Grammars & Parsing
Multilingual Pre-training with Universal Dependency Learning
The pre-trained language model (PrLM) demonstrates domination in downstream natural language processing tasks, in which multilingual PrLM takes advantage of language universality to alleviate the issue of limited resources for low-resource languages. Despite its successes, the performance of multilingual PrLM is still unsatisfactory, when multilingual PrLMs only focus on plain text and ignore obvious universal linguistic structure clues. Existing PrLMs have shown that monolingual linguistic structure knowledge may bring about better performance. Thus we propose a novel multilingual PrLM that supports both explicit universal dependency parsing and implicit language modeling. Syntax in terms of universal dependency parse serves as not only pre-training objective but also learned representation in our model, which brings unprecedented PrLM interpretability and convenience in downstream task use. Our model outperforms two popular multilingual PrLM, multilingual-BERT and XLM-R, on cross-lingual natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks and linguistic structure parsing datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and stronger cross-lingual modeling capabilities of our approach.
Supplementary Material for Grammar-Based Grounded Lexicon Learning
In the supplementary material, we describe the domain specific languages used in our experiments (Section 1), demonstrate how the proposed CKY-E2 method works by a concrete example (Section 2.1), show formal properties of CKY-E2 (Section 2.2), present dataset setups and analyze model behaviors (Section 3), and list environmental details for experiments (Section??). In this section, we will present and discuss the domain-specific languages (DSLs) we use for two domains: visual reasoning and language-guided navigation. We will further introduce the neurosymbolic module we have designed for executing programs in these two domains. Overall, each DSL contains a set of types and a set of deterministic modules that have been manually designed for realizing necessary operations in these domains. However, in contrast to realizing them as we do in standard programming languages (with for-loops and if-conditions), we will be using tensor operations (e.g., tensor additions and multiplications) to realize them so that the output of each program is differentiable with respect to all of its inputs. We refer readers to the original papers for a detailed introduction to the DSL and neuro-symbolic program execution. Here we only highlight the key aspects of our language and its neuro-symbolic realization, and discuss the difference between our implementation and the ones in original papers. Our visual reasoning DSL is a subset of CLEVR, containing 6 types and 8 primitive operations. Table 1 illustrates all 6 types and how they are internally represented in neuro-symbolic execution. Table 2 further shows all operations in the DSL. There are two main differences between the DSL used by G2L2 and the original CLEVRDSL.
SADGA: Structure-Aware Dual Graph Aggregation Network for Text-to-SQL
The Text-to-SQL task, aiming to translate the natural language of the questions into SQL queries, has drawn much attention recently. One of the most challenging problems of Text-to-SQL is how to generalize the trained model to the unseen database schemas, also known as the cross-domain Text-to-SQL task. The key lies in the generalizability of (i) the encoding method to model the question and the database schema and (ii) the question-schema linking method to learn the mapping between words in the question and tables/columns in the database schema. Focusing on the above two key issues, we propose a Structure-Aware Dual Graph Aggregation Network (SADGA) for cross-domain Text-to-SQL. In SADGA, we adopt the graph structure to provide a unified encoding model for both the natural language question and database schema. Based on the proposed unified modeling, we further devise a structure-aware aggregation method to learn the mapping between the question-graph and schema-graph. The structure-aware aggregation method is featured with Global Graph Linking, Local Graph Linking and DualGraph Aggregation Mechanism. We not only study the performance of our proposal empirically but also achieved 3rd place on the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider at the time of writing.
Recursive Bayesian Networks: Generalising and Unifying Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars and Dynamic Bayesian Networks
Probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs) and dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) are widely used sequence models with complementary strengths and limitations. While PCFGs allow for nested hierarchical dependencies (tree structures), their latent variables (non-terminal symbols) have to be discrete. In contrast, DBNs allow for continuous latent variables, but the dependencies are strictly sequential (chain structure). Therefore, neither can be applied if the latent variables are assumed to be continuous and also to have a nested hierarchical dependency structure. In this paper, we present Recursive Bayesian Networks (RBNs), which generalise and unify PCFGs and DBNs, combining their strengths and containing both as special cases. RBNs define a joint distribution over tree-structured Bayesian networks with discrete or continuous latent variables. The main challenge lies in performing joint inference over the exponential number of possible structures and the continuous variables. We provide two solutions: 1) For arbitrary RBNs, we generalise inside and outside probabilities from PCFGs to the mixed discrete-continuous case, which allows for maximum posterior estimates of the continuous latent variables via gradient descent, while marginalising over network structures.
MOMA-LRG: Language-Refined Graphs for Multi-Object Multi-Actor Activity Parsing Supplementary Material
VLMEvaluation To evaluate two VLMs (Frozen in Time [1] and VideoCLIP [13]), we use a hybrid approach that leverages both prototypical networks [11] and the video-language similarity metrics learned by both models. Below, we show an ablation study where we use only the video prototype networks. We show the performance of using only language similarity in the few-shot case to demonstrate the effects of sample removal, and we also show the effects of our hybrid weighting scheme, where we weight the language embeddings five times more than the video embeddings when constructing the hybrid prototype (as opposed to equal weighting during the regular hybrid approach). Although we perform our ablation study with Frozen-in-Time, and use the same weighting scheme and prototype strategy for VideoCLIP as well. For this study, we show activity and sub-activity classification accuracy in the 5-shot case. We visualize whether a given method uses language, video, or both to create its prototype embeddings.
Phase transition on a context-sensitive random language model with short range interactions
Toji, Yuma, Takahashi, Jun, Roychowdhury, Vwani, Miyahara, Hideyuki
Since the random language model was proposed by E. DeGiuli [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 128301], language models have been investigated intensively from the viewpoint of statistical mechanics. Recently, the existence of a Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless transition was numerically demonstrated in models with long-range interactions between symbols. In statistical mechanics, it has long been known that long-range interactions can induce phase transitions. Therefore, it has remained unclear whether phase transitions observed in language models originate from genuinely linguistic properties that are absent in conventional spin models. In this study, we construct a random language model with short-range interactions and numerically investigate its statistical properties. Our model belongs to the class of context-sensitive grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy and allows explicit reference to contexts. We find that a phase transition occurs even when the model refers only to contexts whose length remains constant with respect to the sentence length. This result indicates that finite-temperature phase transitions in language models are genuinely induced by the intrinsic nature of language, rather than by long-range interactions.