Neural networks can achieve impressive performance on many natural language processing applications, but they typically need large labeled data for training and are not easily interpretable. On the other hand, symbolic rules such as regular expressions are interpretable, require no training, and often achieve decent accuracy; but rules cannot benefit from labeled data when available and hence underperform neural networks in rich-resource scenarios. In this paper, we propose a type of recurrent neural networks called FA-RNNs that combine the advantages of neural networks and regular expression rules. An FA-RNN can be converted from regular expressions and deployed in zero-shot and cold-start scenarios. It can also utilize labeled data for training to achieve improved prediction accuracy. After training, an FA-RNN often remains interpretable and can be converted back into regular expressions. We apply FA-RNNs to text classification and observe that FA-RNNs significantly outperform previous neural approaches in both zero-shot and low-resource settings and remain very competitive in rich-resource settings.

Word embedding is an essential building block for deep learning methods for natural language processing. Although word embedding has been extensively studied over the years, the problem of how to effectively embed numerals, a special subset of words, is still underexplored. Existing word embedding methods do not learn numeral embeddings well because there are an infinite number of numerals and their individual appearances in training corpora are highly scarce. In this paper, we propose two novel numeral embedding methods that can handle the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem for numerals. We first induce a finite set of prototype numerals using either a self-organizing map or a Gaussian mixture model. We then represent the embedding of a numeral as a weighted average of the prototype number embeddings. Numeral embeddings represented in this manner can be plugged into existing word embedding learning approaches such as skip-gram for training. We evaluated our methods and showed its effectiveness on four intrinsic and extrinsic tasks: word similarity, embedding numeracy, numeral prediction, and sequence labeling.