Previous work on bridging anaphora recognition (Hou et al., 2013a) casts the problem as a subtask of learning fine-grained information status (IS). However, these systems heavily depend on many handcrafted linguistic features. In this paper, we propose a discourse context-aware self-attention neural network model for fine-grained IS classification. On the ISNotes corpus (Markert et al., 2012), our model with the contextually-encoded word representations (BERT) (Devlin et al., 2018) achieves new state-of-the-art performances on fine-grained IS classification, obtaining a 4.1% absolute overall accuracy improvement compared to Hou et al. (2013a). More importantly, we also show an improvement of 3.9% F1 for bridging anaphora recognition without using any complex handcrafted semantic features designed for capturing the bridging phenomenon. 1 Introduction Information Structure (Halliday, 1967; Prince, 1981, 1992; Gundel et al., 1993; Lambrecht, 1994; Birner and Ward, 1998; Kruijff-Korbayov a and Steedman, 2003) studies structural and semantic properties of a sentence according to its relation to the discourse context.

Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive typology of cross-lingual word embedding models. We compare their data requirements and objective functions. The recurring theme of the survey is that many of the models presented in the literature optimize for the same objectives, and that seemingly different models are often equivalent, modulo optimization strategies, hyper-parameters, and such. We also discuss the different ways cross-lingual word embeddings are evaluated, as well as future challenges and research horizons.

Qualitative relationships describe how increasing or decreasing one property (e.g. altitude) affects another (e.g. temperature). They are an important aspect of natural language question answering and are crucial for building chatbots or voice agents where one may enquire about qualitative relationships. Recently a dataset about question answering involving qualitative relationships has been proposed, and a few approaches to answer such questions have been explored, in the heart of which lies a semantic parser that converts the natural language input to a suitable logical form. A problem with existing semantic parsers is that they try to directly convert the input sentences to a logical form. Since the output language varies with each application, it forces the semantic parser to learn almost everything from scratch. In this paper, we show that instead of using a semantic parser to produce the logical form, if we apply the generate-validate framework i.e. generate a natural language description of the logical form and validate if the natural language description is followed from the input text, we get a better scope for transfer learning and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin of 7.93%.

Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), is a subfield of linguistic semantics. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units make up the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantic interface.[1] Lexical units, also referred to as syntactic atoms, can stand alone such as in the case of root words or parts of compound words or they necessarily attach to other units such as prefixes and suffixes do. The former are called free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes.[2]

--Time Series Motif Discovery (TSMD) is defined as searching for patterns that are previously unknown and appear with a given frequency in time series. Another problem strongly related with TSMD is Word Segmentation. This problem has received much attention from the community that studies early language acquisition in babies and toddlers. The development of biologically plausible models for word segmentation could greatly advance this field. Therefore, in this article, we propose the V ariable Input Length Map (VILMAP) for Motif Discovery and Word Segmentation. The model is based on the Self-Organizing Maps and can identify Motifs with different lengths in time series. In our experiments, we show that VILMAP presents good results in finding Motifs in a standard Motif discovery dataset and can avoid catastrophic forgetting when trained with datasets with increasing values of input size. We also show that VILMAP achieves results similar or superior to other methods in the literature developed for the task of word segmentation.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a task to recognize all the predicate-argument pairs of a sentence, which has been in a performance improvement bottleneck after a series of latest works were presented. This paper proposes a novel syntax-agnostic SRL model enhanced by the proposed associated memory network (AMN), which makes use of inter-sentence attention of label-known associated sentences as a kind of memory to further enhance dependency-based SRL. In detail, we use sentences and their labels from train dataset as an associated memory cue to help label the target sentence. Furthermore, we compare several associated sentences selecting strategies and label merging methods in AMN to find and utilize the label of associated sentences while attending them. By leveraging the attentive memory from known training data, Our full model reaches state-of-the-art on CoNLL-2009 benchmark datasets for syntax-agnostic setting, showing a new effective research line of SRL enhancement other than exploiting external resources such as well pre-trained language models. 1 Introduction Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a task to recognize all the predicate-argument pairs of a given sentence and its predicates. It is a shallow semantic parsing task, which has been widely used in a series of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information extraction (Liu et al., 2016) and question answering (Abujabal et al., 2017). Generally, SRL is decomposed into four classification subtasks in pipeline systems, consisting of Corresponding author.

This paper describes an implementation of a bot assistant in Minecraft, and the tools and platform allowing players to interact with the bot and to record those interactions. The purpose of building such an assistant is to facilitate the study of agents that can complete tasks specified by dialogue, and eventually, to learn from dialogue interactions.

Thousands of engineers write the code to create our apps, which serve billions of people worldwide. This is no trivial task--our services have grown so diverse and complex that the codebase contains millions of lines of code that intersect with a wide variety of different systems, from messaging to image rendering. To simplify and speed the process of writing code that will make an impact on so many systems, engineers often want a way to find how someone else has handled a similar task. We created Aroma, a code-to-code search and recommendation tool that uses machine learning (ML) to make the process of gaining insights from big codebases much easier. Prior to Aroma, none of the existing tools fully addressed this problem.

Storytelling is fundamental to language, including culture, conversation and communication in their broadest senses. It thus emerges as an essential component of intelligent systems, including systems where natural language is not a primary focus or where we do not usually think of a story being involved. In this paper we explore the emergence of storytelling as a requirement in embodied conversational agents, including its role in educational and health interventions, as well as in a general-purpose computer interface for people with disabilities or other constraints that prevent the use of traditional keyboard and speech interfaces. We further present a characterization of storytelling as an inventive fleshing out of detail according to a particular personal perspective, and propose the DREAMT model to focus attention on the different layers that need to be present in a character-driven storytelling system. Most if not all aspects of the DREAMT model have arisen from or been explored in some aspect of our implemented research systems, but currently only at a primitive and relatively unintegrated level. However, this experience leads us to formalize and elaborate the DREAMT model mnemonically as follows: - Description/Dialogue/Definition/Denotation - Realization/Representation/Role - Explanation/Education/Entertainment - Actualization/Activation - Motivation/Modelling - Topicalization/Transformation

The inherent difficulty of knowledge specification and the lack of trained specialists are some of the key obstacles on the way to making intelligent systems based on the knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) paradigm commonplace. Knowledge and query authoring using natural language, especially controlled natural language (CNL), is one of the promising approaches that could enable domain experts, who are not trained logicians, to both create formal knowledge and query it. In previous work, we introduced the KALM system (Knowledge Authoring Logic Machine) that supports knowledge authoring (and simple querying) with very high accuracy that at present is unachievable via machine learning approaches. The present paper expands on the question answering aspect of KALM and introduces KALM-QA (KALM for Question Answering) that is capable of answering much more complex English questions. We show that KALM-QA achieves 100% accuracy on an extensive suite of movie-related questions, called MetaQA, which contains almost 29,000 test questions and over 260,000 training questions. We contrast this with a published machine learning approach, which falls far short of this high mark. It is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.