Ensembling word embeddings to improve distributed word representations has shown good success for natural language processing tasks in recent years. These approaches either carry out straightforward mathematical operations over a set of vectors or use unsupervised learning to find a lower-dimensional representation. This work compares meta-embeddings trained for different losses, namely loss functions that account for angular distance between the reconstructed embedding and the target and those that account normalized distances based on the vector length. We argue that meta-embeddings are better to treat the ensemble set equally in unsupervised learning as the respective quality of each embedding is unknown for upstream tasks prior to meta-embedding. We show that normalization methods that account for this such as cosine and KL-divergence objectives outperform meta-embedding trained on standard $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ loss on \textit{defacto} word similarity and relatedness datasets and find it outperforms existing meta-learning strategies.
For many computer vision applications such as image captioning, visual question answering, and person search, learning discriminative feature representations at both image and text level is an essential yet challenging problem. Its challenges originate from the large word variance in the text domain as well as the difficulty of accurately measuring the distance between the features of the two modalities. Most prior work focuses on the latter challenge, by introducing loss functions that help the network learn better feature representations but fail to account for the complexity of the textual input. With that in mind, we introduce TIMAM: a Text-Image Modality Adversarial Matching approach that learns modality-invariant feature representations using adversarial and cross-modal matching objectives. In addition, we demonstrate that BERT, a publicly-available language model that extracts word embeddings, can successfully be applied in the text-to-image matching domain. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art cross-modal matching performance on four widely-used publicly-available datasets resulting in absolute improvements ranging from 2% to 5% in terms of rank-1 accuracy.
In information retrieval (IR) and related tasks, term weighting approaches typically consider the frequency of the term in the document and in the collection in order to compute a score reflecting the importance of the term for the document. In tasks characterized by the presence of training data (such as text classification) it seems logical that the term weighting function should take into account the distribution (as estimated from training data) of the term across the classes of interest. Although `supervised term weighting' approaches that use this intuition have been described before, they have failed to show consistent improvements. In this article we analyse the possible reasons for this failure, and call consolidated assumptions into question. Following this criticism we propose a novel supervised term weighting approach that, instead of relying on any predefined formula, learns a term weighting function optimised on the training set of interest; we dub this approach \emph{Learning to Weight} (LTW). The experiments that we run on several well-known benchmarks, and using different learning methods, show that our method outperforms previous term weighting approaches in text classification.
Learning to construct text representations in end-to-end systems can be difficult, as natural languages are highly compositional and task-specific annotated datasets are often limited in size. Methods for directly supervising language composition can allow us to guide the models based on existing knowledge, regularizing them towards more robust and interpretable representations. In this paper, we investigate how objectives at different granularities can be used to learn better language representations and we propose an architecture for jointly learning to label sentences and tokens. The predictions at each level are combined together using an attention mechanism, with token-level labels also acting as explicit supervision for composing sentence-level representations. Our experiments show that by learning to perform these tasks jointly on multiple levels, the model achieves substantial improvements for both sentence classification and sequence labeling.
Multilingual Word Embeddings (MWEs) represent words from multiple languages in a single distributional vector space. Unsupervised MWE (UMWE) methods acquire multilingual embeddings without cross-lingual supervision, which is a significant advantage over traditional supervised approaches and opens many new possibilities for low-resource languages. Prior art for learning UMWEs, however, merely relies on a number of independently trained Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embeddings (UBWEs) to obtain multilingual embeddings. These methods fail to leverage the interdependencies that exist among many languages. To address this shortcoming, we propose a fully unsupervised framework for learning MWEs that directly exploits the relations between all language pairs. Our model substantially outperforms previous approaches in the experiments on multilingual word translation and cross-lingual word similarity. In addition, our model even beats supervised approaches trained with cross-lingual resources.
We present a new approach for learning graph embeddings, that relies on structural measures of node similarities for generation of training data. The model learns node embeddings that are able to approximate a given measure, such as the shortest path distance or any other. Evaluations of the proposed model on semantic similarity and word sense disambiguation tasks (using WordNet as the source of gold similarities) show that our method yields state-of-the-art results, but also is capable in certain cases to yield even better performance than the input similarity measure. The model is computationally efficient, orders of magnitude faster than the direct computation of graph distances.
Computer vision has benefited from initializing multiple deep layers with weights pretrained on large supervised training sets like ImageNet. Natural language processing (NLP) typically sees initialization of only the lowest layer of deep models with pretrained word vectors. In this paper, we use a deep LSTM encoder from an attentional sequence-to-sequence model trained for machine translation (MT) to contextualize word vectors. We show that adding these context vectors (CoVe) improves performance over using only unsupervised word and character vectors on a wide variety of common NLP tasks: sentiment analysis (SST, IMDb), question classification (TREC), entailment (SNLI), and question answering (SQuAD). For fine-grained sentiment analysis and entailment, CoVe improves performance of our baseline models to the state of the art.
Similarity/Distance measures play a key role in many machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining algorithms, which leads to the emergence of metric learning field. Many metric learning algorithms learn a global distance function from data that satisfy the constraints of the problem. However, in many real-world datasets that the discrimination power of features varies in the different regions of input space, a global metric is often unable to capture the complexity of the task. To address this challenge, local metric learning methods are proposed that learn multiple metrics across the different regions of input space. Some advantages of these methods are high flexibility and the ability to learn a nonlinear mapping but typically achieves at the expense of higher time requirement and overfitting problem. To overcome these challenges, this research presents an online multiple metric learning framework. Each metric in the proposed framework is composed of a global and a local component learned simultaneously. Adding a global component to a local metric efficiently reduce the problem of overfitting. The proposed framework is also scalable with both sample size and the dimension of input data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first local online similarity/distance learning framework based on PA (Passive/Aggressive). In addition, for scalability with the dimension of input data, DRP (Dual Random Projection) is extended for local online learning in the present work. It enables our methods to be run efficiently on high-dimensional datasets, while maintains their predictive performance. The proposed framework provides a straightforward local extension to any global online similarity/distance learning algorithm based on PA.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.
State-of-the-art methods for learning cross-lingual word embeddings have relied on bilingual dictionaries or parallel corpora. Recent studies showed that the need for parallel data supervision can be alleviated with character-level information. While these methods showed encouraging results, they are not on par with their supervised counterparts and are limited to pairs of languages sharing a common alphabet. In this work, we show that we can build a bilingual dictionary between two languages without using any parallel corpora, by aligning monolingual word embedding spaces in an unsupervised way. Without using any character information, our model even outperforms existing supervised methods on cross-lingual tasks for some language pairs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method works very well also for distant language pairs, like English-Russian or English-Chinese. We finally describe experiments on the English-Esperanto low-resource language pair, on which there only exists a limited amount of parallel data, to show the potential impact of our method in fully unsupervised machine translation. Our code, embeddings and dictionaries are publicly available.
Standard deep learning systems require thousands or millions of examples to learn a concept, and cannot integrate new concepts easily. By contrast, humans have an incredible ability to do one-shot or few-shot learning. For instance, from just hearing a word used in a sentence, humans can infer a great deal about it, by leveraging what the syntax and semantics of the surrounding words tells us. Here, we draw inspiration from this to highlight a simple technique by which deep recurrent networks can similarly exploit their prior knowledge to learn a useful representation for a new word from little data. This could make natural language processing systems much more flexible, by allowing them to learn continually from the new words they encounter.