Automatic text dating(ATD) is a challenging task since explicit temporal mentions usually do not appear in texts. Existing state-of-the-art approaches learn word representations via language models, whereas most of them ignore diachronic change of words, which may affect the efforts of text modeling. Meanwhile, few of them consider text modeling for long diachronic documents. In this paper, we present a time-aware language model named TALM, to learn temporal word representations by transferring language models of general domains to those of time-specific ones. We also build a hierarchical modeling approach to represent diachronic documents by encoding them with temporal word representations. Experiments on a Chinese diachronic corpus show that our model effectively captures implicit temporal information of words, and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in historical text dating as well.

Here we experiment with the use of information retrieval as an augmentation for pre-trained language models. The text corpus used in information retrieval can be viewed as form of episodic memory which grows over time. By augmenting GPT 2.0 with information retrieval we achieve a zero shot 15% relative reduction in perplexity on Gigaword corpus without any re-training. We also validate our IR augmentation on an event co-reference task.

Recently, pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable success in a broad range of natural language processing tasks. However, in multilingual setting, it is extremely resource-consuming to pre-train a deep language model over large-scale corpora for each language. Instead of exhaustively pre-training monolingual language models independently, an alternative solution is to pre-train a powerful multilingual deep language model over large-scale corpora in hundreds of languages. However, the vocabulary size for each language in such a model is relatively small, especially for low-resource languages. This limitation inevitably hinders the performance of these multilingual models on tasks such as sequence labeling, wherein in-depth token-level or sentence-level understanding is essential. In this paper, inspired by previous methods designed for monolingual settings, we investigate two approaches (i.e., joint mapping and mixture mapping) based on a pre-trained multilingual model BERT for addressing the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem on a variety of tasks, including part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, machine translation quality estimation, and machine reading comprehension. Experimental results show that using mixture mapping is more promising. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that attempts to address and discuss the OOV issue in multilingual settings.

Remarkable success has been achieved in the last few years on some limited machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. However, it is still difficult to interpret the predictions of existing MRC models. In this paper, we focus on extracting evidence sentences that can explain or support the answers of multiple-choice MRC tasks, where the majority of answer options cannot be directly extracted from reference documents. Due to the lack of ground truth evidence sentence labels in most cases, we apply distant supervision to generate imperfect labels and then use them to train an evidence sentence extractor. To denoise the noisy labels, we apply a recently proposed deep probabilistic logic learning framework to incorporate both sentence-level and cross-sentence linguistic indicators for indirect supervision. We feed the extracted evidence sentences into existing MRC models and evaluate the end-to-end performance on three challenging multiple-choice MRC datasets: MultiRC, RACE, and DREAM, achieving comparable or better performance than the same models that take as input the full reference document. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work extracting evidence sentences for multiple-choice MRC.

Deep learning has emerged as a versatile tool for a wide range of NLP tasks, due to its superior capacity in representation learning. But its applicability is limited by the reliance on annotated examples, which are difficult to produce at scale. Indirect supervision has emerged as a promising direction to address this bottleneck, either by introducing labeling functions to automatically generate noisy examples from unlabeled text, or by imposing constraints over interdependent label decisions. A plethora of methods have been proposed, each with respective strengths and limitations. Probabilistic logic offers a unifying language to represent indirect supervision, but end-to-end modeling with probabilistic logic is often infeasible due to intractable inference and learning. In this paper, we propose deep probabilistic logic (DPL) as a general framework for indirect supervision, by composing probabilistic logic with deep learning. DPL models label decisions as latent variables, represents prior knowledge on their relations using weighted first-order logical formulas, and alternates between learning a deep neural network for the end task and refining uncertain formula weights for indirect supervision, using variational EM. This framework subsumes prior indirect supervision methods as special cases, and enables novel combination via infusion of rich domain and linguistic knowledge. Experiments on biomedical machine reading demonstrate the promise of this approach.

Progress in text understanding has been driven by large datasets that test particular capabilities, like recent datasets for reading comprehension (Hermann et al., 2015). We focus here on the LAMBADA dataset (Paperno et al., 2016), a word prediction task requiring broader context than the immediate sentence. We view LAMBADA as a reading comprehension problem and apply comprehension models based on neural networks. Though these models are constrained to choose a word from the context, they improve the state of the art on LAMBADA from 7.3% to 49%. We analyze 100 instances, finding that neural network readers perform well in cases that involve selecting a name from the context based on dialogue or discourse cues but struggle when coreference resolution or external knowledge is needed.

A significant number of neural architectures for reading comprehension have recently been developed and evaluated on large cloze-style datasets. We present experiments supporting the emergence of “predication structure” in the hidden state vectors of these readers. More specifically, we provide evidence that the hidden state vectors represent atomic formulas 𝛷c where 𝛷 is a semantic property (predicate) and c is a constant symbol entity identifier.