Articles

AbstractNowadays a typical Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model generates translations from left to right as a linear sequence, during which latent syntactic structures of the target sentences are not explicitly concerned. Inspired by the success of using syntactic knowledge of target language for improving statistical machine translation, in this paper …...

AbstractEven though a linguistics-free sequence to sequence model in neural machine translation (NMT) has certain capability of implicitly learning syntactic information of source sentences, this paper shows that source syntax can be explicitly incorporated into NMT effectively to provide further improvements. Specifically, we linearize parse trees of source sentences to …...

AbstractThe referring expressions (REs) produced by a natural language generation (NLG) system can be misunderstood by the hearer, even when they are semantically correct. In an interactive setting, the NLG system can try to recognize such misunderstandings and correct them. We present an algorithm for generating corrective REs that use …...

AbstractEnd-to-end learning of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is an attractive solution for dialog systems; however, current techniques are data-intensive and require thousands of dialogs to learn simple behaviors. We introduce Hybrid Code Networks (HCNs), which combine an RNN with domain-specific knowledge encoded as software and system action templates. Compared to …...

AbstractWhile recent neural encoder-decoder models have shown great promise in modeling open-domain conversations, they often generate dull and generic responses. Unlike past work that has focused on diversifying the output of the decoder from word-level to alleviate this problem, we present a novel framework based on conditional variational autoencoders that …...

AbstractHuman verbal communication includes affective messages which are conveyed through use of emotionally colored words. There has been a lot of research effort in this direction but the problem of integrating state-of-the-art neural language models with affective information remains an area ripe for exploration. In this paper, we propose an …...

AbstractAn important problem in domain adaptation is to quickly generalize to a new domain with limited supervision given K existing domains. One approach is to retrain a global model across all K + 1 domains using standard techniques, for instance Daumé III (2009). However, it is desirable to adapt without …...

AbstractWe present a visually grounded model of speech perception which projects spoken utterances and images to a joint semantic space. We use a multi-layer recurrent highway network to model the temporal nature of spoken speech, and show that it learns to extract both form and meaning-based linguistic knowledge from the …...

AbstractThe sociolinguistic construct of stancetaking describes the activities through which discourse participants create and signal relationships to their interlocutors, to the topic of discussion, and to the talk itself. Stancetaking underlies a wide range of interactional phenomena, relating to formality, politeness, affect, and subjectivity. We present a computational approach to …...

AbstractCultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an elusive, poorly measured construct. Recent research draws on computational linguistics to measure cultural fit but overlooks asymmetries in cultural adaptation. By contrast, we develop a directed, dynamic measure …...

AbstractCloze-style reading comprehension is a representative problem in mining relationship between document and query. In this paper, we present a simple but novel model called attention-over-attention reader for better solving cloze-style reading comprehension task. The proposed model aims to place another attention mechanism over the document-level attention and induces “attended …...

AbstractKeyphrase provides highly-summative information that can be effectively used for understanding, organizing and retrieving text content. Though previous studies have provided many workable solutions for automated keyphrase extraction, they commonly divided the to-be-summarized content into multiple text chunks, then ranked and selected the most meaningful ones. These approaches could neither …...

AbstractRelation detection is a core component of many NLP applications including Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). In this paper, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network enhanced by residual learning which detects KB relations given an input question. Our method uses deep residual bidirectional LSTMs to compare questions and relation …...

AbstractThis paper proposes a low-complexity word-level deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for text categorization that can efficiently represent long-range associations in text. In the literature, several deep and complex neural networks have been proposed for this task, assuming availability of relatively large amounts of training data. However, the associated …...

AbstractWe present in this paper a novel framework for morpheme segmentation which uses the morpho-syntactic regularities preserved by word representations, in addition to orthographic features, to segment words into morphemes. This framework is the first to consider vocabulary-wide syntactico-semantic information for this task. We also analyze the deficiencies of available …...

AbstractA fundamental question in language learning concerns the role of a speaker’s first language in second language acquisition. We present a novel methodology for studying this question: analysis of eye-movement patterns in second language reading of free-form text. Using this methodology, we demonstrate for the first time that the native …...

AbstractTranslation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and literature for thousands of years. Translators have always tried to be invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in the target language. We show that traces of the source language remain in the translation …...

AbstractEnd-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a popular alternative to conventional DNN/HMM systems because it avoids the need for linguistic resources such as pronunciation dictionary, tokenization, and context-dependency trees, leading to a greatly simplified model-building process. There are two major types of end-to-end architectures for ASR: attention-based methods use …...

AbstractGiven a collection of images and spoken audio captions, we present a method for discovering word-like acoustic units in the continuous speech signal and grounding them to semantically relevant image regions. For example, our model is able to detect spoken instances of the word ‘lighthouse’ within an utterance and associate …...

AbstractWe study response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval based chatbots. Existing work either concatenates utterances in context or matches a response with a highly abstract context vector finally, which may lose relationships among the utterances or important information in the context. We propose a sequential matching network (SMN) to …...