Discourse & Dialogue
Sentiment Analysis with AFINN Lexicon – Himanshu Lohiya – Medium
The AFINN lexicon is perhaps one of the simplest and most popular lexicons that can be used extensively for sentiment analysis. The current version of the lexicon is AFINN-en-165. You can find this lexicon at the author's official GitHub repository. The author has also created a nice wrapper library on top of this in Python called afinn, which we will be using for our analysis. Let's look at some visualisations now.
Combing LDA and Word Embeddings for topic modeling – Towards Data Science
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a classical way to do a topic modelling. Topic modeling is a unsupervised learning and the goal is group different document to same "topic". Typical example is clustering a news to corresponding category including "Finance", "Travel", "Sport" etc. Before word embeddings we may use Bag-of-Words in most of the time. However, the world changed after Mikolov et al. introduce word2vec (one of the example of Word Embeddings) in 2013.
Document Informed Neural Autoregressive Topic Models with Distributional Prior
Gupta, Pankaj, Chaudhary, Yatin, Buettner, Florian, Schütze, Hinrich
We address two challenges in topic models: (1) Context information around words helps in determining their actual meaning, e.g., "networks" used in the contexts artificial neural networks vs. biological neuron networks. Generative topic models infer topic-word distributions, taking no or only little context into account. Here, we extend a neural autoregressive topic model to exploit the full context information around words in a document in a language modeling fashion. The proposed model is named as iDocNADE. (2) Due to the small number of word occurrences (i.e., lack of context) in short text and data sparsity in a corpus of few documents, the application of topic models is challenging on such texts. Therefore, we propose a simple and efficient way of incorporating external knowledge into neural autoregressive topic models: we use embeddings as a distributional prior. The proposed variants are named as DocNADE2 and iDocNADE2. We present novel neural autoregressive topic model variants that consistently outperform state-of-the-art generative topic models in terms of generalization, interpretability (topic coherence) and applicability (retrieval and classification) over 6 long-text and 8 short-text datasets from diverse domains.
Distilled Wasserstein Learning for Word Embedding and Topic Modeling
Xu, Hongteng, Wang, Wenlin, Liu, Wei, Carin, Lawrence
We propose a novel Wasserstein method with a distillation mechanism, yielding joint learning of word embeddings and topics. The proposed method is based on the fact that the Euclidean distance between word embeddings may be employed as the underlying distance in the Wasserstein topic model. The word distributions of topics, their optimal transports to the word distributions of documents, and the embeddings of words are learned in a unified framework. When learning the topic model, we leverage a distilled underlying distance matrix to update the topic distributions and smoothly calculate the corresponding optimal transports. Such a strategy provides the updating of word embeddings with robust guidance, improving the algorithmic convergence. As an application, we focus on patient admission records, in which the proposed method embeds the codes of diseases and procedures and learns the topics of admissions, obtaining superior performance on clinically-meaningful disease network construction, mortality prediction as a function of admission codes, and procedure recommendation.
Game-Based Video-Context Dialogue
Pasunuru, Ramakanth, Bansal, Mohit
Current dialogue systems focus more on textual and speech context knowledge and are usually based on two speakers. Some recent work has investigated static image-based dialogue. However, several real-world human interactions also involve dynamic visual context (similar to videos) as well as dialogue exchanges among multiple speakers. To move closer towards such multimodal conversational skills and visually-situated applications, we introduce a new video-context, many-speaker dialogue dataset based on live-broadcast soccer game videos and chats from Twitch.tv. This challenging testbed allows us to develop visually-grounded dialogue models that should generate relevant temporal and spatial event language from the live video, while also being relevant to the chat history. For strong baselines, we also present several discriminative and generative models, e.g., based on tridirectional attention flow (TriDAF). We evaluate these models via retrieval ranking-recall, automatic phrase-matching metrics, as well as human evaluation studies. We also present dataset analyses, model ablations, and visualizations to understand the contribution of different modalities and model components.
A Transfer-Learnable Natural Language Interface for Databases
Wang, Wenlu, Tian, Yingtao, Xiong, Hongyu, Wang, Haixun, Ku, Wei-Shinn
Relational database management systems (RDBMSs) are powerful because they are able to optimize and answer queries against any relational database. A natural language interface (NLI) for a database, on the other hand, is tailored to support that specific database. In this work, we introduce a general purpose transfer-learnable NLI with the goal of learning one model that can be used as NLI for any relational database. We adopt the data management principle of separating data and its schema, but with the additional support for the idiosyncrasy and complexity of natural languages. Specifically, we introduce an automatic annotation mechanism that separates the schema and the data, where the schema also covers knowledge about natural language. Furthermore, we propose a customized sequence model that translates annotated natural language queries to SQL statements. We show in experiments that our approach outperforms previous NLI methods on the WikiSQL dataset and the model we learned can be applied to another benchmark dataset OVERNIGHT without retraining.
Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q: Robust Planning for Dialogue Policy Learning
Su, Shang-Yu, Li, Xiujun, Gao, Jianfeng, Liu, Jingjing, Chen, Yun-Nung
This paper presents a Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q) approach to improving the effectiveness and robustness of Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ), a recently proposed framework that extends the Dyna-Q algorithm to integrate planning for task-completion dialogue policy learning. To obviate DDQ's high dependency on the quality of simulated experiences, we incorporate an RNN-based discriminator in D3Q to differentiate simulated experience from real user experience in order to control the quality of training data. Experiments show that D3Q significantly outperforms DDQ by controlling the quality of simulated experience used for planning. The effectiveness and robustness of D3Q is further demonstrated in a domain extension setting, where the agent's capability of adapting to a changing environment is tested.
Visual Coreference Resolution in Visual Dialog using Neural Module Networks
Kottur, Satwik, Moura, José M. F., Parikh, Devi, Batra, Dhruv, Rohrbach, Marcus
Visual dialog entails answering a series of questions grounded in an image, using dialog history as context. In addition to the challenges found in visual question answering (VQA), which can be seen as one-round dialog, visual dialog encompasses several more. We focus on one such problem called visual coreference resolution that involves determining which words, typically noun phrases and pronouns, co-refer to the same entity/object instance in an image. This is crucial, especially for pronouns (e.g., `it'), as the dialog agent must first link it to a previous coreference (e.g., `boat'), and only then can rely on the visual grounding of the coreference `boat' to reason about the pronoun `it'. Prior work (in visual dialog) models visual coreference resolution either (a) implicitly via a memory network over history, or (b) at a coarse level for the entire question; and not explicitly at a phrase level of granularity. In this work, we propose a neural module network architecture for visual dialog by introducing two novel modules - Refer and Exclude - that perform explicit, grounded, coreference resolution at a finer word level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on MNIST Dialog, a visually simple yet coreference-wise complex dataset, by achieving near perfect accuracy, and on VisDial, a large and challenging visual dialog dataset on real images, where our model outperforms other approaches, and is more interpretable, grounded, and consistent qualitatively.
Distance Based Source Domain Selection for Sentiment Classification
Schultz, Lex Razoux, Loog, Marco, Esfahani, Peyman Mohajerin
Automated sentiment classification (SC) on short text fragments has received increasing attention in recent years. Performing SC on unseen domains with few or no labeled samples can significantly affect the classification performance due to different expression of sentiment in source and target domain. In this study, we aim to mitigate this undesired impact by proposing a methodology based on a predictive measure, which allows us to select an optimal source domain from a set of candidates. The proposed measure is a linear combination of well-known distance functions between probability distributions supported on the source and target domains (e.g. Earth Mover's distance and Kullback-Leibler divergence). The performance of the proposed methodology is validated through an SC case study in which our numerical experiments suggest a significant improvement in the cross domain classification error in comparison with a random selected source domain for both a naive and adaptive learning setting. In the case of more heterogeneous datasets, the predictability feature of the proposed model can be utilized to further select a subset of candidate domains, where the corresponding classifier outperforms the one trained on all available source domains. This observation reinforces a hypothesis that our proposed model may also be deployed as a means to filter out redundant information during a training phase of SC.
Summarizing Opinions: Aspect Extraction Meets Sentiment Prediction and They Are Both Weakly Supervised
Angelidis, Stefanos, Lapata, Mirella
A number of techniques have been proposed for aspect discovery using part of speech tagging (Hu and Liu, 2004), syntactic parsing (Lu et al., 2009), clustering (Mei et al., 2007; Titov and McDonald, 2008b), data mining (Ku et al., 2006), and information extraction (Popescu and Etzioni, 2005). Various lexicon and rule-based methods (Hu and Liu, 2004; Ku et al., 2006; Blair-Goldensohn et al., 2008) have been adopted for sentiment prediction together with a few learning approaches (Lu et al., 2009; Pappas and Popescu-Belis, 2017; Angelidis and Lapata, 2018). As for the summaries, a common format involves a list of aspects and the number of positive and negative opinions for each (Hu and Liu, 2004). While this format gives an overall idea of people's opinion, reading the actual text might be necessary to gain a better understanding of specific details. Textual summaries are created following mostly extractive methods (but see Ganesan et al. 2010 for an abstractive approach), and various formats ranging from lists of words (Popescu and Etzioni, 2005), to phrases (Lu et al., 2009), and sentences (Mei et al., 2007; Blair-Goldensohn et al., 2008; Lerman et al., 2009; Wang and Ling, 2016). In this paper, we present a neural framework for opinion extraction from product reviews. We follow the standard architecture for aspect-based summarization, while taking advantage of the success of neural network models in learning continuous features without recourse to preprocessing tools or linguistic annotations.