Subendhu Rongali


2021

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Improved Latent Tree Induction with Distant Supervision via Span Constraints
Zhiyang Xu | Andrew Drozdov | Jay Yoon Lee | Tim O’Gorman | Subendhu Rongali | Dylan Finkbeiner | Shilpa Suresh | Mohit Iyyer | Andrew McCallum
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

For over thirty years, researchers have developed and analyzed methods for latent tree induction as an approach for unsupervised syntactic parsing. Nonetheless, modern systems still do not perform well enough compared to their supervised counterparts to have any practical use as structural annotation of text. In this work, we present a technique that uses distant supervision in the form of span constraints (i.e. phrase bracketing) to improve performance in unsupervised constituency parsing. Using a relatively small number of span constraints we can substantially improve the output from DIORA, an already competitive unsupervised parsing system. Compared with full parse tree annotation, span constraints can be acquired with minimal effort, such as with a lexicon derived from Wikipedia, to find exact text matches. Our experiments show span constraints based on entities improves constituency parsing on English WSJ Penn Treebank by more than 5 F1. Furthermore, our method extends to any domain where span constraints are easily attainable, and as a case study we demonstrate its effectiveness by parsing biomedical text from the CRAFT dataset.

2020

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Compressing Transformer-Based Semantic Parsing Models using Compositional Code Embeddings
Prafull Prakash | Saurabh Kumar Shashidhar | Wenlong Zhao | Subendhu Rongali | Haidar Khan | Michael Kayser
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

The current state-of-the-art task-oriented semantic parsing models use BERT or RoBERTa as pretrained encoders; these models have huge memory footprints. This poses a challenge to their deployment for voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant on edge devices with limited memory budgets. We propose to learn compositional code embeddings to greatly reduce the sizes of BERT-base and RoBERTa-base. We also apply the technique to DistilBERT, ALBERT-base, and ALBERT-large, three already compressed BERT variants which attain similar state-of-the-art performances on semantic parsing with much smaller model sizes. We observe 95.15% 98.46% embedding compression rates and 20.47% 34.22% encoder compression rates, while preserving >97.5% semantic parsing performances. We provide the recipe for training and analyze the trade-off between code embedding sizes and downstream performances.

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Unsupervised Parsing with S-DIORA: Single Tree Encoding for Deep Inside-Outside Recursive Autoencoders
Andrew Drozdov | Subendhu Rongali | Yi-Pei Chen | Tim O’Gorman | Mohit Iyyer | Andrew McCallum
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The deep inside-outside recursive autoencoder (DIORA; Drozdov et al. 2019) is a self-supervised neural model that learns to induce syntactic tree structures for input sentences *without access to labeled training data*. In this paper, we discover that while DIORA exhaustively encodes all possible binary trees of a sentence with a soft dynamic program, its vector averaging approach is locally greedy and cannot recover from errors when computing the highest scoring parse tree in bottom-up chart parsing. To fix this issue, we introduce S-DIORA, an improved variant of DIORA that encodes a single tree rather than a softly-weighted mixture of trees by employing a hard argmax operation and a beam at each cell in the chart. Our experiments show that through *fine-tuning* a pre-trained DIORA with our new algorithm, we improve the state of the art in *unsupervised* constituency parsing on the English WSJ Penn Treebank by 2.2-6% F1, depending on the data used for fine-tuning.