NAACL 2015 Papers

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for joint segmentation, POS tagging and dependency parsing. While joint modeling of these tasks addresses the issue of error propagation inherent in traditional pipeline architectures, it also complicates the inference task. Past research has addressed this challenge by placing constraints on the scoring function. In contrast, we propose an approach that can handle arbitrarily complex scoring functions. Specifically, we employ a randomized greedy algorithm that jointly predicts segmentations, POS tags and dependency trees. Moreover, this architecture readily handles different segmentation tasks, such as morphological segmentation for Arabic and word segmentation for Chinese. The joint model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on three datasets, obtaining 2.1% TedEval absolute gain against the best published results in the 2013 SPMRL shared task. 1

Vector Space Models (VSMs) of Semantics are useful tools for exploring the semantics of single words, and the composition of words to make phrasal meaning. While many methods can estimate the meaning (i.e. vector) of a phrase, few do so in an interpretable way. We introduce a new method (CNNSE) that allows word and phrase vectors to adapt to the notion of composition. Our method learns a VSM that is both tailored to support a chosen semantic composition operation, and whose resulting features have an intuitive interpretation. Interpretability allows for the exploration of phrasal semantics, which we leverage to analyze performance on a behavioral task.

Most recent unsupervised methods in vector space semantics for assessing thematic fit (e.g. Erk, 2007; Baroni and Lenci, 2010; Sayeed and Demberg, 2014) create prototypical rolefillers without performing word sense disambiguation. This leads to a kind of sparsity problem: candidate role-fillers for different senses of the verb end up being measured by the same “yardstick”, the single prototypical role-filler. In this work, we use three different feature spaces to construct robust unsupervised models of distributional semantics. We show that correlation with human judgements on thematic fit estimates can be improved consistently by clustering typical role-fillers and then calculating similarities of candidate rolefillers with these cluster centroids. The suggested methods can be used in any vector space model that constructs a prototype vector from a non-trivial set of typical vectors.

We present a joint model for predicate argument alignment. We leverage multiple sources of semantic information, including temporal ordering constraints between events. These are combined in a max-margin framework to find a globally consistent view of entities and events across multiple documents, which leads to improvements over a very strong local baseline.

We introduce a new approach to unsupervised estimation of feature-rich semantic role labeling models. Our model consists of two components: (1) an encoding component: a semantic role labeling model which predicts roles given a rich set of syntactic and lexical features; (2) a reconstruction component: a tensor factorization model which relies on roles to predict argument fillers. When the components are estimated jointly to minimize errors in argument reconstruction, the induced roles largely correspond to roles defined in annotated resources. Our method performs on par with most accurate role induction methods on English and German, even though, unlike these previous approaches, we do not incorporate any prior linguistic knowledge about the languages.