Deep learning has significantly improved state-of-the-art performance for natural language processing tasks like machine translation, summarization, question answering, and text classification. Each of these tasks is typically studied with a specific metric, and performance is often measured on a set of standard benchmark datasets. This has led to the development of architectures designed specifically for those tasks and metrics, but it does not necessarily promote the emergence of general NLP models, those which can perform well across a wide variety of NLP tasks. In order to explore the possibility of such models as well as the tradeoffs that arise in optimizing for them, we introduce the Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP). The goal of the Decathlon is to explore models that generalize to all ten tasks and investigate how such models differ from those trained for single tasks.

Deep learning has improved performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks individually. However, general NLP models cannot emerge within a paradigm that focuses on the particularities of a single metric, dataset, and task. We introduce the Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP), a challenge that spans ten tasks: question answering, machine translation, summarization, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, semantic role labeling, zero-shot relation extraction, goal-oriented dialogue, semantic parsing, and commonsense pronoun resolution. We cast all tasks as question answering over a context. Furthermore, we present a new Multitask Question Answering Network (MQAN) jointly learns all tasks in decaNLP without any task-specific modules or parameters in the multitask setting. MQAN shows improvements in transfer learning for machine translation and named entity recognition, domain adaptation for sentiment analysis and natural language inference, and zero-shot capabilities for text classification. We demonstrate that the MQAN's multi-pointer-generator decoder is key to this success and performance further improves with an anti-curriculum training strategy. Though designed for decaNLP, MQAN also achieves state of the art results on the WikiSQL semantic parsing task in the single-task setting. We also release code for procuring and processing data, training and evaluating models, and reproducing all experiments for decaNLP.

We address the problem of spatial segmentation of a 2D object in the context of a robotic system for painting, where an optimal segmentation depends on both the appearance of the object and the size of each segment. Since each segment must take into account appearance features at several scales, we take a hierarchical grammar-based parsing approach to decompose the object into 2D segments for painting. Since there are many ways to segment an object the solution space is extremely large and it is very challenging to utilize an exploration based optimization approach like reinforcement learning. Instead, we pose the segmentation problem as an imitation learning problem by using a segmentation algorithm in the place of an expert, that has access to a small dataset with known foreground-background segmentations. During the imitation learning process, we learn to imitate the oracle (segmentation algorithm) using only the image of the object, without the use of the known foreground-background segmentations. We introduce a novel deterministic policy gradient update, DRAG, in the form of a deterministic actor-critic variant of AggreVaTeD, to train our neural network based object parser. We will also show that our approach can be seen as extending DDPG to the Imitation Learning scenario. Training our neural parser to imitate the oracle via DRAG allow our neural parser to outperform several existing imitation learning approaches.

In this work, we propose a novel constituency parsing scheme. The model predicts a vector of real-valued scalars, named syntactic distances, for each split position in the input sentence. The syntactic distances specify the order in which the split points will be selected, recursively partitioning the input, in a top-down fashion. Compared to traditional shift-reduce parsing schemes, our approach is free from the potential problem of compounding errors, while being faster and easier to parallelize. Our model achieves competitive performance amongst single model, discriminative parsers in the PTB dataset and outperforms previous models in the CTB dataset.

Future predictions on sequence data (e.g., videos or audios) require the algorithms to capture non-Markovian and compositional properties of high-level semantics. Context-free grammars are natural choices to capture such properties, but traditional grammar parsers (e.g., Earley parser) only take symbolic sentences as inputs. In this paper, we generalize the Earley parser to parse sequence data which is neither segmented nor labeled. This generalized Earley parser integrates a grammar parser with a classifier to find the optimal segmentation and labels, and makes top-down future predictions. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms other approaches for future human activity prediction.

JOTA talks organized by SDJT - Slovensko društvo za jezikovne tehnologije hosted Dr Ruslan Mitkov, a Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the University of Wolverhampton, who gave a talk on anaphora and coreference resolution.

Have you ever faced challenges in understanding language and planning sentences while performing Natural Language Processing? Do you wish to overcome these problems and go beyond the basic techniques like bag-of-words? This course is designed with advanced solutions that will take you from newbie to pro in performing Natural Language Processing with NLTK. In this course, you will come across various concepts covering natural language understanding, Natural Language Processing, and syntactic analysis. It consists of everything you need to efficiently use NLTK to implement text classification, identify parts of speech, tag words, and more.

Inspired by the double temporality characteristic of narrative texts, we propose a novel approach for acquiring rich temporal "before/after" event knowledge across sentences in narrative stories. The double temporality states that a narrative story often describes a sequence of events following the chronological order and therefore, the temporal order of events matches with their textual order. We explored narratology principles and built a weakly supervised approach that identifies 287k narrative paragraphs from three large text corpora. We then extracted rich temporal event knowledge from these narrative paragraphs. Such event knowledge is shown useful to improve temporal relation classification and outperform several recent neural network models on the narrative cloze task.

Guided troubleshooting is an inherent task in the domain of technical support services. When a customer experiences an issue with the functioning of a technical service or a product, an expert user helps guide the customer through a set of steps comprising a troubleshooting procedure. The objective is to identify the source of the problem through a set of diagnostic steps and observations, and arrive at a resolution. Procedures containing these set of diagnostic steps and observations in response to different problems are common artifacts in the body of technical support documentation. The ability to use machine learning and linguistics to understand and leverage these procedures for applications like intelligent chatbots or robotic process automation, is crucial. Existing research on question answering or intelligent chatbots does not look within procedures or deep-understand them. In this paper, we outline a system for mining procedures from technical support documents. We create models for solving important subproblems like extraction of procedures, identifying decision points within procedures, identifying blocks of instructions corresponding to these decision points and mapping instructions within a decision block. We also release a dataset containing our manual annotations on publicly available support documents, to promote further research on the problem.

This paper introduces transductive consensus network (TCNs), as an extension of a consensus network (CN), for semi-supervised learning. TCN does multi-modal classification based on a few available labels by urging the {\em interpretations} of different modalities to resemble each other. We formulate the multi-modal, semi-supervised learning problem, put forward TCN for multi-modal semi-supervised learning task, and its several variants. To understand the mechanisms of TCN, we formulate the {\em similarity} of the interpretations as the negative relative Jensen-Shannon divergence, and show that a consensus state beneficial for classification desires a stable but not perfect similarity between the interpretations. We show the performances of TCN are better than best benchmark algorithms given only 20 and 80 labeled samples on Bank Marketing and the DementiaBank dataset respectively, and align with their performances given more labeled samples.