We propose a methodology for representing the reasoning structure of arguments using Bayesian networks and predicate logic facilitated by argumentation schemes. We express the meaning of text segments using predicate logic and map the boolean values of predicate logic expressions to nodes in a Bayesian network. The reasoning structure among text segments is described with a directed acyclic graph. While our formalism is highly expressive and capable of describing the informal logic of human arguments, it is too open-ended to actually build a network for an argument. It is not at all obvious which segment of argumentative text should be considered as a node in a Bayesian network, and how to decide the dependencies among nodes. To alleviate the difficulty, we provide abstract network fragments, called idioms, which represent typical argument justification patterns derived from argumentation schemes. The network construction process is decomposed into idiom selection, idiom instantiation, and idiom combination. We define 17 idioms in total by referring to argumentation schemes as well as analyzing actual arguments and fitting idioms to them. We also create a dataset consisting of pairs of an argumentative text and a corresponding Bayesian network. Our dataset contains about 2,400 pairs, which is large in the research area of argumentation schemes.

In knowledge graph embedding, the theoretical relationship between the softmax cross-entropy and negative sampling loss functions has not been investigated. This makes it difficult to fairly compare the results of the two different loss functions. We attempted to solve this problem by using the Bregman divergence to provide a unified interpretation of the softmax cross-entropy and negative sampling loss functions. Under this interpretation, we can derive theoretical findings for fair comparison. Experimental results on the FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets show that the theoretical findings are valid in practical settings.

This paper presents a simple and effective discrete optimization method for training binarized knowledge graph embedding model B-CP. Unlike the prior work using a SGD-based method and quantization of real-valued vectors, the proposed method directly optimizes binary embedding vectors by a series of bit flipping operations. On the standard knowledge graph completion tasks, the B-CP model trained with the proposed method achieved comparable performance with that trained with SGD as well as state-of-the-art real-valued models with similar embedding dimensions.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has made the public pay close attention to related news, covering various domains, such as sanitation, treatment, and effects on education. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 condition is very different among the countries (e.g., policies and development of the epidemic), and thus citizens would be interested in news in foreign countries. We build a system for worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation containing reliable articles from 10 regions in 7 languages sorted by topics. Our reliable COVID-19 related website dataset collected through crowdsourcing ensures the quality of the articles. A neural machine translation module translates articles in other languages into Japanese and English. A BERT-based topic-classifier trained on our article-topic pair dataset helps users find their interested information efficiently by putting articles into different categories.

Many researchers have tried to predict the accuracies of extrinsic evaluation by using intrinsic evaluation to evaluate word embedding. The relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation, however, has only been studied with simple correlation analysis, which has difficulty capturing complex cause-effect relationships and integrating external factors such as the hyperparameters of word embedding. To tackle this problem, we employ partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM), a method of structural equation modeling developed for causal analysis. We propose a causal diagram consisting of the evaluation results on the BATS, VecEval, and SentEval datasets, with a causal hypothesis that linguistic knowledge encoded in word embedding contributes to solving downstream tasks. Our PLS-PM models are estimated with 600 word embeddings, and we prove the existence of causal relations between linguistic knowledge evaluated on BATS and the accuracies of downstream tasks evaluated on VecEval and SentEval in our PLS-PM models. Moreover, we show that the PLS-PM models are useful for analyzing the effect of hyperparameters, including the training algorithm, corpus, dimension, and context window, and for validating the effectiveness of intrinsic evaluation.

Bilinear diagonal models for knowledge graph embedding (KGE), such as DistMult and ComplEx, balance expressiveness and computational efficiency by representing relations as diagonal matrices. Although they perform well in predicting atomic relations, composite relations (relation paths) cannot be modeled naturally by the product of relation matrices, as the product of diagonal matrices is commutative and hence invariant with the order of relations. In this paper, we propose a new bilinear KGE model, called BlockHolE, based on block circulant matrices. In BlockHolE, relation matrices can be non-commutative, allowing composite relations to be modeled by matrix product. The model is parameterized in a way that covers a spectrum ranging from diagonal to full relation matrices. A fast computation technique can be developed on the basis of the duality of the Fourier transform of circulant matrices.

Although neural tensor networks (NTNs) have been successful in many NLP tasks, they require a large number of parameters to be estimated, which often leads to overfitting and a long training time. We address these issues by applying eigendecomposition to each slice matrix of a tensor to reduce its number of paramters. First, we evaluate our proposed NTN models on knowledge graph completion. Second, we extend the models to recursive NTNs (RNTNs) and evaluate them on logical reasoning tasks. These experiments show that our proposed models learn better and faster than the original (R)NTNs.

