Learning What’s Easy: Fully Differentiable Neural Easy-First Taggers

André F. T. Martins, Julia Kreutzer


Abstract
We introduce a novel neural easy-first decoder that learns to solve sequence tagging tasks in a flexible order. In contrast to previous easy-first decoders, our models are end-to-end differentiable. The decoder iteratively updates a “sketch” of the predictions over the sequence. At its core is an attention mechanism that controls which parts of the input are strategically the best to process next. We present a new constrained softmax transformation that ensures the same cumulative attention to every word, and show how to efficiently evaluate and backpropagate over it. Our models compare favourably to BILSTM taggers on three sequence tagging tasks.
Anthology ID:
D17-1036
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
349–362
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1036
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1036
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
André F. T. Martins and Julia Kreutzer. 2017. Learning What’s Easy: Fully Differentiable Neural Easy-First Taggers. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 349–362, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning What’s Easy: Fully Differentiable Neural Easy-First Taggers (Martins & Kreutzer, EMNLP 2017)
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