As a new classification platform, deep learning has recently received increasing attention from researchers and has been successfully applied to many domains. In some domains, like bioinformatics and robotics, it is very difficult to construct a large-scale well-annotated dataset due to the expense of data acquisition and costly annotation, which limits its development. Transfer learning relaxes the hypothesis that the training data must be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) with the test data, which motivates us to use transfer learning to solve the problem of insufficient training data. This survey focuses on reviewing the current researches of transfer learning by using deep neural network and its applications. We defined deep transfer learning, category and review the recent research works based on the techniques used in deep transfer learning.

We propose Adaptive Recursive Neural Network (AdaRNN) for target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification. AdaRNN adaptively propagates the sentiments of words to target depending on the context and syntactic relationships between them. It consists of more than one composition functions, and we model the adaptive sentiment propagations as distributions over these composition functions. The experimental studies illustrate that AdaRNN improves the baseline methods. Furthermore, we introduce a manually annotated dataset for target-dependent Twitter sentiment analysis.

Automatic question generation aims to generate questions from a text passage where the generated questions can be answered by certain sub-spans of the given passage. Traditional methods mainly use rigid heuristic rules to transform a sentence into related questions. In this work, we propose to apply the neural encoderdecoder model to generate meaningful and diverse questions from natural language sentences. The encoder reads the input text and the answer position, to produce an answer-aware input representation, which is fed to the decoder to generate an answer focused question. We conduct a preliminary study on neural question generation from text with the SQuAD dataset, and the experiment results show that our method can produce fluent and diverse questions.

Conventional customer service chatbots are usually based on human dialogue, yet significant issues in terms of data scale and privacy. In this paper, we present SuperAgent, a customer service chatbot that leverages large-scale and publicly available ecommerce data. Distinct from existing counterparts, SuperAgent takes advantage of data from in-page product descriptions as well as user-generated content from ecommerce websites, which is more practical and cost-effective when answering repetitive questions, freeing up human support staff to answer much higher value questions. We demonstrate SuperAgent as an add-on extension to mainstream web browsers and show its usefulness to user's online shopping experience.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. However, the widely-used sequence labeling framework is usually difficult to detect entities with nested structures. The span-based method that can easily detect nested entities in different subsequences is naturally suitable for the nested NER problem. However, previous span-based methods have two main issues. First, classifying all subsequences is computationally expensive and very inefficient at inference. Second, the span-based methods mainly focus on learning span representations but lack of explicit boundary supervision. To tackle the above two issues, we propose a boundary enhanced neural span classification model. In addition to classifying the span, we propose incorporating an additional boundary detection task to predict those words that are boundaries of entities. The two tasks are jointly trained under a multitask learning framework, which enhances the span representation with additional boundary supervision. In addition, the boundary detection model has the ability to generate high-quality candidate spans, which greatly reduces the time complexity during inference. Experiments show that our approach outperforms all existing methods and achieves 85.3, 83.9, and 78.3 scores in terms of F1 on the ACE2004, ACE2005, and GENIA datasets, respectively.

Modeling sentence pairs plays the vital role for judging the relationship between two sentences, such as paraphrase identification, natural language inference, and answer sentence selection. Previous work achieves very promising results using neural networks with attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose the multiway attention networks which employ multiple attention functions to match sentence pairs under the matching-aggregation framework. Specifically, we design four attention functions to match words in corresponding sentences. Then, we aggregate the matching information from each function, and combine the information from all functions to obtain the final representation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multiway attention networks improve the result on the Quora Question Pairs, SNLI, MultiNLI, and answer sentence selection task on the SQuAD dataset.

Document-level relation extraction aims to extract relations among multiple entity pairs from a document. Previously proposed graph-based or transformer-based models utilize the entities independently, regardless of global information among relational triples. This paper approaches the problem by predicting an entity-level relation matrix to capture local and global information, parallel to the semantic segmentation task in computer vision. Herein, we propose a Document U-shaped Network for document-level relation extraction. Specifically, we leverage an encoder module to capture the context information of entities and a U-shaped segmentation module over the image-style feature map to capture global interdependency among triples. Experimental results show that our approach can obtain state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets DocRED, CDR, and GDA.

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