We propose a method for unsupervised opinion summarization that encodes sentences from customer reviews into a hierarchical discrete latent space, then identifies common opinions based on the frequency of their encodings. We are able to generate both abstractive summaries by decoding these frequent encodings, and extractive summaries by selecting the sentences assigned to the same frequent encodings. Our method is attributable, because the model identifies sentences used to generate the summary as part of the summarization process. It scales easily to many hundreds of input reviews, because aggregation is performed in the latent space rather than over long sequences of tokens. We also demonstrate that our appraoch enables a degree of control, generating aspect-specific summaries by restricting the model to parts of the encoding space that correspond to desired aspects (e.g., location or food). Automatic and human evaluation on two datasets from different domains demonstrates that our method generates summaries that are more informative than prior work and better grounded in the input reviews.

We propose a generative model of paraphrase generation, that encourages syntactic diversity by conditioning on an explicit syntactic sketch. We introduce Hierarchical Refinement Quantized Variational Autoencoders (HRQ-VAE), a method for learning decompositions of dense encodings as a sequence of discrete latent variables that make iterative refinements of increasing granularity. This hierarchy of codes is learned through end-to-end training, and represents fine-to-coarse grained information about the input. We use HRQ-VAE to encode the syntactic form of an input sentence as a path through the hierarchy, allowing us to more easily predict syntactic sketches at test time. Extensive experiments, including a human evaluation, confirm that HRQ-VAE learns a hierarchical representation of the input space, and generates paraphrases of higher quality than previous systems.

Word segmentation, the problem of finding word boundaries in speech, is of interest for a range of tasks. Previous papers have suggested that for sequence-to-sequence models trained on tasks such as speech translation or speech recognition, attention can be used to locate and segment the words. We show, however, that even on monolingual data this approach is brittle. In our experiments with different input types, data sizes, and segmentation algorithms, only models trained to predict phones from words succeed in the task. Models trained to predict words from either phones or speech (i.e., the opposite direction needed to generalize to new data), yield much worse results, suggesting that attention-based segmentation is only useful in limited scenarios.

Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) capture sentence-level semantics structural representations to broad-coverage natural sentences. We investigate parsing AMR with explicit dependency structures and interpretable latent structures. We generate the latent soft structure without additional annotations, and fuse both dependency and latent structure via an extended graph neural networks. The fused structural information helps our experiments results to achieve the best reported results on both AMR 2.0 (77.5% Smatch F1 on LDC2017T10) and AMR 1.0 ((71.8% Smatch F1 on LDC2014T12).

Aspect-based sentiment classification is a popular task aimed at identifying the corresponding emotion of a specific aspect. One sentence may contain various sentiments for different aspects. Many sophisticated methods such as attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been widely employed for handling this challenge. Recently, semantic dependency tree implemented by Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) is introduced to describe the inner connection between aspects and the associated emotion words. But the improvement is limited due to the noise and instability of dependency trees. To this end, we propose a dependency graph enhanced dual-transformer network (named DGEDT) by jointly considering the flat representations learnt from Transformer and graph-based representations learnt from the corresponding dependency graph in an iterative interaction manner. Specifically, a dual-transformer structure is devised in DGEDT to support mutual reinforcement between the flat representation learning and graph-based representation learning. The idea is to allow the dependency graph to guide the representation learning of the transformer encoder and vice versa. The results on five datasets demonstrate that the proposed DGEDT outperforms all state-of-the-art alternatives with a large margin.

What is the relationship between sentence representations learned by deep recurrent models against those encoded by the brain? Is there any correspondence between hidden layers of these recurrent models and brain regions when processing sentences? Can these deep models be used to synthesize brain data which can then be utilized in other extrinsic tasks? We investigate these questions using sentences with simple syntax and semantics (e.g., The bone was eaten by the dog.). We consider multiple neural network architectures, including recently proposed ELMo and BERT. We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain recording data collected from human subjects when they were reading these simple sentences. Overall, we find that BERT’s activations correlate the best with MEG brain data. We also find that the deep network representation can be used to generate brain data from new sentences to augment existing brain data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work showing that the MEG brain recording when reading a word in a sentence can be used to distinguish earlier words in the sentence. Our exploration is also the first to use deep neural network representations to generate synthetic brain data and to show that it helps in improving subsequent stimuli decoding task accuracy.