Are Pre-trained Language Models Aware of Phrases? Simple but Strong Baselines for Grammar Induction

With the recent success and popularity of pre-trained language models (LMs) in natural language processing, there has been a rise in efforts to understand their inner workings. In line with such interest, we propose a novel method that assists us in investigating the extent to which pre-trained LMs capture the syntactic notion of constituency. Our method provides an effective way of extracting constituency trees from the pre-trained LMs without training. In addition, we report intriguing findings in the induced trees, including the fact that pre-trained LMs outperform other approaches in correctly demarcating adverb phrases in sentences.

Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder for Dialogue State Tracking Data Augmentation

Recent works have shown that generative data augmentation, where synthetic samples generated from deep generative models are used to augment the training dataset, benefit certain NLP tasks. In this work, we extend this approach to the task of dialogue state tracking for goal-oriented dialogues, in which the data naturally exhibits a hierarchical structure over utterances and related annotations. Deep generative data augmentation for dialogue state tracking requires the generative model to be aware of the hierarchically structured data. We propose Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder (VHDA) for modeling various aspects of goal-oriented dialogues, including linguistic and underlying annotation structures. Our experiments show that our model is able to generate realistic and novel samples that improve the robustness of state-of-the-art dialogue state trackers, ultimately improving their final dialogue state tracking performances on several datasets.

Summary Level Training of Sentence Rewriting for Abstractive Summarization

As an attempt to combine extractive and abstractive summarization, Sentence Rewriting models adopt the strategy of extracting salient sentences from a document first and then paraphrasing the selected ones to generate a summary. However, the existing models in this framework mostly rely on sentence-level rewards or suboptimal labels, causing a mismatch between a training objective and evaluation metric. In this paper, we present a novel training signal that directly maximizes summary-level ROUGE scores through reinforcement learning. In addition, we incorporate BERT into our model, making good use of its ability on natural language understanding. In extensive experiments, we show that a combination of our proposed model and training procedure obtains new state-of-the-art performance on both CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets. We also demonstrate that it generalizes better on DUC-2002 test set.

Don't Just Scratch the Surface: Enhancing Word Representations for Korean with Hanja

We propose a simple yet effective approach for improving Korean word representations using additional linguistic annotation (i.e. Hanja). We employ cross-lingual transfer learning in training word representations by leveraging the fact that Hanja is closely related to Chinese. We evaluate the intrinsic quality of representations learned through our approach using the word analogy and similarity tests. In addition, we demonstrate their effectiveness on several downstream tasks, including a novel Korean news headline generation task.

A Cross-Sentence Latent Variable Model for Semi-Supervised Text Sequence Matching

We present a latent variable model for predicting the relationship between a pair of text sequences. Unlike previous auto-encoding--based approaches that consider each sequence separately, our proposed framework utilizes both sequences within a single model by generating a sequence that has a given relationship with a source sequence. We further extend the cross-sentence generating framework to facilitate semi-supervised training. We also define novel semantic constraints that lead the decoder network to generate semantically plausible and diverse sequences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model from quantitative and qualitative experiments, while achieving state-of-the-art results on semi-supervised natural language inference and paraphrase identification.

SNU_IDS at SemEval-2019 Task 3: Addressing Training-Test Class Distribution Mismatch in Conversational Classification

We present several techniques to tackle the mismatch in class distributions between training and test data in the Contextual Emotion Detection task of SemEval 2019, by extending the existing methods for class imbalance problem. Reducing the distance between the distribution of prediction and ground truth, they consistently show positive effects on the performance. Also we propose a novel neural architecture which utilizes representation of overall context as well as of each utterance. The combination of the methods and the models achieved micro F1 score of about 0.766 on the final evaluation.

Data Augmentation for Spoken Language Understanding via Joint Variational Generation

Data scarcity is one of the main obstacles of domain adaptation in spoken language understanding (SLU) due to the high cost of creating manually tagged SLU datasets. Recent works in neural text generative models, particularly latent variable models such as variational autoencoder (VAE), have shown promising results in regards to generating plausible and natural sentences. In this paper, we propose a novel generative architecture which leverages the generative power of latent variable models to jointly synthesize fully annotated utterances. Our experiments show that existing SLU models trained on the additional synthetic examples achieve performance gains. Our approach not only helps alleviate the data scarcity issue in the SLU task for many datasets but also indiscriminately improves language understanding performances for various SLU models, supported by extensive experiments and rigorous statistical testing.

Dynamic Compositionality in Recursive Neural Networks with Structure-aware Tag Representations

Most existing recursive neural network (RvNN) architectures utilize only the structure of parse trees, ignoring syntactic tags which are provided as by-products of parsing. We present a novel RvNN architecture that can provide dynamic compositionality by considering comprehensive syntactic information derived from both the structure and linguistic tags. Specifically, we introduce a structure-aware tag representation constructed by a separate tag-level tree-LSTM. With this, we can control the composition function of the existing word-level tree-LSTM by augmenting the representation as a supplementary input to the gate functions of the tree-LSTM. We show that models built upon the proposed architecture obtain superior performance on several sentence-level tasks such as sentiment analysis and natural language inference when compared against previous tree-structured models and other sophisticated neural models. In particular, our models achieve new state-of-the-art results on Stanford Sentiment Treebank, Movie Review, and Text Retrieval Conference datasets.

Cell-aware Stacked LSTMs for Modeling Sentences

We propose a method of stacking multiple long short-term memory (LSTM) layers for modeling sentences. In contrast to the conventional stacked LSTMs where only hidden states are fed as input to the next layer, our architecture accepts both hidden and memory cell states of the preceding layer and fuses information from the left and the lower context using the soft gating mechanism of LSTMs. Thus the proposed stacked LSTM architecture modulates the amount of information to be delivered not only in horizontal recurrence but also in vertical connections, from which useful features extracted from lower layers are effectively conveyed to upper layers. We dub this architecture Cell-aware Stacked LSTM (CAS-LSTM) and show from experiments that our models achieve state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets for natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and sentiment classification.