Hard Non-Monotonic Attention for Character-Level Transduction

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Wu, Shijie, Shapiro, Pamela, Cotterell, Ryan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2018
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913237683929088
author Wu, Shijie
Shapiro, Pamela
Cotterell, Ryan
author_facet Wu, Shijie
Shapiro, Pamela
Cotterell, Ryan
contents Character-level string-to-string transduction is an important component of various NLP tasks. The goal is to map an input string to an output string, where the strings may be of different lengths and have characters taken from different alphabets. Recent approaches have used sequence-to-sequence models with an attention mechanism to learn which parts of the input string the model should focus on during the generation of the output string. Both soft attention and hard monotonic attention have been used, but hard non-monotonic attention has only been used in other sequence modeling tasks such as image captioning (Xu et al., 2015), and has required a stochastic approximation to compute the gradient. In this work, we introduce an exact, polynomial-time algorithm for marginalizing over the exponential number of non-monotonic alignments between two strings, showing that hard attention models can be viewed as neural reparameterizations of the classical IBM Model 1. We compare soft and hard non-monotonic attention experimentally and find that the exact algorithm significantly improves performance over the stochastic approximation and outperforms soft attention. Code is available at https://github. com/shijie-wu/neural-transducer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1808_10024
institution arXiv
publishDate 2018
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hard Non-Monotonic Attention for Character-Level Transduction
Wu, Shijie
Shapiro, Pamela
Cotterell, Ryan
Computation and Language
Character-level string-to-string transduction is an important component of various NLP tasks. The goal is to map an input string to an output string, where the strings may be of different lengths and have characters taken from different alphabets. Recent approaches have used sequence-to-sequence models with an attention mechanism to learn which parts of the input string the model should focus on during the generation of the output string. Both soft attention and hard monotonic attention have been used, but hard non-monotonic attention has only been used in other sequence modeling tasks such as image captioning (Xu et al., 2015), and has required a stochastic approximation to compute the gradient. In this work, we introduce an exact, polynomial-time algorithm for marginalizing over the exponential number of non-monotonic alignments between two strings, showing that hard attention models can be viewed as neural reparameterizations of the classical IBM Model 1. We compare soft and hard non-monotonic attention experimentally and find that the exact algorithm significantly improves performance over the stochastic approximation and outperforms soft attention. Code is available at https://github. com/shijie-wu/neural-transducer.
title Hard Non-Monotonic Attention for Character-Level Transduction
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10024