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1. Neural Polysynthetic Language Modelling

   Schwartz, Lane ; Tyers, Francis ; Levin, Lori ; Kirov, Christo ; Littell, Patrick ; Lo, Chi-kiu ; Prud'hommeaux, Emily ; Park, Hyunji Hayley ; Steimel, Kenneth ; Knowles, Rebecca ; et al ( May 2020 , Final Report of the Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop)

   Many techniques in modern computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) make the assumption that approaches that work well on English and other widely used European (and sometimes Asian) languages are “language agnostic” – that is that they will also work across the typologically diverse languages of the world. In high-resource languages, especially those that are analytic rather than synthetic, a common approach is to treat morphologically-distinct variants of a common root (such as dog and dogs) as completely independent word types. Doing so relies on two main assumptions: that there exist a limited number of morphological inflections for anymore »given root, and that most or all of those variants will appear in a large enough corpus (conditioned on assumptions about domain, etc.) so that the model can adequately learn statistics about each variant. Approaches like stemming, lemmatization, morphological analysis, subword segmentation, or other normalization techniques are frequently used when either of those assumptions are likely to be violated, particularly in the case of synthetic languages like Czech and Russian that have more inflectional morphology than English. Within the NLP literature, agglutinative languages like Finnish and Turkish are commonly held up as extreme examples of morphological complexity that challenge common modelling assumptions. Yet, when considering all of the world’s languages, Finnish and Turkish are closer to the average case in terms of synthesis. When we consider polysynthetic languages (those at the extreme of morphological complexity), even approaches like stemming, lemmatization, or subword modelling may not suffice. These languages have very high numbers of hapax legomena (words appearing only once in a corpus), underscoring the need for appropriate morphological handling of words, without which there is no hope for a model to capture enough statistical information about those words. Moreover, many of these languages have only very small text corpora, substantially magnifying these challenges. To this end, we examine the current state-of-the-art in language modelling, machine translation, and predictive text completion in the context of four polysynthetic languages: Guaraní, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, and Inuktitut. We have a particular focus on Inuit-Yupik, a highly challenging family of endangered polysynthetic languages that ranges geographically from Greenland through northern Canada and Alaska to far eastern Russia. The languages in this family are extraordinarily challenging from a computational perspective, with pervasive use of derivational morphemes in addition to rich sets of inflectional suffixes and phonological challenges at morpheme boundaries. Finally, we propose a novel framework for language modelling that combines knowledge representations from finite-state morphological analyzers with Tensor Product Representations (Smolensky, 1990) in order to enable successful neural language models capable of handling the full linguistic variety of typologically variant languages.« less
2. Neural Polysynthetic Language Modelling

   Schwartz, Lane ; Tyers, Francis ; Levin, Lori ; Kirov, Christo ; Littell, Patrick ; Lo, Chi-kiu ; Prud'hommeaux, Emily ; Park, Hyunji Hayley ; Steimel, Kenneth ; Knowles, Rebecca ; et al ( May 2020 , ArXivorg)

   Many techniques in modern computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) make the assumption that approaches that work well on English and other widely used European (and sometimes Asian) languages are “language agnostic” – that is that they will also work across the typologically diverse languages of the world. In high-resource languages, especially those that are analytic rather than synthetic, a common approach is to treat morphologically-distinct variants of a common root (such as dog and dogs) as completely independent word types. Doing so relies on two main assumptions: that there exist a limited number of morphological inflections for anymore »given root, and that most or all of those variants will appear in a large enough corpus (conditioned on assumptions about domain, etc.) so that the model can adequately learn statistics about each variant. Approaches like stemming, lemmatization, morphological analysis, subword segmentation, or other normalization techniques are frequently used when either of those assumptions are likely to be violated, particularly in the case of synthetic languages like Czech and Russian that have more inflectional morphology than English. Within the NLP literature, agglutinative languages like Finnish and Turkish are commonly held up as extreme examples of morphological complexity that challenge common modelling assumptions. Yet, when considering all of the world’s languages, Finnish and Turkish are closer to the average case in terms of synthesis. When we consider polysynthetic languages (those at the extreme of morphological complexity), even approaches like stemming, lemmatization, or subword modelling may not suffice. These languages have very high numbers of hapax legomena (words appearing only once in a corpus), underscoring the need for appropriate morphological handling of words, without which there is no hope for a model to capture enough statistical information about those words. Moreover, many of these languages have only very small text corpora, substantially magnifying these challenges. To this end, we examine the current state-of-the-art in language modelling, machine translation, and predictive text completion in the context of four polysynthetic languages: Guaraní, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, and Inuktitut. We have a particular focus on Inuit-Yupik, a highly challenging family of endangered polysynthetic languages that ranges geographically from Greenland through northern Canada and Alaska to far eastern Russia. The languages in this family are extraordinarily challenging from a computational perspective, with pervasive use of derivational morphemes in addition to rich sets of inflectional suffixes and phonological challenges at morpheme boundaries. Finally, we propose a novel framework for language modelling that combines knowledge representations from finite-state morphological analyzers with Tensor Product Representations (Smolensky, 1990) in order to enable successful neural language models capable of handling the full linguistic variety of typologically variant languages.« less
3. On the Power of Pre-Trained Text Representations: Models and Applications in Text Mining

