Better call Saul: Flexible Programming for Learning and Inference in NLP

Parisa Kordjamshidi, Daniel Khashabi, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Bhargav Mangipudi, Sameer Singh, Dan Roth


Abstract
We present a novel way for designing complex joint inference and learning models using Saul (Kordjamshidi et al., 2015), a recently-introduced declarative learning-based programming language (DeLBP). We enrich Saul with components that are necessary for a broad range of learning based Natural Language Processing tasks at various levels of granularity. We illustrate these advances using three different, well-known NLP problems, and show how these generic learning and inference modules can directly exploit Saul’s graph-based data representation. These properties allow the programmer to easily switch between different model formulations and configurations, and consider various kinds of dependencies and correlations among variables of interest with minimal programming effort. We argue that Saul provides an extremely useful paradigm both for the design of advanced NLP systems and for supporting advanced research in NLP.
Anthology ID:
C16-1285
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
3030–3040
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1285
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parisa Kordjamshidi, Daniel Khashabi, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Bhargav Mangipudi, Sameer Singh, and Dan Roth. 2016. Better call Saul: Flexible Programming for Learning and Inference in NLP. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 3030–3040, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Better call Saul: Flexible Programming for Learning and Inference in NLP (Kordjamshidi et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/C16-1285.pdf
Code
 IllinoisCogComp/saul