English

Attending Form and Context to Generate Specialized Out-of-VocabularyWords Representations

Machine Learning 2019-12-17 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We propose a new contextual-compositional neural network layer that handles out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in natural language processing (NLP) tagging tasks. This layer consists of a model that attends to both the character sequence and the context in which the OOV words appear. We show that our model learns to generate task-specific \textit{and} sentence-dependent OOV word representations without the need for pre-training on an embedding table, unlike previous attempts. We insert our layer in the state-of-the-art tagging model of \citet{plank2016multilingual} and thoroughly evaluate its contribution on 23 different languages on the task of jointly tagging part-of-speech and morphosyntactic attributes. Our OOV handling method successfully improves performances of this model on every language but one to achieve a new state-of-the-art on the Universal Dependencies Dataset 1.4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.06876,
  title  = {Attending Form and Context to Generate Specialized Out-of-VocabularyWords Representations},
  author = {Nicolas Garneau and Jean-Samuel Leboeuf and Yuval Pinter and Luc Lamontagne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.06876},
  year   = {2019}
}