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3447548.3470810  

   Meng, Yu ; Huang, Jiaxin ; Zhang, Yu ; Han, Jiawei ( August 2021 , KDD'21:The 27th {ACM} {SIGKDD} Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 14-18, 2021)

   Recent years have witnessed the enormous success of text representation learning in a wide range of text mining tasks. Earlier word embedding learning approaches represent words as fixed low-dimensional vectors to capture their semantics. The word embeddings so learned are used as the input features of task-specific models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs), which learn universal language representations via pre-training Transformer-based neural models on large-scale text corpora, have revolutionized the natural language processing (NLP) field. Such pre-trained representations encode generic linguistic features that can be transferred to almost any text-related applications. PLMs outperform previous task-specific models in many applications asmore »they only need to be fine-tuned on the target corpus instead of being trained from scratch. In this tutorial, we introduce recent advances in pre-trained text embeddings and language models, as well as their applications to a wide range of text mining tasks. Specifically, we first overview a set of recently developed self-supervised and weakly-supervised text embedding methods and pre-trained language models that serve as the fundamentals for downstream tasks. We then present several new methods based on pre-trained text embeddings and language models for various text mining applications such as topic discovery and text classification. We focus on methods that are weakly-supervised, domain-independent, language-agnostic, effective and scalable for mining and discovering structured knowledge from large-scale text corpora. Finally, we demonstrate with real world datasets how pre-trained text representations help mitigate the human annotation burden and facilitate automatic, accurate and efficient text analyses.« less
4. Topical network embedding

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-019-00659-7  

   Shi, Min ; Tang, Yufei ; Zhu, Xingquan ; Liu, Jianxun ; He, Haibo ( October 2019 , Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery)

   Networked data involve complex information from multifaceted channels, including topology structures, node content, and/or node labels etc., where structure and content are often correlated but are not always consistent. A typical scenario is the citation relationships in scholarly publications where a paper is cited by others not because they have the same content, but because they share one or multiple subject matters. To date, while many network embedding methods exist to take the node content into consideration, they all consider node content as simple flat word/attribute set and nodes sharing connections are assumed to have dependency with respect to allmore »words or attributes. In this paper, we argue that considering topic-level semantic interactions between nodes is crucial to learn discriminative node embedding vectors. In order to model pairwise topic relevance between linked text nodes, we propose topical network embedding, where interactions between nodes are built on the shared latent topics. Accordingly, we propose a unified optimization framework to simultaneously learn topic and node representations from the network text contents and structures, respectively. Meanwhile, the structure modeling takes the learned topic representations as conditional context under the principle that two nodes can infer each other contingent on the shared latent topics. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach can learn significantly better network representations, i.e., 4.1% improvement over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of Micro-F1 on Cora dataset. (The source code of the proposed method is available through the github link: https:// github.com/codeshareabc/TopicalNE.)« less
5. Metaconcepts: Isolating Context in Word Embeddings

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MIPR.2019.00110  

   Sutor, Peter ; Aloimonos, Yiannis ; Fermuller, Cornelia ; Summers-Stay, Douglas ( March 2019 , 2019 IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR))

   ord embeddings are commonly used to measure word-level semantic similarity in text, especially in direct word- to-word comparisons. However, the relationships between words in the embedding space are often viewed as approximately linear and concepts comprised of multiple words are a sort of linear combination. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is not generally true and show how the relationships can be better captured by leveraging the topology of the embedding space. We propose a technique for directly computing new vectors representing multiple words in a way that naturally combines them into a new, more consistent space where distancemore »better correlates to similarity. We show that this technique works well for natural language, even when it comprises multiple words, on a simple task derived from WordNet synset descriptions and examples of words. Thus, the generated vectors better represent complex concepts in the word embedding space.« less