Jeff Mitchell


2020

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Priorless Recurrent Networks Learn Curiously
Jeff Mitchell | Jeffrey Bowers
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recently, domain-general recurrent neural networks, without explicit linguistic inductive biases, have been shown to successfully reproduce a range of human language behaviours, such as accurately predicting number agreement between nouns and verbs. We show that such networks will also learn number agreement within unnatural sentence structures, i.e. structures that are not found within any natural languages and which humans struggle to process. These results suggest that the models are learning from their input in a manner that is substantially different from human language acquisition, and we undertake an analysis of how the learned knowledge is stored in the weights of the network. We find that while the model has an effective understanding of singular versus plural for individual sentences, there is a lack of a unified concept of number agreement connecting these processes across the full range of inputs. Moreover, the weights handling natural and unnatural structures overlap substantially, in a way that underlines the non-human-like nature of the knowledge learned by the network.

2018

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Extrapolation in NLP
Jeff Mitchell | Pontus Stenetorp | Pasquale Minervini | Sebastian Riedel
Proceedings of the Workshop on Generalization in the Age of Deep Learning

We argue that extrapolation to unseen data will often be easier for models that capture global structures, rather than just maximise their local fit to the training data. We show that this is true for two popular models: the Decomposable Attention Model and word2vec.

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UCL Machine Reading Group: Four Factor Framework For Fact Finding (HexaF)
Takuma Yoneda | Jeff Mitchell | Johannes Welbl | Pontus Stenetorp | Sebastian Riedel
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

In this paper we describe our 2nd place FEVER shared-task system that achieved a FEVER score of 62.52% on the provisional test set (without additional human evaluation), and 65.41% on the development set. Our system is a four stage model consisting of document retrieval, sentence retrieval, natural language inference and aggregation. Retrieval is performed leveraging task-specific features, and then a natural language inference model takes each of the retrieved sentences paired with the claimed fact. The resulting predictions are aggregated across retrieved sentences with a Multi-Layer Perceptron, and re-ranked corresponding to the final prediction.

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Jack the Reader – A Machine Reading Framework
Dirk Weissenborn | Pasquale Minervini | Isabelle Augenstein | Johannes Welbl | Tim Rocktäschel | Matko Bošnjak | Jeff Mitchell | Thomas Demeester | Tim Dettmers | Pontus Stenetorp | Sebastian Riedel
Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations

Many Machine Reading and Natural Language Understanding tasks require reading supporting text in order to answer questions. For example, in Question Answering, the supporting text can be newswire or Wikipedia articles; in Natural Language Inference, premises can be seen as the supporting text and hypotheses as questions. Providing a set of useful primitives operating in a single framework of related tasks would allow for expressive modelling, and easier model comparison and replication. To that end, we present Jack the Reader (JACK), a framework for Machine Reading that allows for quick model prototyping by component reuse, evaluation of new models on existing datasets as well as integrating new datasets and applying them on a growing set of implemented baseline models. JACK is currently supporting (but not limited to) three tasks: Question Answering, Natural Language Inference, and Link Prediction. It is developed with the aim of increasing research efficiency and code reuse.

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Behavior Analysis of NLI Models: Uncovering the Influence of Three Factors on Robustness
Ivan Sanchez | Jeff Mitchell | Sebastian Riedel
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Natural Language Inference is a challenging task that has received substantial attention, and state-of-the-art models now achieve impressive test set performance in the form of accuracy scores. Here, we go beyond this single evaluation metric to examine robustness to semantically-valid alterations to the input data. We identify three factors - insensitivity, polarity and unseen pairs - and compare their impact on three SNLI models under a variety of conditions. Our results demonstrate a number of strengths and weaknesses in the models’ ability to generalise to new in-domain instances. In particular, while strong performance is possible on unseen hypernyms, unseen antonyms are more challenging for all the models. More generally, the models suffer from an insensitivity to certain small but semantically significant alterations, and are also often influenced by simple statistical correlations between words and training labels. Overall, we show that evaluations of NLI models can benefit from studying the influence of factors intrinsic to the models or found in the dataset used.

2017

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The SUMMA Platform Prototype
Renars Liepins | Ulrich Germann | Guntis Barzdins | Alexandra Birch | Steve Renals | Susanne Weber | Peggy van der Kreeft | Hervé Bourlard | João Prieto | Ondřej Klejch | Peter Bell | Alexandros Lazaridis | Alfonso Mendes | Sebastian Riedel | Mariana S. C. Almeida | Pedro Balage | Shay B. Cohen | Tomasz Dwojak | Philip N. Garner | Andreas Giefer | Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt | Hina Imran | David Nogueira | Ahmed Ali | Sebastião Miranda | Andrei Popescu-Belis | Lesly Miculicich Werlen | Nikos Papasarantopoulos | Abiola Obamuyide | Clive Jones | Fahim Dalvi | Andreas Vlachos | Yang Wang | Sibo Tong | Rico Sennrich | Nikolaos Pappas | Shashi Narayan | Marco Damonte | Nadir Durrani | Sameer Khurana | Ahmed Abdelali | Hassan Sajjad | Stephan Vogel | David Sheppey | Chris Hernon | Jeff Mitchell
Proceedings of the Software Demonstrations of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present the first prototype of the SUMMA Platform: an integrated platform for multilingual media monitoring. The platform contains a rich suite of low-level and high-level natural language processing technologies: automatic speech recognition of broadcast media, machine translation, automated tagging and classification of named entities, semantic parsing to detect relationships between entities, and automatic construction / augmentation of factual knowledge bases. Implemented on the Docker platform, it can easily be deployed, customised, and scaled to large volumes of incoming media streams.

2016

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Decomposing Bilexical Dependencies into Semantic and Syntactic Vectors
Jeff Mitchell
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

2015

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Parser Adaptation to the Biomedical Domain without Re-Training
Jeff Mitchell | Mark Steedman
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis

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Orthogonality of Syntax and Semantics within Distributional Spaces
Jeff Mitchell | Mark Steedman
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2013

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Learning Semantic Representations in a Bigram Language Model
Jeff Mitchell
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013) – Short Papers

2010

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Syntactic and Semantic Factors in Processing Difficulty: An Integrated Measure
Jeff Mitchell | Mirella Lapata | Vera Demberg | Frank Keller
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2009

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Language Models Based on Semantic Composition
Jeff Mitchell | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2008

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Vector-based Models of Semantic Composition
Jeff Mitchell | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT