No Arabic abstract
Though language model text embeddings have revolutionized NLP research, their ability to capture high-level semantic information, such as relations between entities in text, is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework that trains sentence embeddings to encode the relations in a graph structure. Given a sentence (unstructured text) and its graph, we use contrastive learning to impose relation-related structure on the token-level representations of the sentence obtained with a CharacterBERT (El Boukkouri et al.,2020) model. The resulting relation-aware sentence embeddings achieve state-of-the-art results on the relation extraction task using only a simple KNN classifier, thereby demonstrating the success of the proposed method. Additional visualization by a tSNE analysis shows the effectiveness of the learned representation space compared to baselines. Furthermore, we show that we can learn a different space for named entity recognition, again using a contrastive learning objective, and demonstrate how to successfully combine both representation spaces in an entity-relation task.
Word embeddings are a popular way to improve downstream performances in contemporary language modeling. However, the underlying geometric structure of the embedding space is not well understood. We present a series of explorations using bio-inspired methodology to traverse and visualize word embeddings, demonstrating evidence of discernible structure. Moreover, our model also produces word similarity rankings that are plausible yet very different from common similarity metrics, mainly cosine similarity and Euclidean distance. We show that our bio-inspired model can be used to investigate how different word embedding techniques result in different semantic outputs, which can emphasize or obscure particular interpretations in textual data.
This paper presents SimCSE, a simple contrastive learning framework that greatly advances the state-of-the-art sentence embeddings. We first describe an unsupervised approach, which takes an input sentence and predicts itself in a contrastive objective, with only standard dropout used as noise. This simple method works surprisingly well, performing on par with previous supervised counterparts. We find that dropout acts as minimal data augmentation and removing it leads to a representation collapse. Then, we propose a supervised approach, which incorporates annotated pairs from natural language inference datasets into our contrastive learning framework, by using entailment pairs as positives and contradiction pairs as hard negatives. We evaluate SimCSE on standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, and our unsupervised and supervised models using BERT base achieve an average of 76.3% and 81.6% Spearmans correlation respectively, a 4.2% and 2.2% improvement compared to previous best results. We also show -- both theoretically and empirically -- that contrastive learning objective regularizes pre-trained embeddings anisotropic space to be more uniform, and it better aligns positive pairs when supervised signals are available.
Despite pre-trained language models have proven useful for learning high-quality semantic representations, these models are still vulnerable to simple perturbations. Recent works aimed to improve the robustness of pre-trained models mainly focus on adversarial training from perturbed examples with similar semantics, neglecting the utilization of different or even opposite semantics. Different from the image processing field, the text is discrete and few word substitutions can cause significant semantic changes. To study the impact of semantics caused by small perturbations, we conduct a series of pilot experiments and surprisingly find that adversarial training is useless or even harmful for the model to detect these semantic changes. To address this problem, we propose Contrastive Learning with semantIc Negative Examples (CLINE), which constructs semantic negative examples unsupervised to improve the robustness under semantically adversarial attacking. By comparing with similar and opposite semantic examples, the model can effectively perceive the semantic changes caused by small perturbations. Empirical results show that our approach yields substantial improvements on a range of sentiment analysis, reasoning, and reading comprehension tasks. And CLINE also ensures the compactness within the same semantics and separability across different semantics in sentence-level.
Recent advances in reinforcement learning have shown its potential to tackle complex real-life tasks. However, as the dimensionality of the task increases, reinforcement learning methods tend to struggle. To overcome this, we explore methods for representing the semantic information embedded in the state. While previous methods focused on information in its raw form (e.g., raw visual input), we propose to represent the state using natural language. Language can represent complex scenarios and concepts, making it a favorable candidate for representation. Empirical evidence, within the domain of ViZDoom, suggests that natural language based agents are more robust, converge faster and perform better than vision based agents, showing the benefit of using natural language representations for reinforcement learning.
There has been significant interest recently in learning multilingual word embeddings -- in which semantically similar words across languages have similar embeddings. State-of-the-art approaches have relied on expensive labeled data, which is unavailable for low-resource languages, or have involved post-hoc unification of monolingual embeddings. In the present paper, we investigate the efficacy of multilingual embeddings learned from weakly-supervised image-text data. In particular, we propose methods for learning multilingual embeddings using image-text data, by enforcing similarity between the representations of the image and that of the text. Our experiments reveal that even without using any expensive labeled data, a bag-of-words-based embedding model trained on image-text data achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art on crosslingual semantic similarity tasks.