A sentence compression method using LSTM can generate fluent compressed sentences. However, the performance of this method is significantly degraded when compressing longer sentences since it does not explicitly handle syntactic features. To solve this problem, we propose a higher-order syntactic attention network (HiSAN) that can handle higher-order dependency features as an attention distribution on LSTM hidden states. Furthermore, to avoid the influence of incorrect parse results, we trained HiSAN by maximizing jointly the probability of a correct output with the attention distribution. Experimental results on Google sentence compression dataset showed that our method achieved the best performance on F1 as well as ROUGE-1,2 and L scores, 83.2, 82.9, 75.8 and 82.7, respectively. In human evaluation, our methods also outperformed baseline methods in both readability and informativeness.

The sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model has been successfully applied to machine translation (MT). Recently, MT performances were improved by incorporating supervised attention into the model. In this paper, we introduce supervised attention to constituency parsing that can be regarded as another translation task. Evaluation results on the PTB corpus showed that the bracketing F-measure was improved by supervised attention.

In applying word-based dependency parsing such as Universal Dependencies (UD) to Japanese, the uncertainty of word segmentation emerges for defining a word unit of the dependencies. We introduce the following hierarchical word structures to dependency parsing in Japanese: morphological units (a short unit word, SUW) and syntactic units (a long unit word, LUW). An SUW can be used to segment a sentence consistently, while it is too short to represent syntactic construction. An LUW is a unit including functional multiwords and LUW-based analysis facilitates the capturing of syntactic structure and makes parsing results more precise than SUW-based analysis. This paper describes the results of a feasibility study on the ability and the effectiveness of parsing methods based on hierarchical word structure (LUW chunking+parsing) in comparison to single layer word structure (SUW parsing). We also show joint analysis of LUW-chunking and dependency parsing improves the performance of identifying predicate-argument structures, while there is not much difference between overall results of them. not much difference between overall results of them.

We show the equivalence of two state-of-the-art models for link prediction/knowledge graph completion: Nickel et al’s holographic embeddings and Trouillon et al.’s complex embeddings. We first consider a spectral version of the holographic embeddings, exploiting the frequency domain in the Fourier transform for efficient computation. The analysis of the resulting model reveals that it can be viewed as an instance of the complex embeddings with a certain constraint imposed on the initial vectors upon training. Conversely, any set of complex embeddings can be converted to a set of equivalent holographic embeddings.

This paper presents an efficient and optimal parsing algorithm for probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs). To achieve faster parsing, our proposal employs a pruning technique to reduce unnecessary edges in the search space. The key is to conduct repetitively Viterbi inside and outside parsing, while gradually expanding the search space to efficiently compute heuristic bounds used for pruning. Our experimental results using the English Penn Treebank corpus show that the proposed algorithm is faster than the standard CKY parsing algorithm. In addition, we also show how to extend this algorithm to extract k-best Viterbi parse trees.

This paper presents NTT-NAIST SMT systems for English-German and German-English MT tasks of the IWSLT 2014 evaluation campaign. The systems are based on generalized minimum Bayes risk system combination of three SMT systems using the forest-to-string, syntactic preordering, and phrase-based translation formalisms. Individual systems employ training data selection for domain adaptation, truecasing, compound word splitting (for GermanEnglish), interpolated n-gram language models, and hypotheses rescoring using recurrent neural network language models.

This paper proposes a discriminative forest reranking algorithm for dependency parsing that can be seen as a form of efficient stacked parsing. A dynamic programming shift-reduce parser produces a packed derivation forest which is then scored by a discriminative reranker, using the 1-best tree output by the shift-reduce parser as guide features in addition to third-order graph-based features. To improve efficiency and accuracy, this paper also proposes a novel shift-reduce parser that eliminates the spurious ambiguity of arc-standard transition systems. Testing on the English Penn Treebank data, forest reranking gave a state-of-the-art unlabeled dependency accuracy of 93.12.

Minimum error rate training (MERT) is a widely used learning method for statistical machine translation. In this paper, we present a SVM-based training method to enhance generalization ability. We extend MERT optimization by maximizing the margin between the reference and incorrect translations under the L2-norm prior to avoid overfitting problem. Translation accuracy obtained by our proposed methods is more stable in various conditions than that obtained by MERT. Our experimental results on the French-English WMT08 shared task show that degrade of our proposed methods is smaller than that of MERT in case of small training data or out-of-domain test data.