Vector averaging remains one of the most popular sentence embedding methods in spite of its obvious disregard for syntactic structure. While more complex sequential or convolutional networks potentially yield superior classification performance, the improvements in classification accuracy are typically mediocre compared to the simple vector averaging. As an efficient alternative, we propose the use of discrete cosine transform (DCT) to compress word sequences in an order-preserving manner. The lower order DCT coefficients represent the overall feature patterns in sentences, which results in suitable embeddings for tasks that could benefit from syntactic features. Our results in semantic probing tasks demonstrate that DCT embeddings indeed preserve more syntactic information compared with vector averaging. With practically equivalent complexity, the model yields better overall performance in downstream classification tasks that correlate with syntactic features, which illustrates the capacity of DCT to preserve word order information.
Determining the textual entailment between texts is important in many NLP tasks, such as summarization, question answering, and information extraction and retrieval. Various methods have been suggested based on external knowledge sources; however, such resources are not always available in all languages and their acquisition is typically laborious and very costly. Distributional word representations such as word embeddings learned over large corpora have been shown to capture syntactic and semantic word relationships. Such models have contributed to improving the performance of several NLP tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of textual entailment in Arabic. We employ both traditional features and distributional representations. Crucially, we do not depend on any external resources in the process. Our suggested approach yields state of the art performance on a standard data set, ArbTE, achieving an accuracy of 76.2 % compared to current state of the art of 69.3 %.
This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2017 Task 3 Subtask D, "Question Answer Ranking in Arabic Community Question Answering". In this work, we applied a supervised machine learning approach to automatically re-rank a set of QA pairs according to their relevance to a given question. We employ features based on latent semantic models, namely WTMF, as well as a set of lexical features based on string length and surface level matching. The proposed system ranked first out of 3 submissions, with a MAP score of 61.16%.
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