generation. Prior deep learning models employ either decoding methods or add random input noise for varying outputs. We propose a simple method Diverse Paraphrase Generation (D-PAGE), which extends neural machine translation (NMT) models to support the generation of diverse paraphrases with implicit rewriting patterns. Our experimental results on two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model generates at least one order of magnitude more diverse outputs than the baselines in terms of a new evaluation metric Jeffrey's Divergence. We have also conducted extensive experiments to understand various properties of our model with a focus on diversity.

f-GANs in an Information Geometric Nutshell

Nowozin \textit{et al} showed last year how to extend the GAN \textit{principle} to all $f$-divergences. The approach is elegant but falls short of a full description of the supervised game, and says little about the key player, the generator: for example, what does the generator actually converge to if solving the GAN game means convergence in some space of parameters? How does that provide hints on the generator's design and compare to the flourishing but almost exclusively experimental literature on the subject? In this paper, we unveil a broad class of distributions for which such convergence happens --- namely, deformed exponential families, a wide superset of exponential families --- and show tight connections with the three other key GAN parameters: loss, game and architecture. In particular, we show that current deep architectures are able to factorize a very large number of such densities using an especially compact design, hence displaying the power of deep architectures and their concinnity in the $f$-GAN game. This result holds given a sufficient condition on \textit{activation functions} --- which turns out to be satisfied by popular choices. The key to our results is a variational generalization of an old theorem that relates the KL divergence between regular exponential families and divergences between their natural parameters. We complete this picture with additional results and experimental insights on how these results may be used to ground further improvements of GAN architectures, via (i) a principled design of the activation functions in the generator and (ii) an explicit integration of proper composite losses' link function in the discriminator.

Automatic Generation of Grounded Visual Questions

In this paper, we propose the first model to be able to generate visually grounded questions with diverse types for a single image. Visual question generation is an emerging topic which aims to ask questions in natural language based on visual input. To the best of our knowledge, it lacks automatic methods to generate meaningful questions with various types for the same visual input. To circumvent the problem, we propose a model that automatically generates visually grounded questions with varying types. Our model takes as input both images and the captions generated by a dense caption model, samples the most probable question types, and generates the questions in sequel. The experimental results on two real world datasets show that our model outperforms the strongest baseline in terms of both correctness and diversity with a wide margin.

Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach

We present a theoretically grounded approach to train deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, subject to class-dependent label noise. We propose two procedures for loss correction that are agnostic to both application domain and network architecture. They simply amount to at most a matrix inversion and multiplication, provided that we know the probability of each class being corrupted into another. We further show how one can estimate these probabilities, adapting a recent technique for noise estimation to the multi-class setting, and thus providing an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments on MNIST, IMDB, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and a large scale dataset of clothing images employing a diversity of architectures --- stacking dense, convolutional, pooling, dropout, batch normalization, word embedding, LSTM and residual layers --- demonstrate the noise robustness of our proposals. Incidentally, we also prove that, when ReLU is the only non-linearity, the loss curvature is immune to class-dependent label noise.

Neighborhood Mixture Model for Knowledge Base Completion

Knowledge bases are useful resources for many natural language processing tasks, however, they are far from complete. In this paper, we define a novel entity representation as a mixture of its neighborhood in the knowledge base and apply this technique on TransE-a well-known embedding model for knowledge base completion. Experimental results show that the neighborhood information significantly helps to improve the results of the TransE model, leading to better performance than obtained by other state-of-the-art embedding models on three benchmark datasets for triple classification, entity prediction and relation prediction tasks.