Ming Zhou

Abstract: We present a method that learns word embedding for Twitter sentiment classification in this paper. Most existing algorithms for learning continuous word representations typically only model the syntactic context of words but ignore the sentiment of text. This is problematic for sentiment analysis as they usually map words with similar syntactic context but opposite sentiment polarity, such as good and bad, to neighboring word vectors. We address this issue by learning sentimentspecific word embedding (SSWE), which encodes sentiment information in the continuous representation of words. Specifically, we develop three neural networks to effectively incorporate the supervision from sentiment polarity of text (e.g. sentences or tweets) in their loss functions. To obtain large scale training corpora, we learn the sentiment-specific word embedding from massive distant-supervised tweets collected by positive and negative emoticons. Experiments on applying SSWE to a benchmark Twitter sentiment classification dataset in SemEval 2013 show that (1) the SSWE feature performs comparably with hand-crafted features in the top-performed system; (2) the performance is further improved by concatenating SSWE with existing feature set.

Abstract: Sentiment analysis on Twitter data has attracted much attention recently. In this paper, we focus on target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification; namely, given a query, we classify the sentiments of the tweets as positive, negative or neutral according to whether they contain positive, negative or neutral sentiments about that query. Here the query serves as the target of the sentiments. The state-of-the-art approaches for solving this problem always adopt the target-independent strategy, which may assign irrelevant sentiments to the given target. Moreover, the state-of-the-art approaches only take the tweet to be classified into consideration when classifying the sentiment; they ignore its context (i.e., related tweets). However, because tweets are usually short and more ambiguous, sometimes it is not enough to consider only the current tweet for sentiment classification. In this paper, we propose to improve target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification by 1) incorporating target-dependent features; and 2) taking related tweets into consideration. According to the experimental results, our approach greatly improves the performance of target-dependent sentiment classification.

Abstract: In this paper, we present the gated self-matching networks for reading comprehension style question answering, which aims to answer questions from a given passage. We first match the question and passage with gated attention-based recurrent networks to obtain the question-aware passage representation. Then we propose a self-matching attention mechanism to refine the representation by matching the passage against itself, which effectively encodes information from the whole passage. We finally employ the pointer networks to locate the positions of answers from the passages. We conduct extensive experiments on the SQuAD dataset. The single model achieves 71.3% on the evaluation metrics of exact match on the hidden test set, while the ensemble model further boosts the results to 75.9%. At the time of submission of the paper, our model holds the first place on the SQuAD leaderboard for both single and ensemble model.

Abstract: This paper presents a new Unified pre-trained Language Model (UniLM) that can be fine-tuned for both natural language understanding and generation tasks. The model is pre-trained using three types of language modeling tasks: unidirectional, bidirectional, and sequence-to-sequence prediction. The unified modeling is achieved by employing a shared Transformer network and utilizing specific self-attention masks to control what context the prediction conditions on. UniLM compares favorably with BERT on the GLUE benchmark, and the SQuAD 2.0 and CoQA question answering tasks. Moreover, UniLM achieves new state-of-the-art results on five natural language generation datasets, including improving the CNN/DailyMail abstractive summarization ROUGE-L to 40.51 (2.04 absolute improvement), the Gigaword abstractive summarization ROUGE-L to 35.75 (0.86 absolute improvement), the CoQA generative question answering F1 score to 82.5 (37.1 absolute improvement), the SQuAD question generation BLEU-4 to 22.12 (3.75 absolute improvement), and the DSTC7 document-grounded dialog response generation NIST-4 to 2.67 (human performance is 2.65). The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/unilm.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models (Peters et al., 2018a; Radford et al., 2018), BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5 (7.7 point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).

Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Abstract: We report on a series of experiments with convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on top of pre-trained word vectors for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that a simple CNN with little hyperparameter tuning and static vectors achieves excellent results on multiple benchmarks. Learning task-specific vectors through fine-tuning offers further gains in performance. We additionally propose a simple modification to the architecture to allow for the use of both task-specific and static vectors. The CNN models discussed herein improve upon the state of the art on 4 out of 7 tasks, which include sentiment analysis and question classification.

Abstract: An important part of our information-gathering behavior has always been to find out what other people think. With the growing availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinions of others. The sudden eruption of activity in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as a first-class object. This survey covers techniques and approaches that promise to directly enable opinion-oriented information-seeking systems. Our focus is on methods that seek to address the new challenges raised by sentiment-aware applications, as compared to those that are already present in more traditional fact-based analysis. We include material on summarization of evaluative text and on broader issues regarding privacy, manipulation, and economic impact that the development of opinion-oriented information-access services gives rise to. To facilitate future work, a discussion of available resources, benchmark datasets, and evaluation campaigns is also provided.