scholarly journals Assessing the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Syntax-Sensitive Dependencies

Author(s):  
Tal Linzen ◽  
Emmanuel Dupoux ◽  
Yoav Goldberg

The success of long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks in language processing is typically attributed to their ability to capture long-distance statistical regularities. Linguistic regularities are often sensitive to syntactic structure; can such dependencies be captured by LSTMs, which do not have explicit structural representations? We begin addressing this question using number agreement in English subject-verb dependencies. We probe the architecture’s grammatical competence both using training objectives with an explicit grammatical target (number prediction, grammaticality judgments) and using language models. In the strongly supervised settings, the LSTM achieved very high overall accuracy (less than 1% errors), but errors increased when sequential and structural information conflicted. The frequency of such errors rose sharply in the language-modeling setting. We conclude that LSTMs can capture a non-trivial amount of grammatical structure given targeted supervision, but stronger architectures may be required to further reduce errors; furthermore, the language modeling signal is insufficient for capturing syntax-sensitive dependencies, and should be supplemented with more direct supervision if such dependencies need to be captured.

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 7554-7561
Author(s):  
Pengxiang Cheng ◽  
Katrin Erk

Recent progress in NLP witnessed the development of large-scale pre-trained language models (GPT, BERT, XLNet, etc.) based on Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017), and in a range of end tasks, such models have achieved state-of-the-art results, approaching human performance. This clearly demonstrates the power of the stacked self-attention architecture when paired with a sufficient number of layers and a large amount of pre-training data. However, on tasks that require complex and long-distance reasoning where surface-level cues are not enough, there is still a large gap between the pre-trained models and human performance. Strubell et al. (2018) recently showed that it is possible to inject knowledge of syntactic structure into a model through supervised self-attention. We conjecture that a similar injection of semantic knowledge, in particular, coreference information, into an existing model would improve performance on such complex problems. On the LAMBADA (Paperno et al. 2016) task, we show that a model trained from scratch with coreference as auxiliary supervision for self-attention outperforms the largest GPT-2 model, setting the new state-of-the-art, while only containing a tiny fraction of parameters compared to GPT-2. We also conduct a thorough analysis of different variants of model architectures and supervision configurations, suggesting future directions on applying similar techniques to other problems.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Abdallah ◽  
Ashraf Mahgoub ◽  
Hany Ahmed ◽  
Somali Chaterji

Abstract The performance of most error-correction (EC) algorithms that operate on genomics reads is dependent on the proper choice of its configuration parameters, such as the value of k in k-mer based techniques. In this work, we target the problem of finding the best values of these configuration parameters to optimize error correction and consequently improve genome assembly. We perform this in an adaptive manner, adapted to different datasets and to EC tools, due to the observation that different configuration parameters are optimal for different datasets, i.e., from different platforms and species, and vary with the EC algorithm being applied. We use language modeling techniques from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain in our algorithmic suite, Athena, to automatically tune the performance-sensitive configuration parameters. Through the use of N-Gram and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) language modeling, we validate the intuition that the EC performance can be computed quantitatively and efficiently using the “perplexity” metric, repurposed from NLP. After training the language model, we show that the perplexity metric calculated from a sample of the test (or production) data has a strong negative correlation with the quality of error correction of erroneous NGS reads. Therefore, we use the perplexity metric to guide a hill climbing-based search, converging toward the best configuration parameter value. Our approach is suitable for both de novo and comparative sequencing (resequencing), eliminating the need for a reference genome to serve as the ground truth. We find that Athena can automatically find the optimal value of k with a very high accuracy for 7 real datasets and using 3 different k-mer based EC algorithms, Lighter, Blue, and Racer. The inverse relation between the perplexity metric and alignment rate exists under all our tested conditions—for real and synthetic datasets, for all kinds of sequencing errors (insertion, deletion, and substitution), and for high and low error rates. The absolute value of that correlation is at least 73%. In our experiments, the best value of k found by Athena achieves an alignment rate within 0.53% of the oracle best value of k found through brute force searching (i.e., scanning through the entire range of k values). Athena’s selected value of k lies within the top-3 best k values using N-Gram models and the top-5 best k values using RNN models With best parameter selection by Athena, the assembly quality (NG50) is improved by a Geometric Mean of 4.72X across the 7 real datasets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Bhatt ◽  
Ruth Roberts ◽  
Xi Chen ◽  
Ting Li ◽  
Skylar Connor ◽  
...  

