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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Zijun, Deshmukh, Anup Anand, Wu, Yongkang, Lin, Jimmy, Mou, Lili
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04919
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Table of Contents:
  • In Natural Language Processing (NLP), predicting linguistic structures, such as parsing and chunking, has mostly relied on manual annotations of syntactic structures. This paper introduces an unsupervised approach to chunking, a syntactic task that involves grouping words in a non-hierarchical manner. We present a Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (HRNN) designed to model word-to-chunk and chunk-to-sentence compositions. Our approach involves a two-stage training process: pretraining with an unsupervised parser and finetuning on downstream NLP tasks. Experiments on multiple datasets reveal a notable improvement of unsupervised chunking performance in both pretraining and finetuning stages. Interestingly, we observe that the emergence of the chunking structure is transient during the neural model's downstream-task training. This study contributes to the advancement of unsupervised syntactic structure discovery and opens avenues for further research in linguistic theory.