No Arabic abstract
Human engagement in narrative is partially driven by reasoning about discourse relations between narrative events, and the expectations about what is likely to happen next that results from such reasoning. Researchers in NLP have tackled modeling such expectations from a range of perspectives, including treating it as the inference of the contingent discourse relation, or as a type of common-sense causal reasoning. Our approach is to model likelihood between events by drawing on several of these lines of previous work. We implement and evaluate different unsupervised methods for learning event pairs that are likely to be contingent on one another. We refine event pairs that we learn from a corpus of film scene descriptions utilizing web search counts, and evaluate our results by collecting human judgments of contingency. Our results indicate that the use of web search counts increases the average accuracy of our best method to 85.64% over a baseline of 50%, as compared to an average accuracy of 75.15% without web search.
Unsupervised machine translation---i.e., not assuming any cross-lingual supervision signal, whether a dictionary, translations, or comparable corpora---seems impossible, but nevertheless, Lample et al. (2018) recently proposed a fully unsupervised machine translation (MT) model. The model relies heavily on an adversarial, unsupervised alignment of word embedding spaces for bilingual dictionary induction (Conneau et al., 2018), which we examine here. Our results identify the limitations of current unsupervised MT: unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction performs much worse on morphologically rich languages that are not dependent marking, when monolingual corpora from different domains or different embedding algorithms are used. We show that a simple trick, exploiting a weak supervision signal from identical words, enables more robust induction, and establish a near-perfect correlation between unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction performance and a previously unexplored graph similarity metric.
Traditional event extraction methods require predefined event types and their corresponding annotations to learn event extractors. These prerequisites are often hard to be satisfied in real-world applications. This work presents a corpus-based open-domain event type induction method that automatically discovers a set of event types from a given corpus. As events of the same type could be expressed in multiple ways, we propose to represent each event type as a cluster of <predicate sense, object head> pairs. Specifically, our method (1) selects salient predicates and object heads, (2) disambiguates predicate senses using only a verb sense dictionary, and (3) obtains event types by jointly embedding and clustering <predicate sense, object head> pairs in a latent spherical space. Our experiments, on three datasets from different domains, show our method can discover salient and high-quality event types, according to both automatic and human evaluations.
We explore clustering of contextualized text representations for two unsupervised syntax induction tasks: part of speech induction (POSI) and constituency labelling (CoLab). We propose a deep embedded clustering approach which jointly transforms these representations into a lower dimension cluster friendly space and clusters them. We further enhance these representations by augmenting them with task-specific representations. We also explore the effectiveness of multilingual representations for different tasks and languages. With this work, we establish the first strong baselines for unsupervised syntax induction using contextualized text representations. We report competitive performance on 45-tag POSI, state-of-the-art performance on 12-tag POSI across 10 languages, and competitive results on CoLab.
Great progress has been made in unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (UBLI) by aligning the source and target word embeddings independently trained on monolingual corpora. The common assumption of most UBLI models is that the embedding spaces of two languages are approximately isomorphic. Therefore the performance is bound by the degree of isomorphism, especially on etymologically and typologically distant languages. To address this problem, we propose a transformation-based method to increase the isomorphism. Embeddings of two languages are made to match with each other by rotating and scaling. The method does not require any form of supervision and can be applied to any language pair. On a benchmark data set of bilingual lexicon induction, our approach can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, with particularly strong results being found on distant languages.
Bilingual lexicons map words in one language to their translations in another, and are typically induced by learning linear projections to align monolingual word embedding spaces. In this paper, we show it is possible to produce much higher quality lexicons with methods that combine (1) unsupervised bitext mining and (2) unsupervised word alignment. Directly applying a pipeline that uses recent algorithms for both subproblems significantly improves induced lexicon quality and further gains are possible by learning to filter the resulting lexical entries, with both unsupervised and semi-supervised schemes. Our final model outperforms the state of the art on the BUCC 2020 shared task by 14 $F_1$ points averaged over 12 language pairs, while also providing a more interpretable approach that allows for rich reasoning of word meaning in context. Further analysis of our output and the standard reference lexicons suggests they are of comparable quality, and new benchmarks may be needed to measure further progress on this task.