We apply a generative segmental model of task structure, guided by narration, to action segmentation in video. We focus on unsupervised and weakly-supervised settings where no action labels are known during training. Despite its simplicity, our model performs competitively with previous work on a dataset of naturalistic instructional videos. Our model allows us to vary the sources of supervision used in training, and we find that both task structure and narrative language provide large benefits in segmentation quality.

This paper is about learning word representations using grammatical type information. We use the syntactic types of Combinatory Categorial Grammar to develop multilinear representations, i.e. maps with n arguments, for words with different functional types. The multilinear maps of words compose with each other to form sentence representations. We extend the skipgram algorithm from vectors to multi- linear maps to learn these representations and instantiate it on unary and binary maps for transitive verbs. These are evaluated on verb and sentence similarity and disambiguation tasks and a subset of the SICK relatedness dataset. Our model performs better than previous type- driven models and is competitive with state of the art representation learning methods such as BERT and neural sentence encoders.

Prior work has shown that, on small amounts of training data, syntactic neural language models learn structurally sensitive generalisations more successfully than sequential language models. However, their computational complexity renders scaling difficult, and it remains an open question whether structural biases are still necessary when sequential models have access to ever larger amounts of training data. To answer this question, we introduce an efficient knowledge distillation (KD) technique that transfers knowledge from a syntactic language model trained on a small corpus to an LSTM language model, hence enabling the LSTM to develop a more structurally sensitive representation of the larger training data it learns from. On targeted syntactic evaluations, we find that, while sequential LSTMs perform much better than previously reported, our proposed technique substantially improves on this baseline, yielding a new state of the art. Our findings and analysis affirm the importance of structural biases, even in models that learn from large amounts of data.

Generating from Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is an underspecified problem, as many syntactic decisions are not specified by the semantic graph. To explicitly account for this variation, we break down generating from AMR into two steps: first generate a syntactic structure, and then generate the surface form. We show that decomposing the generation process this way leads to state-of-the-art single model performance generating from AMR without additional unlabelled data. We also demonstrate that we can generate meaning-preserving syntactic paraphrases of the same AMR graph, as judged by humans.

Rhetorical structure trees have been shown to be useful for several document-level tasks including summarization and document classification. Previous approaches to RST parsing have used discriminative models; however, these are less sample efficient than generative models, and RST parsing datasets are typically small. In this paper, we present the first generative model for RST parsing. Our model is a document-level RNN grammar (RNNG) with a bottom-up traversal order. We show that, for our parser’s traversal order, previous beam search algorithms for RNNGs have a left-branching bias which is ill-suited for RST parsing. We develop a novel beam search algorithm that keeps track of both structure-and word-generating actions without exhibit-ing this branching bias and results in absolute improvements of 6.8 and 2.9 on unlabelled and labelled F1 over previous algorithms. Overall, our generative model outperforms a discriminative model with the same features by 2.6 F1points and achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art, outperforming all published parsers from a recent replication study that do not use additional training data

Latent tree learning models represent sentences by composing their words according to an induced parse tree, all based on a downstream task. These models often outperform baselines which use (externally provided) syntax trees to drive the composition order. This work contributes (a) a new latent tree learning model based on shift-reduce parsing, with competitive downstream performance and non-trivial induced trees, and (b) an analysis of the trees learned by our shift-reduce model and by a chart-based model.

Language exhibits hierarchical structure, but recent work using a subject-verb agreement diagnostic argued that state-of-the-art language models, LSTMs, fail to learn long-range syntax sensitive dependencies. Using the same diagnostic, we show that, in fact, LSTMs do succeed in learning such dependencies—provided they have enough capacity. We then explore whether models that have access to explicit syntactic information learn agreement more effectively, and how the way in which this structural information is incorporated into the model impacts performance. We find that the mere presence of syntactic information does not improve accuracy, but when model architecture is determined by syntax, number agreement is improved. Further, we find that the choice of how syntactic structure is built affects how well number agreement is learned: top-down construction outperforms left-corner and bottom-up variants in capturing non-local structural dependencies.

Important advances have recently been made using computational semantic models to decode brain activity patterns associated with concepts; however, this work has almost exclusively focused on concrete nouns. How well these models extend to decoding abstract nouns is largely unknown. We address this question by applying state-of-the-art computational models to decode functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) activity patterns, elicited by participants reading and imagining a diverse set of both concrete and abstract nouns. One of the models we use is linguistic, exploiting the recent word2vec skipgram approach trained on Wikipedia. The second is visually grounded, using deep convolutional neural networks trained on Google Images. Dual coding theory considers concrete concepts to be encoded in the brain both linguistically and visually, and abstract concepts only linguistically. Splitting the fMRI data according to human concreteness ratings, we indeed observe that both models significantly decode the most concrete nouns; however, accuracy is significantly greater using the text-based models for the most abstract nouns. More generally this confirms that current computational models are sufficiently advanced to assist in investigating the representational structure of abstract concepts in the brain.

Research in computational semantics is increasingly guided by our understanding of human semantic processing. However, semantic models are typically studied in the context of natural language processing system performance. In this paper, we present a systematic evaluation and comparison of a range of widely-used, state-of-the-art semantic models in their ability to predict patterns of conceptual representation in the human brain. Our results provide new insights both for the design of computational semantic models and for further research in cognitive neuroscience.

We present a dialogue generation model that directly captures the variability in possible responses to a given input, which reduces the ‘boring output’ issue of deterministic dialogue models. Experiments show that our model generates more diverse outputs than baseline models, and also generates more consistently acceptable output than sampling from a deterministic encoder-decoder model.

One of the key problems in computational metaphor modelling is finding the optimal level of abstraction of semantic representations, such that these are able to capture and generalise metaphorical mechanisms. In this paper we present the first metaphor identification method that uses representations constructed from property norms. Such norms have been previously shown to provide a cognitively plausible representation of concepts in terms of semantic properties. Our results demonstrate that such property-based semantic representations provide a suitable model of cross-domain knowledge projection in metaphors, outperforming standard distributional models on a metaphor identification task.

Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into a machine-interpretable meaning representation. Most approaches to this task have been evaluated on a small number of existing corpora which assume that all utterances must be interpreted according to a database and typically ignore context. In this paper we present a new, publicly available corpus for context-dependent semantic parsing. The MRL used for the annotation was designed to support a portable, interactive tourist information system. We develop a semantic parser for this corpus by adapting the imitation learning algorithm DAgger without requiring alignment information during training. DAgger improves upon independently trained classifiers by 9.0 and 4.8 points in F-score on the development and test sets respectively.

Distributional semantic models have been effective at representing linguistic semantics at the word level, and more recently research has moved on to the construction of distributional representations for larger segments of text. However, it is not well understood how the composition operators that work well on short phrase-based models scale up to full-length sentences. In this paper we test several simple compositional methods on a sentence-length similarity task and discover that their performance peaks at fewer than ten operations. We also introduce a novel sentence segmentation method that reduces the number of compositional operations.