Syntactic parsers have dominated natural language understanding for decades. Yet, their syntactic interpretations are losing centrality in downstream tasks due to the success of large-scale textual representation learners. In this paper, we propose KERMIT (Kernel-inspired Encoder with Recursive Mechanism for Interpretable Trees) to embed symbolic syntactic parse trees into artificial neural networks and to visualize how syntax is used in inference. We experimented with KERMIT paired with two state-of-the-art transformer-based universal sentence encoders (BERT and XLNet) and we showed that KERMIT can indeed boost their performance by effectively embedding human-coded universal syntactic representations in neural networks

In this paper, we present SyntNN as a way to include traditional syntactic models in multilayer neural networks used in the task of Semeval Task 2 of emoji prediction. The model builds on the distributed tree embedder also known as distributed tree kernel. Initial results are extremely encouraging but additional analysis is needed to overcome the problem of overfitting.