Determining the relative importance of the elements in a sentence is a key factor for effortless natural language understanding. For human language processing, we can approximate patterns of relative importance by measuring reading fixations using eye-tracking technology. In neural language models, gradient-based saliency methods indicate the relative importance of a token for the target objective. In this work, we compare patterns of relative importance in English language processing by humans and models and analyze the underlying linguistic patterns. We find that human processing patterns in English correlate strongly with saliency-based importance in language models and not with attention-based importance. Our results indicate that saliency could be a cognitively more plausible metric for interpreting neural language models. The code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/beinborn/relative_importance
We present importance aligned key iterative algorithm for extractive summarization that is faster than conventional algorithms keeping its accuracy. The computational complexity of our algorithm is O($SNlogN$) to summarize original $N$ sentences into final $S$ sentences. Our algorithm maximizes the weighted dissimilarity defined by the product of importance and cosine dissimilarity so that the summary represents the document and at the same time the sentences of the summary are not similar to each other. The weighted dissimilarity is heuristically maximized by iterative greedy search and binar…
Kangwon National University（江原大学）；Konkuk University（建国大学）
Previous researchers have considered sentiment analysis as a document classification task, in which input documents are classified into predefined sentiment classes. Although there are sentences in a document that support important evidences for sentiment analysis and sentences that do not, they have treated the document as a bag of sentences. In other words, they have not considered the importance of each sentence in the document. To effectively determine polarity of a document, each sentence in the document should be dealt with different degrees of importance. To address this problem, we pro…
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本北陆先端科学技术大学院大学）；University of Engineering and Technology, VNU（越南国立大学工程技术大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Ambiguity is a characteristic of natural language, which makes expression ideas flexible. However, in a domain that requires accurate statements, it becomes a barrier. Specifically, a single word can have many meanings and multiple words can have the same meaning. When translating a text into a foreign language, the translator needs to determine the exact meaning of each element in the original sentence to produce the correct translation sentence. From that observation, in this paper, we propose ParaLaw Nets, a pretrained model family using sentence-level cross-lingual information to reduce am…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine the relation between two entities from a document of multiple sentences. Recent studies typically represent the entire document by sequence- or graph-based models to predict the relations of all entity pairs. However, we find that such a model is not robust and exhibits bizarre behaviors: it predicts correctly when an entire test document is fed as input, but errs when non-evidence sentences are removed. To this end, we propose a Sentence Importance Estimation and Focusing (SIEF) framework for DocRE, where we design a sentence import…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have long been an architecture of interest for computational models of human sentence processing. The recently introduced Transformer architecture outperforms RNNs on many natural language processing tasks but little is known about its ability to model human language processing. We compare Transformer- and RNN-based language models' ability to account for measures of human reading effort. Our analysis shows Transformers to outperform RNNs in explaining self-paced reading times and neural activity during reading English sentences, challenging the widely held ide…
Underutilization of Syntactic Processing by Chinese Learners of English in Comprehending English Sentences, Evidenced from Adapted Garden-Path Ambiguity Experiment
Comparing Human and Language Models Sentence Processing Difficulties on Complex Structures
Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Israel（巴尔-艾塔夫大学计算机科学学院）；Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Israel（巴尔-艾塔夫大学语言学系）；Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Israel（巴尔-艾塔夫大学神经科学学院）
This paper describes SentencePiece, a language-independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer designed for Neural-based text processing, including Neural Machine Translation. It provides open-source C++ and Python implementations for subword units. While existing subword segmentation tools assume that the input is pre-tokenized into word sequences, SentencePiece can train subword models directly from raw sentences, which allows us to make a purely end-to-end and language independent system. We perform a validation experiment of NMT on English-Japanese machine translation, and find that it is po…
The complexity of sentences characteristic to biomedical articles poses a challenge to natural language parsers, which are typically trained on large-scale corpora of non-technical text. We propose a text simplification process, bioSimplify, that seeks to reduce the complexity of sentences in biomedical abstracts in order to improve the performance of syntactic parsers on the processed sentences. Syntactic parsing is typically one of the first steps in a text mining pipeline. Thus, any improvement in performance would have a ripple effect over all processing steps. We evaluated our method usin…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman（克尔曼沙希德·巴霍纳尔大学）；University of Basque Country UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））
In this paper, we develop a compositional vector-based semantics of positive transitive sentences in quantum natural language processing for a non-English language, i.e. Persian, to compare the parametrized quantum circuits of two synonymous sentences in two languages, English and Persian. By considering grammar+meaning of a transitive sentence, we translate DisCoCat diagram via ZX-calculus into quantum circuit form. Also, we use a bigraph method to rewrite DisCoCat diagram and turn into quantum circuit in the semantic side.
