While lexico-semantic elements no doubt capture a large amount of linguistic information, it has been argued that they do not capture all information contained in text. This assumption is central to constructionist approaches to language which argue that language consists of constructions, learned pairings of a form and a function or meaning that are either frequent or have a meaning that cannot be predicted from its component parts. BERT's training objectives give it access to a tremendous amount of lexico-semantic information, and while BERTology has shown that BERT captures certain important linguistic dimensions, there have been no studies exploring the extent to which BERT might have access to constructional information. In this work we design several probes and conduct extensive experiments to answer this question. Our results allow us to conclude that BERT does indeed have access to a significant amount of information, much of which linguists typically call constructional information. The impact of this observation is potentially far-reaching as it provides insights into what deep learning methods learn from text, while also showing that information contained in constructions is redundantly encoded in lexico-semantics.
With the success of pre-trained language models in recent years, more and more researchers focus on opening the "black box" of these models. Following this interest, we carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of constituency grammar in attention heads of BERT and RoBERTa. We employ the syntactic distance method to extract implicit constituency grammar from the attention weights of each head. Our results show that there exist heads that can induce some grammar types much better than baselines, suggesting that some heads act as a proxy for constituency grammar. We also analyze how atte…
Current grammatical error correction (GEC) models typically consider the task as sequence generation, which requires large amounts of annotated data and limit the applications in data-limited settings. We try to incorporate contextual information from pre-trained language model to leverage annotation and benefit multilingual scenarios. Results show strong potential of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in grammatical error correction task.
This paper presents a scoring system that has shown the top result on the text subset of CALL v3 shared task. The presented system is based on text embeddings, namely NNLM~\cite{nnlm} and BERT~\cite{Bert}. The distinguishing feature of the given approach is that it does not rely on the reference grammar file for scoring. The model is compared against approaches that use the grammar file and proves the possibility to achieve similar and even higher results without a predefined set of correct answers. The paper describes the model itself and the data preparation process that played a crucial rol…
Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS（乌得勒支语言学研究所OTS）
In this paper, we set out to quantify the syntactic capacity of BERT in the evaluation regime of non-context free patterns, as occurring in Dutch. We devise a test suite based on a mildly context-sensitive formalism, from which we derive grammars that capture the linguistic phenomena of control verb nesting and verb raising. The grammars, paired with a small lexicon, provide us with a large collection of naturalistic utterances, annotated with verb-subject pairings, that serve as the evaluation test bed for an attention-based span selection probe. Our results, backed by extensive analysis, sug…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
A well formed query is defined as a query which is formulated in the manner of an inquiry, and with correct interrogatives, spelling and grammar. While identifying well formed queries is an important task, few works have attempted to address it. In this paper we propose transformer based language model - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to this task. We further imbibe BERT with parts-of-speech information inspired from earlier works. Furthermore, we also train the model in multiple curriculum settings for improvement in performance. Curriculum Learning over the ta…
Attention Meets Reachability: Structural Equivalence and Efficiency in Grammar-Constrained LLM Decoding
Department of Computer Engineering, Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey（计算机工程系，巴切希尔大学，伊斯坦布尔，土耳其）；Department of Industrial Engineering, Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey（工业工程系，巴切希尔大学，伊斯坦布尔，土耳其）
Meitu（美图）；The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong（香港恒生大学）
Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is a fundamental task for Chinese language understanding. Recently, neural network-based models have attained superior performance in solving the in-domain CWS task. Last year, Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT), a new language representation model, has been proposed as a backbone model for many natural language tasks and redefined the corresponding performance. The excellent performance of BERT motivates us to apply it to solve the CWS task. By conducting intensive experiments in the benchmark datasets from the second International Ch…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Lausanne（洛桑大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；University of St. Gallen（圣加仑大学）
Many processes in psychology are complex, such as dyadic interactions between two interacting partners (e.g. patient-therapist, intimate relationship partners). Nevertheless, many basic questions about interactions are difficult to investigate because dyadic processes can be within a person and between partners, they are based on multimodal aspects of behavior and unfold rapidly. Current analyses are mainly based on the behavioral coding method, whereby human coders annotate behavior based on a coding schema. But coding is labor-intensive, expensive, slow, focuses on few modalities. Current ap…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
