Syntax is fundamental to our thinking about language. Failing to capture the structure of input language could lead to generalization problems and over-parametrization. In the present work, we propose a new syntax-aware language model: Syntactic Ordered Memory (SOM). The model explicitly models the structure with an incremental parser and maintains the conditional probability setting of a standard language model (left-to-right). To train the incremental parser and avoid exposure bias, we also propose a novel dynamic oracle, so that SOM is more robust to wrong parsing decisions. Experiments show that SOM can achieve strong results in language modeling, incremental parsing, and syntactic generalization tests while using fewer parameters than other models.

There are two major classes of natural language grammars — the dependency grammar that models one-to-one correspondences between words and the constituency grammar that models the assembly of one or several corresponded words. While previous unsupervised parsing methods mostly focus on only inducing one class of grammars, we introduce a novel model, StructFormer, that can induce dependency and constituency structure at the same time. To achieve this, we propose a new parsing framework that can jointly generate a constituency tree and dependency graph. Then we integrate the induced dependency relations into the transformer, in a differentiable manner, through a novel dependency-constrained self-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model can achieve strong results on unsupervised constituency parsing, unsupervised dependency parsing, and masked language modeling at the same time.

We model the recursive production property of context-free grammars for natural and synthetic languages. To this end, we present a dynamic programming algorithm that marginalises over latent binary tree structures with N leaves, allowing us to compute the likelihood of a sequence of N tokens under a latent tree model, which we maximise to train a recursive neural function. We demonstrate performance on two synthetic tasks: SCAN, where it outperforms previous models on the LENGTH split, and English question formation, where it performs comparably to decoders with the ground-truth tree structure. We also present experimental results on German-English translation on the Multi30k dataset, and qualitatively analyse the induced tree structures our model learns for the SCAN tasks and the German-English translation task.

It is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally efficiently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic. In this paper, we make use of a multi-task objective, i.e., the models simultaneously predict words as well as ground truth parse trees in a form called “syntactic distances”, where information between these two separate objectives shares the same intermediate representation. Experimental results on the Penn Treebank and Chinese Treebank datasets show that when ground truth parse trees are provided as additional training signals, the model is able to achieve lower perplexity and induce trees with better quality.

In this work, we propose a novel method for training neural networks to perform single-document extractive summarization without heuristically-generated extractive labels. We call our approach BanditSum as it treats extractive summarization as a contextual bandit (CB) problem, where the model receives a document to summarize (the context), and chooses a sequence of sentences to include in the summary (the action). A policy gradient reinforcement learning algorithm is used to train the model to select sequences of sentences that maximize ROUGE score. We perform a series of experiments demonstrating that BanditSum is able to achieve ROUGE scores that are better than or comparable to the state-of-the-art for extractive summarization, and converges using significantly fewer update steps than competing approaches. In addition, we show empirically that BanditSum performs significantly better than competing approaches when good summary sentences appear late in the source document.

In this work, we propose a novel constituency parsing scheme. The model first predicts a real-valued scalar, named syntactic distance, for each split position in the sentence. The topology of grammar tree is then determined by the values of syntactic distances. Compared to traditional shift-reduce parsing schemes, our approach is free from the potentially disastrous compounding error. It is also easier to parallelize and much faster. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art single model F1 score of 92.1 on PTB and 86.4 on CTB dataset, which surpasses the previous single model results by a large margin.