Computer Science Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2756
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Item Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing through Interactive Feedback(2022) Yuan, Michelle; Boyd-Graber, Jordan; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Machine learning models cannot easily adapt to new domains and applications. This drawback becomes detrimental for natural language processing (NLP) because language is perpetually changing. Across disciplines and languages, there are noticeable differences in content, grammar, and vocabulary. To overcome these shifts, recent NLP breakthroughs focus on transfer learning. Through clever optimization and engineering, a model can successfully adapt to a new domain or task. However, these modifications are still computationally inefficient or resource-intensive. Compared to machines, humans are more capable at generalizing knowledge across different situations, especially in low-resource ones. Therefore, the research on transfer learning should carefully consider how the user interacts with the model. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate “human-in-the-loop” approaches for transfer learning in NLP. First, we design annotation frameworks for inductive transfer learning, which is the transfer of models across tasks. We create an interactive topic modeling system for users to find topics useful for classifying documents in multiple languages. The user-constructed topic model bridges improves classification accuracy and bridges cross-lingual gaps in knowledge. Next, we look at popular language models, like BERT, that can be applied to various tasks. While these models are useful, they still require a large amount of labeled data to learn a new task. To reduce labeling, we develop an active learning strategy which samples documents that surprise the language model. Users only need to annotate a small subset of these unexpected documents to adapt the language model for text classification. Then, we transition to user interaction in transductive transfer learning, which is the transfer of models across domains. We focus our efforts on low-resource languages to develop an interactive system for word embeddings. In this approach, the feedback from bilingual speakers refines the cross-lingual embedding space for classification tasks. Subsequently, we look at domain shift for tasks beyond text classification. Coreference resolution is fundamental for NLP applications, like question-answering and dialogue, but the models are typically trained and evaluated on one dataset. We use active learning to find spans of text in the new domain for users to label. Furthermore, we provide important insights on annotating spans for domain adaptation. Finally, we summarize the contributions of each chapter. We focus on aspects like the scope of applications and model complexity. We conclude with a discussion of future directions. Researchers may extend the ideas in our thesis to topics like user-centric active learning and proactive learning.Item A Neurocomputational Model of Grounded Language Comprehension and Production at the Sentence Level(2011) Monner, Derek; Reggia, James A; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While symbolic and statistical approaches to natural language processing have become undeniably impressive in recent years, such systems still display a tendency to make errors that are inscrutable to human onlookers. This disconnect with human processing may stem from the vast differences in the substrates that underly natural language processing in artificial systems versus biological systems. To create a more relatable system, this dissertation turns to the more biologically inspired substrate of neural networks, describing the design and implementation of a model that learns to comprehend and produce language at the sentence level. The model's task is to ground simulated speech streams, representing a simple subset of English, in terms of a virtual environment. The model learns to understand and answer full-sentence questions about the environment by mimicking the speech stream of another speaker, much as a human language learner would. It is the only known neural model to date that can learn to map natural language questions to full-sentence natural language answers, where both question and answer are represented sublexically as phoneme sequences. The model addresses important points for which most other models, neural and otherwise, fail to account. First, the model learns to ground its linguistic knowledge using human-like sensory representations, gaining language understanding at a deeper level than that of syntactic structure. Second, analysis provides evidence that the model learns combinatorial internal representations, thus gaining the compositionality of symbolic approaches to cognition, which is vital for computationally efficient encoding and decoding of meaning. The model does this while retaining the fully distributed representations characteristic of neural networks, providing the resistance to damage and graceful degradation that are generally lacking in symbolic and statistical approaches. Finally, the model learns via direct imitation of another speaker, allowing it to emulate human processing with greater fidelity, thus increasing the relatability of its behavior. Along the way, this dissertation develops a novel training algorithm that, for the first time, requires only local computations to train arbitrary second-order recurrent neural networks. This algorithm is evaluated on its overall efficacy, biological feasibility, and ability to reproduce peculiarities of human learning such as age-correlated effects in second language acquisition.