Grammars & Parsing
Probabilistic Grammars for Equation Discovery
Brence, Jure, Todorovski, Ljupčo, Džeroski, Sašo
Equation discovery, also known as symbolic regression, is a type of automated modeling that discovers scientific laws, expressed in the form of equations, from observed data and expert knowledge. Deterministic grammars, such as context-free grammars, have been used to limit the search spaces in equation discovery by providing hard constraints that specify which equations to consider and which not. In this paper, we propose the use of probabilistic context-free grammars in the context of equation discovery. Such grammars encode soft constraints on the space of equations, specifying a prior probability distribution on the space of possible equations. We show that probabilistic grammars can be used to elegantly and flexibly formulate the parsimony principle, that favors simpler equations, through probabilities attached to the rules in the grammars. We demonstrate that the use of probabilistic, rather than deterministic grammars, in the context of a Monte-Carlo algorithm for grammar-based equation discovery, leads to more efficient equation discovery. Finally, by specifying prior probability distributions over equation spaces, the foundations are laid for Bayesian approaches to equation discovery.
Extracting and Learning Fine-Grained Labels from Chest Radiographs
Syeda-Mahmood, Tanveer, D, Ph., Wong, K. C. L, D, Ph., Wu, Joy T., D., M., H, M. P., Jadhav, Ashutosh, D, Ph., Boyko, Orest, D, M. D. Ph.
Chest radiographs are the most common diagnostic exam in emergency rooms and intensive care units today. Recently, a number of researchers have begun working on large chest X-ray datasets to develop deep learning models for recognition of a handful of coarse finding classes such as opacities, masses and nodules. In this paper, we focus on extracting and learning fine-grained labels for chest X-ray images. Specifically we develop a new method of extracting fine-grained labels from radiology reports by combining vocabulary-driven concept extraction with phrasal grouping in dependency parse trees for association of modifiers with findings. A total of 457 fine-grained labels depicting the largest spectrum of findings to date were selected and sufficiently large datasets acquired to train a new deep learning model designed for fine-grained classification. We show results that indicate a highly accurate label extraction process and a reliable learning of fine-grained labels. The resulting network, to our knowledge, is the first to recognize fine-grained descriptions of findings in images covering over nine modifiers including laterality, location, severity, size and appearance.
Modelling Morphological Features
This is an excerpt from my master thesis titled: "Semi-supervised morphological reinflection using rectified random variables" Languages use suffixes and prefixes to convey context, stress, intonation, and grammatical meaning (like subject-verb agreement). Such suffixes and prefixes form a more general class of entities which are the meaningful sub-parts of a word; these are called as morphemes. A language's morphology refers to the rules and processes through which morphemes are combined; this allows a word to express its syntactic categories and semantic meaning. For example, in English, a verb can have three tenses: past, present, and future. These are the inflected forms' of the verb.
Template Controllable keywords-to-text Generation
Mishra, Abhijit, Chowdhury, Md Faisal Mahbub, Manohar, Sagar, Gutfreund, Dan, Sankaranarayanan, Karthik
This paper proposes a novel neural model for the understudied task of generating text from keywords. The model takes as input a set of un-ordered keywords, and part-of-speech (POS) based template instructions. This makes it ideal for surface realization in any NLG setup. The framework is based on the encode-attend-decode paradigm, where keywords and templates are encoded first, and the decoder judiciously attends over the contexts derived from the encoded keywords and templates to generate the sentences. Training exploits weak supervision, as the model trains on a large amount of labeled data with keywords and POS based templates prepared through completely automatic means. Qualitative and quantitative performance analyses on publicly available test-data in various domains reveal our system's superiority over baselines, built using state-of-the-art neural machine translation and controllable transfer techniques. Our approach is indifferent to the order of input keywords.
ControlFlag: A Self-supervised Idiosyncratic Pattern Detection System for Software Control Structures
Hasabnis, Niranjan, Gottschlich, Justin
Software debugging has been shown to utilize upwards of 50% of developers' time. Machine programming, the field concerned with the automation of software (and hardware) development, has recently made progress in both research and production-quality automated debugging systems. In this paper, we present ControlFlag, a system that detects possible idiosyncratic violations in software control structures. ControlFlag also suggests possible corrections in the event a true error is detected. A novelty of ControlFlag is that it is entirely self-supervised; that is, it requires no labels to learn about the potential idiosyncratic programming pattern violations. In addition to presenting ControlFlag's design, we also provide an abbreviated experimental evaluation.
Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network
Yang, Xiaoyu, Nie, Feng, Feng, Yufei, Liu, Quan, Chen, Zhigang, Zhu, Xiaodan
Performing fact verification based on structured data is important for many real-life applications and is a challenging research problem, particularly when it involves both symbolic operations and informal inference based on language understanding. In this paper, we present a Program-enhanced Verbalization and Graph Attention Network (ProgVGAT) to integrate programs and execution into textual inference models. Specifically, a verbalization with program execution model is proposed to accumulate evidences that are embedded in operations over the tables. Built on that, we construct the graph attention verification networks, which are designed to fuse different sources of evidences from verbalized program execution, program structures, and the original statements and tables, to make the final verification decision. To support the above framework, we propose a program selection module optimized with a new training strategy based on margin loss, to produce more accurate programs, which is shown to be effective in enhancing the final verification results. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, a 74.4% accuracy, on the benchmark dataset TABFACT.
RussianSuperGLUE: A Russian Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark
Shavrina, Tatiana, Fenogenova, Alena, Emelyanov, Anton, Shevelev, Denis, Artemova, Ekaterina, Malykh, Valentin, Mikhailov, Vladislav, Tikhonova, Maria, Chertok, Andrey, Evlampiev, Andrey
In this paper, we introduce an advanced Russian general language understanding evaluation benchmark -- RussianGLUE. Recent advances in the field of universal language models and transformers require the development of a methodology for their broad diagnostics and testing for general intellectual skills - detection of natural language inference, commonsense reasoning, ability to perform simple logical operations regardless of text subject or lexicon. For the first time, a benchmark of nine tasks, collected and organized analogically to the SuperGLUE methodology, was developed from scratch for the Russian language. We provide baselines, human level evaluation, an open-source framework for evaluating models (https://github.com/RussianNLP/RussianSuperGLUE), and an overall leaderboard of transformer models for the Russian language. Besides, we present the first results of comparing multilingual models in the adapted diagnostic test set and offer the first steps to further expanding or assessing state-of-the-art models independently of language.
Natural Language Processing with spaCy-- Steps and Examples
Part-of-speech tagging is used to assign parts of speech to each word of a given text (such as nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, conjunction, adjectives, interjection) based on its definition and its context. Parts of Speech tagging can be done in spaCy using a token attribute class. Please check for more details here. The above output shows the parts of speech for all the words with complete descriptive details using spacy.explain.
Investigating African-American Vernacular English in Transformer-Based Text Generation
Groenwold, Sophie, Ou, Lily, Parekh, Aesha, Honnavalli, Samhita, Levy, Sharon, Mirza, Diba, Wang, William Yang
The growth of social media has encouraged the written use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which has traditionally been used only in oral contexts. However, NLP models have historically been developed using dominant English varieties, such as Standard American English (SAE), due to text corpora availability. We investigate the performance of GPT-2 on AAVE text by creating a dataset of intent-equivalent parallel AAVE/SAE tweet pairs, thereby isolating syntactic structure and AAVE- or SAE-specific language for each pair. We evaluate each sample and its GPT-2 generated text with pretrained sentiment classifiers and find that while AAVE text results in more classifications of negative sentiment than SAE, the use of GPT-2 generally increases occurrences of positive sentiment for both. Additionally, we conduct human evaluation of AAVE and SAE text generated with GPT-2 to compare contextual rigor and overall quality.
FLIN: A Flexible Natural Language Interface for Web Navigation
Mazumder, Sahisnu, Riva, Oriana
AI assistants have started carrying out tasks on a user's behalf by interacting directly with the web. However, training an interface that maps natural language (NL) commands to web actions is challenging for existing semantic parsing approaches due to the variable and unknown set of actions that characterize websites. We propose FLIN, a natural language interface for web navigation that maps NL commands to concept-level actions rather than low-level UI interactions, thus being able to flexibly adapt to different websites and handle their transient nature. We frame this as a ranking problem where, given a user command and a webpage, FLIN learns to score the most appropriate navigation instruction (involving action and parameter values). To train and evaluate FLIN, we collect a dataset using nine popular websites from three different domains. Quantitative results show that FLIN is capable of adapting to new websites in a given domain.