Standard sequential generation methods assume a pre-specified generation order, such as text generation methods which generate words from left to right. In this work, we propose a framework for training models of text generation that operate in non-monotonic orders; the model directly learns good orders, without any additional annotation. Our framework operates by generating a word at an arbitrary position, and then recursively generating words to its left and then words to its right, yielding a binary tree. Learning is framed as imitation learning, including a coaching method which moves from imitating an oracle to reinforcing the policy's own preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that using the proposed method, it is possible to learn policies which generate text without pre-specifying a generation order, while achieving competitive performance with conventional left-to-right generation.

A common challenge I came across while learning Natural Language Processing (NLP) – can we build models for non-English languages? The answer has been no for quite a long time. Each language has its own grammatical patterns and linguistic nuances. I could barely contain my excitement when I read the news last week. The authors claimed StanfordNLP could support more than 53 human languages!

StanfordNLP is the combination of the software package used by the Stanford team in the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task on Universal Dependency Parsing, and the group's official Python interface to the Stanford CoreNLP software. Aside from the functions it inherits from CoreNLP, it contains tools to convert a string of text to lists of sentences and words, generate base forms of those words, their parts of speech and morphological features, and a syntactic structure that is designed to be parallel among more than 70 languages. This package is built with highly accurate neural network components that enables efficient training and evaluation with your own annotated data. The modules are built on top of PyTorch. To see StanfordNLP's neural pipeline in action, you can launch the Python interactive interpreter, and try the following commands At the end, you should be able to see the dependency parse of the first sentence in the example.

The DEA has reported that land ports of entry are the primary means for getting drugs into the country, not stretches of the border without barriers. The agency says the most common trafficking technique by transnational criminal organizations is to hide drugs in passenger vehicles or tractor-trailers.

It is intuitive that NLP tasks for logographic languages like Chinese should benefit from the use of the glyph information in those languages. However, due to the lack of rich pictographic evidence in glyphs and the weak generalization ability of standard computer vision models on character data, an effective way to utilize the glyph information remains to be found. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting the Glyce, the glyph-vectors for Chinese character representations. We make three major innovations: (1) We use historical Chinese scripts (e.g., bronzeware script, seal script, traditional Chinese, etc) to enrich the pictographic evidence in characters; (2) We design CNN structures tailored to Chinese character image processing; and (3) We use image-classification as an auxiliary task in a multi-task learning setup to increase the model's ability to generalize. For the first time, we show that glyph-based models are able to consistently outperform word/char ID-based models in a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks. Using Glyce, we are able to achieve the state-of-the-art performances on 13 (almost all) Chinese NLP tasks, including (1) character-Level language modeling, (2) word-Level language modeling, (3) Chinese word segmentation, (4) name entity recognition, (5) part-of-speech tagging, (6) dependency parsing, (7) semantic role labeling, (8) sentence semantic similarity, (9) sentence intention identification, (10) Chinese-English machine translation, (11) sentiment analysis, (12) document classification and (13) discourse parsing

Recent work on Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDB) has attracted considerable attention. NLIDB allow users to search databases using natural language instead of SQL-like query languages. While saving the users from having to learn query languages, multi-turn interaction with NLIDB usually involves multiple queries where contextual information is vital to understand the users' query intents. In this paper, we address a typical contextual understanding problem, termed as follow-up query analysis. In spite of its ubiquity, follow-up query analysis has not been well studied due to two primary obstacles: the multifarious nature of follow-up query scenarios and the lack of high-quality datasets. Our work summarizes typical follow-up query scenarios and provides a new FollowUp dataset with $1000$ query triples on 120 tables. Moreover, we propose a novel approach FANDA, which takes into account the structures of queries and employs a ranking model with weakly supervised max-margin learning. The experimental results on FollowUp demonstrate the superiority of FANDA over multiple baselines across multiple metrics.

The proliferation of fake news on social media has opened up new directions of research for timely identification and containment of fake news, and mitigation of its widespread impact on public opinion. While much of the earlier research was focused on identification of fake news based on its contents or by exploiting users' engagements with the news on social media, there has been a rising interest in proactive intervention strategies to counter the spread of misinformation and its impact on society. In this survey, we describe the modern-day problem of fake news and, in particular, highlight the technical challenges associated with it. We discuss existing methods and techniques applicable to both identification and mitigation, with a focus on the significant advances in each method and their advantages and limitations. In addition, research has often been limited by the quality of existing datasets and their specific application contexts. To alleviate this problem, we comprehensively compile and summarize characteristic features of available datasets. Furthermore, we outline new directions of research to facilitate future development of effective and interdisciplinary solutions.

The study of register in computational language research has historically been divided into register analysis, seeking to determine the registerial character of a text or corpus, and register synthesis, seeking to generate a text in a desired register. This article surveys the different approaches to these disparate tasks. Register synthesis has tended to use more theoretically articulated notions of register and genre than analysis work, which often seeks to categorize on the basis of intuitive and somewhat incoherent notions of prelabeled 'text types'. I argue that an integration of computational register analysis and synthesis will benefit register studies as a whole, by enabling a new large-scale research program in register studies. It will enable comprehensive global mapping of functional language varieties in multiple languages, including the relationships between them. Furthermore, computational methods together with high coverage systematically collected and analyzed data will thus enable rigorous empirical validation and refinement of different theories of register, which will have also implications for our understanding of linguistic variation in general.

We present an approach to map utterances in conversation to logical forms, which will be executed on a large-scale knowledge base. To handle enormous ellipsis phenomena in conversation, we introduce dialog memory management to manipulate historical entities, predicates, and logical forms when inferring the logical form of current utterances. Dialog memory management is embodied in a generative model, in which a logical form is interpreted in a top-down manner following a small and flexible grammar. We learn the model from denotations without explicit annotation of logical forms, and evaluate it on a large-scale dataset consisting of 200K dialogs over 12.8M entities. Results verify the benefits of modeling dialog memory, and show that our semantic parsing-based approach outperforms a memory network based encoder-decoder model by a huge margin.

As machine learning becomes more widely used in practice, we need new methods to build complex intelligent systems that integrate learning with existing software, and with domain knowledge encoded as rules. As a case study, we present such a system that learns to parse Newtonian physics problems in textbooks. This system, Nuts&Bolts, learns a pipeline process that incorporates existing code, pre-learned machine learning models, and human engineered rules. It jointly trains the entire pipeline to prevent propagation of errors, using a combination of labelled and unlabelled data. Our approach achieves a good performance on the parsing task, outperforming the simple pipeline and its variants. Finally, we also show how Nuts&Bolts can be used to achieve improvements on a relation extraction task and on the end task of answering Newtonian physics problems.