Grammars & Parsing
Emma Watson jokes she needs proofreader after she debuts feminist tattoo with grammatical error
Emma Watson jokes she needs a proofreader after a tattoo she debuted had a glaring grammatical error. Emma Watson joked she needed a proofreader after she debuted some new ink at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party that contained a glaring grammatical error. The "Harry Potter" star showed off a tattoo that read "Times Up" on her arm -- clearly missing the apostrophe for the organization Time's Up. Watson's tattoo was apparently a sign of support for the movement but social media users quickly pointed out the phrase was missing an apostrophe. At first, it was not immediately clear if Watson's tattoo was real or temporary.
Emma Watson displays Times Up tattoo at Vanity Fair Oscar party but social media users point out grammatical error
Emma Watson displayed some new ink at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party but social media users pointed out the tattoo's glaring grammatical error. The "Harry Potter" star showed off a tattoo that read "Times Up" on her arm -- clearly missing the apostrophe for the organization Time's Up. It was not immediately clear if the tattoo was real. People reported the tattoo could be be temporary. The Brown University graduate has been an outspoken proponent of the Time's Up movement, which began after bombshell exposรฉs revealed decades of alleged sexual misconduct by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelligence: A roadmap for reverse-engineering the infant language-learner
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still escapes current cognitive and linguistic theories. Recently, spectacular progress in the engineering science, notably, machine learning and wearable technology, offer the promise of revolutionizing the study of cognitive development. Machine learning offers powerful learning algorithms that can achieve human-like performance on many linguistic tasks. Wearable sensors can capture vast amounts of data, which enable the reconstruction of the sensory experience of infants in their natural environment. The project of 'reverse engineering' language development, i.e., of building an effective system that mimics infant's achievements appears therefore to be within reach. Here, we analyze the conditions under which such a project can contribute to our scientific understanding of early language development. We argue that instead of defining a sub-problem or simplifying the data, computational models should address the full complexity of the learning situation, and take as input the raw sensory signals available to infants. This implies that (1) accessible but privacy-preserving repositories of home data be setup and widely shared, and (2) models be evaluated at different linguistic levels through a benchmark of psycholinguist tests that can be passed by machines and humans alike, (3) linguistically and psychologically plausible learning architectures be scaled up to real data using probabilistic/optimization principles from machine learning. We discuss the feasibility of this approach and present preliminary results.
Progressive Cognitive Human Parsing
Zhu, Bingke (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences) | Chen, Yingying (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences) | Tang, Ming (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences) | Wang, Jinqiao (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Human parsing is an important task for human-centric understanding. Generally, two mainstreams are used to deal with this challenging and fundamental problem. The first one is employing extra human pose information to generate hierarchical parse graph to deal with human parsing task. Another one is training an end-to-end network with the semantic information in image level. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end progressive cognitive network to segment human parts. In order to establish a hierarchical relationship, a novel component-aware region convolution structure is proposed. With this structure, latter layers inherit prior component information from former layers and pay its attention to a finer component. In this way, we deal with human parsing as a progressive recognition task, that is, we first locate the whole human and then segment the hierarchical components gradually. The experiments indicate that our method has a better location capacity for the small objects and a better classification capacity for the large objects. Moreover, our framework can be embedded into any fully convolutional network to enhance the performance significantly.
Inference on Syntactic and Semantic Structures for Machine Comprehension
Li, Chenrui (East China Normal University) | Wu, Yuanbin (East China Normal University) | Lan, Man (East China Normal University)
Hidden variable models are important tools for solving open domain machine comprehension tasks and have achieved remarkable accuracy in many question answering benchmark datasets. Existing models impose strong independence assumptions on hidden variables, which leaves the interaction among them unexplored. Here we introduce linguistic structures to help capturing global evidence in hidden variable modeling. In the proposed algorithms, question-answer pairs are scored based on structured inference results on parse trees and semantic frames, which aims to assign hidden variables in a global optimal way. Experiments on the MCTest dataset demonstrate that the proposed models are highly competitive with state-of-the-art machine comprehension systems.
A Neural Transition-Based Approach for Semantic Dependency Graph Parsing
Wang, Yuxuan (Harbin Institute of Technology) | Che, Wanxiang (Harbin Institute of Technology) | Guo, Jiang (Harbin Institute of Technology) | Liu, Ting (Harbin Institute of Technology)
Semantic dependency graph has been recently proposed as an extension of tree-structured syntactic or semantic representation for natural language sentences. It particularly features the structural property of multi-head, which allows nodes to have multiple heads, resulting in a directed acyclic graph(DAG) parsing problem. Yet most statistical parsers focused exclusively on shallow bi-lexical tree structures, DAG parsing remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose a neural transition-based parser, using a variant of list-based arc-eager transition algorithm for dependency graph parsing. Particularly, two non-trivial improvements are proposed for representing the key components of the transition system, to better capture the semantics of segments and internal sub-graph structures. We test our parser on the SemEval-2016 Task 9 dataset (Chinese) and the SemEval-2015 Task 18 dataset (English). On both benchmark datasets, we obtain superior or comparable results to the best performing systems. Our parser can be further improved with a simple ensemble mechanism, resulting in the state-of-the-art performance.
Neural Character-level Dependency Parsing for Chinese
Li, Haonan (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) | Zhang, Zhisong (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) | Ju, Yuqi (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) | Zhao, Hai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
This inconvenience makes us do necessary restorations from character-level dependency parsing results Table 2: Character-level evaluation. Character-level dependency parsing covers all levels of language processing within a Chinese sentence. Our model shows that even integrating the least character position simplifies the pipeline into two steps, character POS tagging, information, it is beneficial to the parser.. and character dependency parsing, while traditional processing Finally, effective integration of two levels of tags boosts has to handle word segmentation, POS tagging for word, the performance most. For CHAR WORD strategy, it is more and word-level dependency parsing as shown in Figure 2. straightforward but also brings too many tags or labels and With different processing hierarchies, we also provide complete thus will slow down the parsing and make the learning more matches (CM) as one metric for the related evaluation. The character parsing performance comparison is given in Table reason might be that since characters instead of words are 1, in which the following observations are obtained.
Question Answering as Global Reasoning Over Semantic Abstractions
Khashabi, Daniel (University of Pennsylvania) | Khot, Tushar (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence) | Sabharwal, Ashish (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence) | Roth, Dan (University of Pennsylvania)
We propose a novel method for exploiting the semantic structure of text to answer multiple-choice questions. The approach is especially suitable for domains that require reasoning over a diverse set of linguistic constructs but have limited training data. To address these challenges, we present the first system, to the best of our knowledge, that reasons over a wide range of semantic abstractions of the text, which are derived using off-the-shelf, general-purpose, pre-trained natural language modules such as semantic role labelers, coreference resolvers, and dependency parsers. Representing multiple abstractions as a family of graphs, we translate question answering (QA) into a search for an optimal subgraph that satisfies certain global and local properties. This formulation generalizes several prior structured QA systems. Our system, SEMANTICILP, demonstrates strong performance on two domains simultaneously. In particular, on a collection of challenging science QA datasets, it outperforms various state-of-the-art approaches, including neural models, broad coverage information retrieval, and specialized techniques using structured knowledge bases, by 2%-6%.
Computer-Assisted Authoring for Natural Language Story Scripts
Sanghrajka, Rushit (Disney Research) | Witoล, Wojciech (Disney Research) | Schriber, Sasha (Disney Research) | Gross, Markus (Disney Research) | Kapadia, Mubbasir (Rutgers University, Disney Research)
In order to assist scriptwriters during the process of story-writing, we have developed a system that can extract information from natural language stories, and allow for story-centric as well as character-centric reasoning. These inferencing capabilities are exposed to the user through intuitive querying systems, allowing the scriptwriter to ask the system questions about story and character information. We introduce knowledge bytes as atoms of information and demonstrate that the system can parse text into a stream of knowledge bytes and use these mentioned reasoning capabilities through logical reasoning.
Scene-Centric Joint Parsing of Cross-View Videos
Qi, Hang (University of California, Los Angeles) | Xu, Yuanlu (University of California, Los Angeles) | Yuan, Tao (University of California, Los Angeles) | Wu, Tianfu (NC State University) | Zhu, Song-Chun (University of California, Los Angeles)
Cross-view video understanding is an important yet under-explored area in computer vision. In this paper, we introduce a joint parsing framework that integrates view-centric proposals into scene-centric parse graphs that represent a coherent scene-centric understanding of cross-view scenes. Our key observations are that overlapping fields of views embed rich appearance and geometry correlations and that knowledge fragments corresponding to individual vision tasks are governed by consistency constraints available in commonsense knowledge. The proposed joint parsing framework represents such correlations and constraints explicitly and generates semantic scene-centric parse graphs. Quantitative experiments show that scene-centric predictions in the parse graph outperform view-centric predictions.