Evaluation discrepancy and overcorrection phenomenon are two common problems in neural machine translation (NMT). NMT models are generally trained with word-level learning objective, but evaluated by sentence-level metrics. Moreover, the cross-entropy loss function discourages model to generate synonymous predictions and overcorrect them to ground truth words. To address these two drawbacks, we adopt multi-task learning and propose a mixed learning objective (MLO) which combines the strength of word-level and sentence-level evaluation without modifying model structure. At word-level, it calculates semantic similarity between predicted and ground truth words. At sentence-level, it computes probabilistic n-gram matching scores of generated translations. We also combine a loss-sensitive scheduled sampling decoding strategy with MLO to explore its extensibility. Experimental results on IWSLT 2016 German-English and WMT 2019 English-Chinese datasets demonstrate that our methodology can significantly promote translation quality. The ablation study shows that both word-level and sentence-level learning objectives can improve BLEU scores. Furthermore, MLO is consistent with state-of-the-art scheduled sampling methods and can achieve further promotion.

Hierarchical text classification is an essential yet challenging subtask of multi-label text classification with a taxonomic hierarchy. Existing methods have difficulties in modeling the hierarchical label structure in a global view. Furthermore, they cannot make full use of the mutual interactions between the text feature space and the label space. In this paper, we formulate the hierarchy as a directed graph and introduce hierarchy-aware structure encoders for modeling label dependencies. Based on the hierarchy encoder, we propose a novel end-to-end hierarchy-aware global model (HiAGM) with two variants. A multi-label attention variant (HiAGM-LA) learns hierarchy-aware label embeddings through the hierarchy encoder and conducts inductive fusion of label-aware text features. A text feature propagation model (HiAGM-TP) is proposed as the deductive variant that directly feeds text features into hierarchy encoders. Compared with previous works, both HiAGM-LA and HiAGM-TP achieve significant and consistent improvements on three benchmark datasets.

Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is often regarded as a character-based sequence labeling task in most current works which have achieved great success with the help of powerful neural networks. However, these works neglect an important clue: Chinese characters incorporate both semantic and phonetic meanings. In this paper, we introduce multiple character embeddings including Pinyin Romanization and Wubi Input, both of which are easily accessible and effective in depicting semantics of characters. We propose a novel shared Bi-LSTM-CRF model to fuse linguistic features efficiently by sharing the LSTM network during the training procedure. Extensive experiments on five corpora show that extra embeddings help obtain a significant improvement in labeling accuracy. Specifically, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance in AS and CityU corpora with F1 scores of 96.9 and 97.3, respectively without leveraging any external lexical resources.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to recognize the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Syntactic information has been paid a great attention over the role of enhancing SRL. However, the latest advance shows that syntax would not be so important for SRL with the emerging much smaller gap between syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic SRL. To comprehensively explore the role of syntax for SRL task, we extend existing models and propose a unified framework to investigate more effective and more diverse ways of incorporating syntax into sequential neural networks. Exploring the effect of syntactic input quality on SRL performance, we confirm that high-quality syntactic parse could still effectively enhance syntactically-driven SRL. Using empirically optimized integration strategy, we even enlarge the gap between syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic SRL. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on CoNLL-2009 benchmarks both for English and Chinese, substantially outperforming all previous models.

Recurrent neural networks have achieved great success in many NLP tasks. However, they have difficulty in parallelization because of the recurrent structure, so it takes much time to train RNNs. In this paper, we introduce sliced recurrent neural networks (SRNNs), which could be parallelized by slicing the sequences into many subsequences. SRNNs have the ability to obtain high-level information through multiple layers with few extra parameters. We prove that the standard RNN is a special case of the SRNN when we use linear activation functions. Without changing the recurrent units, SRNNs are 136 times as fast as standard RNNs and could be even faster when we train longer sequences. Experiments on six large-scale sentiment analysis datasets show that SRNNs achieve better performance than standard RNNs.

Multi-turn conversation understanding is a major challenge for building intelligent dialogue systems. This work focuses on retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation whose related work simply concatenates the conversation utterances, ignoring the interactions among previous utterances for context modeling. In this paper, we formulate previous utterances into context using a proposed deep utterance aggregation model to form a fine-grained context representation. In detail, a self-matching attention is first introduced to route the vital information in each utterance. Then the model matches a response with each refined utterance and the final matching score is obtained after attentive turns aggregation. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks, including a newly introduced e-commerce dialogue corpus.