Grammar Induction with Neural Language Models: An Unusual Replication

Phu Mon Htut, Kyunghyun Cho, Samuel Bowman


Abstract
A substantial thread of recent work on latent tree learning has attempted to develop neural network models with parse-valued latent variables and train them on non-parsing tasks, in the hope of having them discover interpretable tree structure. In a recent paper, Shen et al. (2018) introduce such a model and report near-state-of-the-art results on the target task of language modeling, and the first strong latent tree learning result on constituency parsing. In an attempt to reproduce these results, we discover issues that make the original results hard to trust, including tuning and even training on what is effectively the test set. Here, we attempt to reproduce these results in a fair experiment and to extend them to two new datasets. We find that the results of this work are robust: All variants of the model under study outperform all latent tree learning baselines, and perform competitively with symbolic grammar induction systems. We find that this model represents the first empirical success for latent tree learning, and that neural network language modeling warrants further study as a setting for grammar induction.
Anthology ID:
D18-1544
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4998–5003
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1544
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1544
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Phu Mon Htut, Kyunghyun Cho, and Samuel Bowman. 2018. Grammar Induction with Neural Language Models: An Unusual Replication. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4998–5003, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Grammar Induction with Neural Language Models: An Unusual Replication (Htut et al., EMNLP 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1544.pdf
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