Drug labeling contains an ‘INDICATIONS AND USAGE’ that provides vital information to support clinical decision making and regulatory management. Effective extraction of drug indication information from free-text based resources could facilitate drug repositioning projects and help collect real-world evidence in support of secondary use of approved medicines. To enable AI-powered language models for the extraction of drug indication information, we used manual reading and curation to develop a Drug Indication Classification and Encyclopedia (DICE) based on FDA approved human prescription drug labeling. A DICE scheme with 7,231 sentences categorized into five classes (indications, contradictions, side effects, usage instructions, and clinical observations) was developed. To further elucidate the utility of the DICE, we developed nine different AI-based classifiers for the prediction of indications based on the developed DICE to comprehensively assess their performance. We found that the transformer-based language models yielded an average MCC of 0.887, outperforming the word embedding-based Bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) models (0.862) with a 2.82% improvement on the test set. The best classifiers were also used to extract drug indication information in DrugBank and achieved a high enrichment rate (>0.930) for this task. We found that domain-specific training could provide more explainable models without performance sacrifices and better generalization for external validation datasets. Altogether, the proposed DICE could be a standard resource for the development and evaluation of task-specific AI-powered, natural language processing (NLP) models.


2008 ◽  
Vol 04 (01) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
ALKET MEMUSHAJ ◽  
TAREK M. SOBH

Probabilistic language models have gained popularity in Natural Language Processing due to their ability to successfully capture language structures and constraints with computational efficiency. Probabilistic language models are flexible and easily adapted to language changes over time as well as to some new languages. Probabilistic language models can be trained and their accuracy strongly related to the availability of large text corpora. In this paper, we investigate the usability of grapheme probabilistic models, specifically grapheme n-grams models in spellchecking as well as augmentative typing systems. Grapheme n-gram models require substantially smaller training corpora and that is one of the main drivers for this thesis in which we build grapheme n-gram language models for the Albanian language. There are presently no available Albanian language corpora to be used for probabilistic language modeling. Our technique attempts to augment spellchecking and typing systems by utilizing grapheme n-gram language models in improving suggestion accuracy in spellchecking and augmentative typing systems. Our technique can be implemented in a standalone tool or incorporated in another tool to offer additional selection/scoring criteria.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Bausch ◽  
Sathyawageeswar Subramanian ◽  
Stephen Piddock

AbstractProbabilistic language models, e.g. those based on recurrent neural networks such as long short-term memory models (LSTMs), often face the problem of finding a high probability prediction from a sequence of random variables over a set of tokens. This is commonly addressed using a form of greedy decoding such as beam search, where a limited number of highest-likelihood paths (the beam width) of the decoder are kept, and at the end the maximum-likelihood path is chosen. In this work, we construct a quantum algorithm to find the globally optimal parse (i.e. for infinite beam width) with high constant success probability. When the input to the decoder follows a power law with exponent k > 0, our algorithm has runtime Rnf(R, k), where R is the alphabet size, n the input length; here f < 1/2, and $f\rightarrow 0$ f → 0 exponentially fast with increasing k, hence making our algorithm always more than quadratically faster than its classical counterpart. We further modify our procedure to recover a finite beam width variant, which enables an even stronger empirical speedup while still retaining higher accuracy than possible classically. Finally, we apply this quantum beam search decoder to Mozilla’s implementation of Baidu’s DeepSpeech neural net, which we show to exhibit such a power law word rank frequency.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (12) ◽  
pp. 3327-3352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander G. Ororbia II ◽  
Tomas Mikolov ◽  
David Reitter

Learning useful information across long time lags is a critical and difficult problem for temporal neural models in tasks such as language modeling. Existing architectures that address the issue are often complex and costly to train. The differential state framework (DSF) is a simple and high-performing design that unifies previously introduced gated neural models. DSF models maintain longer-term memory by learning to interpolate between a fast-changing data-driven representation and a slowly changing, implicitly stable state. Within the DSF framework, a new architecture is presented, the delta-RNN. This model requires hardly any more parameters than a classical, simple recurrent network. In language modeling at the word and character levels, the delta-RNN outperforms popular complex architectures, such as the long short-term memory (LSTM) and the gated recurrent unit (GRU), and, when regularized, performs comparably to several state-of-the-art baselines. At the subword level, the delta-RNN's performance is comparable to that of complex gated architectures.


Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 832
Author(s):  
Lanfei Peng ◽  
Dong Gao ◽  
Yujie Bai

Hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP) is one of the most commonly used hazard analysis methods in the petrochemical industry. The large amount of unstructured data in HAZOP reports has generated an information explosion which has led to a pressing need for technologies that can simplify the use of this information. In order to solve the problem that massive data are difficult to reuse and share, in this study, we propose a new deep learning framework for Chinese HAZOP documents to perform a named entity recognition (NER) task, aiming at the characteristics of HAZOP documents, such as polysemy, multi-entity nesting, and long-distance text. Specifically, the preprocessed data are input into an embeddings from language models (ELMo) and a double convolutional neural network (DCNN) model to extract rich character features. Meanwhile, a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network is used to extract long-distance semantic information. Finally, the results are decoded by a conditional random field (CRF), and then output. Experiments were carried out using the HAZOP report of a coal seam indirect liquefaction project. The experimental results for the proposed model showed that the accuracy rate of the optimal results reached 90.83, the recall rate reached 92.46, and the F-value reached the highest 91.76%, which was significantly improved as compared with other models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 1974 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chanhee Lee ◽  
Kisu Yang ◽  
Taesun Whang ◽  
Chanjun Park ◽  
Andrew Matteson ◽  
...  

Language model pretraining is an effective method for improving the performance of downstream natural language processing tasks. Even though language modeling is unsupervised and thus collecting data for it is relatively less expensive, it is still a challenging process for languages with limited resources. This results in great technological disparity between high- and low-resource languages for numerous downstream natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we aim to make this technology more accessible by enabling data efficient training of pretrained language models. It is achieved by formulating language modeling of low-resource languages as a domain adaptation task using transformer-based language models pretrained on corpora of high-resource languages. Our novel cross-lingual post-training approach selectively reuses parameters of the language model trained on a high-resource language and post-trains them while learning language-specific parameters in the low-resource language. We also propose implicit translation layers that can learn linguistic differences between languages at a sequence level. To evaluate our method, we post-train a RoBERTa model pretrained in English and conduct a case study for the Korean language. Quantitative results from intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our method outperforms several massively multilingual and monolingual pretrained language models in most settings and improves the data efficiency by a factor of up to 32 compared to monolingual training.


Author(s):  
Qiuyuan Huang ◽  
Li Deng ◽  
Dapeng Wu ◽  
Chang Liu ◽  
Xiaodong He

This paper proposes a novel neural architecture — Attentive Tensor Product Learning (ATPL) — to represent grammatical structures of natural language in deep learning models. ATPL exploits Tensor Product Representations (TPR), a structured neural-symbolic model developed in cognitive science, to integrate deep learning with explicit natural language structures and rules. The key ideas of ATPL are: 1) unsupervised learning of role-unbinding vectors of words via the TPR-based deep neural network; 2) the use of attention modules to compute TPR; and 3) the integration of TPR with typical deep learning architectures including long short-term memory and feedforward neural networks. The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to extract the grammatical structure of a sentence by using role-unbinding vectors, which are obtained in an unsupervised manner. Our ATPL approach is applied to 1) image captioning, 2) part of speech (POS) tagging, and 3) constituency parsing of a natural language sentence. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in all these three natural language processing tasks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8766-8774 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Schick ◽  
Hinrich Schütze

Pretraining deep neural network architectures with a language modeling objective has brought large improvements for many natural language processing tasks. Exemplified by BERT, a recently proposed such architecture, we demonstrate that despite being trained on huge amounts of data, deep language models still struggle to understand rare words. To fix this problem, we adapt Attentive Mimicking, a method that was designed to explicitly learn embeddings for rare words, to deep language models. In order to make this possible, we introduce one-token approximation, a procedure that enables us to use Attentive Mimicking even when the underlying language model uses subword-based tokenization, i.e., it does not assign embeddings to all words. To evaluate our method, we create a novel dataset that tests the ability of language models to capture semantic properties of words without any task-specific fine-tuning. Using this dataset, we show that adding our adapted version of Attentive Mimicking to BERT does substantially improve its understanding of rare words.


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