IBM Research, Almaden（IBM研究中心，阿尔马登（IBM Research, Almaden））
Computing universal distributed representations of sentences is a fundamental task in natural language processing. We propose a method to learn such representations by encoding the suffixes of word sequences in a sentence and training on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on the SentEval benchmark, improving on existing approaches on several transfer tasks.
Sentence Simplification aims to rephrase complex sentences into simpler sentences while retaining original meaning. Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, it is not yet known whether LLMs can be served as a high-quality sentence simplification system. In this work, we empirically analyze the zero-/few-shot learning ability of LLMs by evaluating them on a number of benchmark test sets. Experimental results show LLMs outperform state-of-the-art sentence simplification methods, and are judged to be on a par wi…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most difficult parts in shallow discourse parsing as the relation prediction without explicit connectives requires the language understanding at both the text span level and the sentence level. Previous studies mainly focus on the interactions between two arguments. We argue that a powerful contextualized representation module, a bilateral multi-perspective matching module, and a global information fusion module are all important to implicit discourse analysis. We propose a novel model to combine these modules together. Extensive experim…
In this study, we aim to find a method to auto-tag sentences specific to a domain. Our training data comprises short conversational sentences extracted from chat conversations between company's customer representatives and web site visitors. We manually tagged approximately 14 thousand visitor inputs into ten basic categories, which will later be used in a transformer-based language model with attention mechanisms for the ultimate goal of developing a chatbot application that can produce meaningful dialogue. We considered three different state-of-the-art models and reported their auto-tagging …
This paper introduces a sentence to vector encoding framework suitable for advanced natural language processing. Our latent representation is shown to encode sentences with common semantic information with similar vector representations. The vector representation is extracted from an encoder-decoder model which is trained on sentence paraphrase pairs. We demonstrate the application of the sentence representations for two different tasks -- sentence paraphrasing and paragraph summarization, making it attractive for commonly used recurrent frameworks that process text. Experimental results help …
Most compositional distributional semantic models represent sentence meaning with a single vector. In this paper, we propose a Structured Distributional Model (SDM) that combines word embeddings with formal semantics and is based on the assumption that sentences represent events and situations. The semantic representation of a sentence is a formal structure derived from Discourse Representation Theory and containing distributional vectors. This structure is dynamically and incrementally built by integrating knowledge about events and their typical participants, as they are activated by lexical…
This paper is motivated by the automation of neuropsychological tests involving discourse analysis in the retellings of narratives by patients with potential cognitive impairment. In this scenario the task of sentence boundary detection in speech transcripts is important as discourse analysis involves the application of Natural Language Processing tools, such as taggers and parsers, which depend on the sentence as a processing unit. Our aim in this paper is to verify which embedding induction method works best for the sentence boundary detection task, specifically whether it be those which wer…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Most work on multi-document summarization has focused on generic summarization of information present in each individual document set. However, the under-explored setting of update summarization, where the goal is to identify the new information present in each set, is of equal practical interest (e.g., presenting readers with updates on an evolving news topic). In this work, we present SupMMD, a novel technique for generic and update summarization based on the maximum mean discrepancy from kernel two-sample testing. SupMMD combines both supervised learning for salience and unsupervised learni…
Sentence matching is a fundamental task of natural language processing with various applications. Most recent approaches adopt attention-based neural models to build word- or phrase-level alignment between two sentences. However, these models usually ignore the inherent structure within the sentences and fail to consider various dependency relationships among text units. To address these issues, this paper proposes a graph-based approach for sentence matching. First, we represent a sentence pair as a graph with several carefully design strategies. We then employ a novel gated graph attention n…
Duke University（杜克大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Vector representations of sentences, trained on massive text corpora, are widely used as generic sentence embeddings across a variety of NLP problems. The learned representations are generally assumed to be continuous and real-valued, giving rise to a large memory footprint and slow retrieval speed, which hinders their applicability to low-resource (memory and computation) platforms, such as mobile devices. In this paper, we propose four different strategies to transform continuous and generic sentence embeddings into a binarized form, while preserving their rich semantic information. The intr…
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（马萨诸塞总医院）
We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed default production-rule firing time; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of chunks in memory; and resource reduction as reduced goal activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object rela- tives whose matrix clause contained either an NP or a r…
The goal of sentence and document modeling is to accurately represent the meaning of sentences and documents for various Natural Language Processing tasks. In this work, we present Dependency Sensitive Convolutional Neural Networks (DSCNN) as a general-purpose classification system for both sentences and documents. DSCNN hierarchically builds textual representations by processing pretrained word embeddings via Long Short-Term Memory networks and subsequently extracting features with convolution operators. Compared with existing recursive neural models with tree structures, DSCNN does not rely …
Duke University（杜克大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Pretrained language models (PLMs), such as GPT2, have achieved remarkable empirical performance in text generation tasks. However, pretrained on large-scale natural language corpora, the generated text from PLMs may exhibit social bias against disadvantaged demographic groups. To improve the fairness of PLMs in text generation, we propose to minimize the mutual information between the semantics in the generated text sentences and their demographic polarity, i.e., the demographic group to which the sentence is referring. In this way, the mentioning of a demographic group (e.g., male or female) …
The main goal of this master's thesis is to introduce Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) in a way understandable by both the NLP engineer and the quantum computing practitioner. QNLP is a recent application of quantum computing that aims at representing sentences' meaning as vectors encoded into quantum computers. To achieve this, the distributional meaning of words is extended by the compositional meaning of sentences (DisCoCat model) : the vectors representing words' meanings are composed through the syntactic structure of the sentence. This is done using an algorithm based on tensor…
Sentence embedding is an important research topic in natural language processing. It is essential to generate a good embedding vector that fully reflects the semantic meaning of a sentence in order to achieve an enhanced performance for various natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation and document classification. Thus far, various sentence embedding models have been proposed, and their feasibility has been demonstrated through good performances on tasks following embedding, such as sentiment analysis and sentence classification. However, because the performances of senten…
Sentence ordering is a general and critical task for natural language generation applications. Previous works have focused on improving its performance in an external, downstream task, such as multi-document summarization. Given its importance, we propose to study it as an isolated task. We collect a large corpus of academic texts, and derive a data driven approach to learn pairwise ordering of sentences, and validate the efficacy with extensive experiments. Source codes and dataset of this paper will be made publicly available.