The rapid development of quantum computing has demonstrated many unique characteristics of quantum advantages, such as richer feature representation and more secured protection on model parameters. This work proposes a vertical federated learning architecture based on variational quantum circuits to demonstrate the competitive performance of a quantum-enhanced pre-trained BERT model for text classification. In particular, our proposed hybrid classical-quantum model consists of a novel random quantum temporal convolution (QTC) learning framework replacing some layers in the BERT-based decoder. …
In this paper, we address the problem of learning low dimension representation of entities on relational databases consisting of multiple tables. Embeddings help to capture semantics encoded in the database and can be used in a variety of settings like auto-completion of tables, fully-neural query processing of relational joins queries, seamlessly handling missing values, and more. Current work is restricted to working with just single table, or using pretrained embeddings over an external corpus making them unsuitable for use in real-world databases. In this work, we look into ways of using t…
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
The last few years have witnessed an exponential rise in the propagation of offensive text on social media. Identification of this text with high precision is crucial for the well-being of society. Most of the existing approaches tend to give high toxicity scores to innocuous statements (e.g., "I am a gay man"). These false positives result from over-generalization on the training data where specific terms in the statement may have been used in a pejorative sense (e.g., "gay"). Emphasis on such words alone can lead to discrimination against the classes these systems are designed to protect. In…
College of William and Mary（威廉玛丽学院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室，IBM研究院）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）
Pre-trained large-scale language models have increasingly demonstrated high accuracy on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the limited weight storage and computational speed on hardware platforms have impeded the popularity of pre-trained models, especially in the era of edge computing. In this paper, we seek to find the best model structure of BERT for a given computation size to match specific devices. We propose the first compiler-aware neural architecture optimization framework. Our framework can guarantee the identified model to meet both resource and real-time specifi…
We present an approach to searching large video corpora for video clips which depict a natural-language query in the form of a sentence. This approach uses compositional semantics to encode subtle meaning that is lost in other systems, such as the difference between two sentences which have identical words but entirely different meaning: "The person rode the horse} vs. \emph{The horse rode the person". Given a video-sentence pair and a natural-language parser, along with a grammar that describes the space of sentential queries, we produce a score which indicates how well the video depicts the …
The paper presents a data-driven approach to information extraction (viewed as template filling) using the structured language model (SLM) as a statistical parser. The task of template filling is cast as constrained parsing using the SLM. The model is automatically trained from a set of sentences annotated with frame/slot labels and spans. Training proceeds in stages: first a constrained syntactic parser is trained such that the parses on training data meet the specified semantic spans, then the non-terminal labels are enriched to contain semantic information and finally a constrained syntacti…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities between human and digital communication have been strongly emphasized, and differences largely ignored. However, some of these differences matter: communication systems are based on predefined codes shared by every sender-receiver, whereas the distributions of words in natural languages guarantee that no speaker-hearer ever has access to an entire linguistic code…
Semantic parsing is the process of translating natural language utterances into logical forms, which has many important applications such as question answering and instruction following. Sequence-to-sequence models have been very successful across many NLP tasks. However, a lack of task-specific prior knowledge can be detrimental to the performance of these models. Prior work has used frameworks for inducing grammars over the training examples, which capture conditional independence properties that the model can leverage. Inspired by the recent success stories such as BERT we set out to extend…
Speech processing systems rely on robust feature extraction to handle phonetic and semantic variations found in natural language. While techniques exist for desensitizing features to common noise patterns produced by Speech-to-Text (STT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, the question remains how to best leverage state-of-the-art language models (which capture rich semantic features, but are trained on only written text) on inputs with ASR errors. In this paper, we present Telephonetic, a data augmentation framework that helps robustify language model features to ASR corrupted inputs. To captur…
We study the problem of deep recall model in industrial web search, which is, given a user query, retrieve hundreds of most relevance documents from billions of candidates. The common framework is to train two encoding models based on neural embedding which learn the distributed representations of queries and documents separately and match them in the latent semantic space. However, all the exiting encoding models only leverage the information of the document itself, which is often not sufficient in practice when matching with query terms, especially for the hard tail queries. In this work we …
