Understanding human language is one of the key themes of artificial intelligence. For language representation, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge from the detail-riddled and lengthy texts and getting ride of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Traditional attentive models attend to all words without explicit constraint, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. In this work, we propose using syntax to guide the text modeling by incorporating explicit syntactic constraints into attention mechanisms for better linguistically motivated word representations. In detail, for self-attention network (SAN) sponsored Transformer-based encoder, we introduce syntactic dependency of interest (SDOI) design into the SAN to form an SDOI-SAN with syntax-guided self-attention. Syntax-guided network (SG-Net) is then composed of this extra SDOI-SAN and the SAN from the original Transformer encoder through a dual contextual architecture for better linguistics inspired representation. The proposed SG-Net is applied to typical Transformer encoders. Extensive experiments on popular benchmark tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, and neural machine translation show the effectiveness of the proposed SG-Net design.

Despite the impressive successes of generation and dialogue systems, how to endow a text generation system with particular personality traits to deliver more personalized responses remains under-investigated.In this work, we look at how to generate personalized responses for questions on Reddit by utilizing personalized user profiles and posting histories.Specifically, we release an open-domain single-turn dialog dataset made up of 1.5M conversation pairs together with 300k profiles of users and related comments.We then propose a memory network to generate personalized responses in dialogue that utilizes a novel mechanism of splitting memories: one for user profile meta attributes and the other for user-generated information like comment histories.Experimental results show the quantitative and qualitative improvements of our simple split memory network model over the state-of-the-art response generation baselines.The dataset and code are available here.

For machine reading comprehension, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge from the detail-riddled and lengthy passages and getting ride of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Traditional attentive models attend to all words without explicit constraint, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. In this work, we propose using syntax to guide the text modeling by incorporating explicit syntactic constraints into attention mechanism for better linguistically motivated word representations. In detail, for self-attention network (SAN) sponsored Transformer-based encoder, we introduce syntactic dependency of interest (SDOI) design into the SAN to form an SDOI-SAN with syntax-guided self-attention. Syntax-guided network (SG-Net) is then composed of this extra SDOI-SAN and the SAN from the original Transformer encoder through a dual contextual architecture for better linguistics inspired representation. To verify its effectiveness, the proposed SG-Net is applied to typical pre-trained language model BERT which is right based on a Transformer encoder. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks including SQuAD 2.0 and RACE show that the proposed SG-Net design helps achieve substantial performance improvement over strong baselines.

The latest work on language representations carefully integrates contextualized features into language model training, which enables a series of success especially in various machine reading comprehension and natural language inference tasks. However, the existing language representation models including ELMo, GPT and BERT only exploit plain context-sensitive features such as character or word embeddings. They rarely consider incorporating structured semantic information which can provide rich semantics for language representation. To promote natural language understanding, we propose to incorporate explicit contextual semantics from pre-trained semantic role labeling, and introduce an improved language representation model, Semantics-aware BERT (SemBERT), which is capable of explicitly absorbing contextual semantics over a BERT backbone. SemBERT keeps the convenient usability of its BERT precursor in a light fine-tuning way without substantial task-specific modifications. Compared with BERT, semantics-aware BERT is as simple in concept but more powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art or substantially improves results on ten reading comprehension and language inference tasks.

Multi-choice reading comprehension is a challenging task to select an answer from a set of candidate options when given passage and question. Previous approaches usually only calculate question-aware passage representation and ignore passage-aware question representation when modeling the relationship between passage and question, which cannot effectively capture the relationship between passage and question. In this work, we propose dual co-matching network (DCMN) which models the relationship among passage, question and answer options bidirectionally. Besides, inspired by how humans solve multi-choice questions, we integrate two reading strategies into our model: (i) passage sentence selection that finds the most salient supporting sentences to answer the question, (ii) answer option interaction that encodes the comparison information between answer options. DCMN equipped with the two strategies (DCMN+) obtains state-of-the-art results on five multi-choice reading comprehension datasets from different domains: RACE, SemEval-2018 Task 11, ROCStories, COIN, MCTest.