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61/CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61中心）；University of Turku（图尔库大学）
Sentence compression is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task aimed at shortening original sentences and preserving their key information. Its applications can benefit many fields e.g. one can build tools for language education. However, current methods are largely based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models which suffer from poor processing speed. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a token-wise Convolutional Neural Network, a CNN-based model along with pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) features for deletion-based sentence compressio…
University of Salzburg（萨尔茨堡大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Expressive text encoders such as RNNs and Transformer Networks have been at the center of NLP models in recent work. Most of the effort has focused on sentence-level tasks, capturing the dependencies between words in a single sentence, or pairs of sentences. However, certain tasks, such as argumentation mining, require accounting for longer texts and complicated structural dependencies between them. Deep structured prediction is a general framework to combine the complementary strengths of expressive neural encoders and structured inference for highly structured domains. Nevertheless, when the…
Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
News article revision histories have the potential to give us novel insights across varied fields of linguistics and social sciences. In this work, we present, to our knowledge, the first publicly available dataset of news article revision histories, or NewsEdits. Our dataset is multilingual; it contains 1,278,804 articles with 4,609,430 versions from over 22 English- and French-language newspaper sources based in three countries. Across version pairs, we count 10.9 million added sentences; 8.9 million changed sentences and 6.8 million removed sentences. Within the changed sentences, we derive…
Duke University（杜克大学）；NEC Laboratories America（美国NEC实验室）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently emerged as a popular building block for natural language processing (NLP). Despite their success, most existing CNN models employed in NLP share the same learned (and static) set of filters for all input sentences. In this paper, we consider an approach of using a small meta network to learn context-sensitive convolutional filters for text processing. The role of meta network is to abstract the contextual information of a sentence or document into a set of input-aware filters. We further generalize this framework to model sentence pairs, where…
Align and Shine: Building High-Quality Sentence-Aligned Corpora for Multilingual Text Simplification
Centre for Translation, Localisation and Interpreting Studies（翻译、本地化与诠释研究中心）；School of Languages, Cultures and Societies（语言、文化和社会学院）；University of Leeds, UK（利兹大学）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Sentence scoring and sentence selection are two main steps in extractive document summarization systems. However, previous works treat them as two separated subtasks. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end neural network framework for extractive document summarization by jointly learning to score and select sentences. It first reads the document sentences with a hierarchical encoder to obtain the representation of sentences. Then it builds the output summary by extracting sentences one by one. Different from previous methods, our approach integrates the selection strategy into the scorin…
TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（莱布尼茨科学与技术信息中心）
Purpose: The aim of this work is to normalize the NLPCONTRIBUTIONS scheme (henceforward, NLPCONTRIBUTIONGRAPH) to structure, directly from article sentences, the contributions information in Natural Language Processing (NLP) scholarly articles via a two-stage annotation methodology: 1) pilot stage - to define the scheme (described in prior work); and 2) adjudication stage - to normalize the graphing model (the focus of this paper). Design/methodology/approach: We re-annotate, a second time, the contributions-pertinent information across 50 prior-annotated NLP scholarly articles in terms of a d…
Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP). Several recent studies show the success of deep learning on text processing. Convolutional neural network (CNN), as a popular deep learning model, has shown remarkable success in the task of text classification. In this paper, new baseline models have been studied for text classification using CNN. In these models, documents are fed to the network as a three-dimensional tensor representation to provide sentence-level analysis. Applying such a method enables the models to take advantage of the positional information…
