In this paper, we investigate the task of learning word embeddings from very sparse data in an incremental, cognitively-plausible way. We focus on the notion of ‘informativeness’, that is, the idea that some content is more valuable to the learning process than other. We further highlight the challenges of online learning and argue that previous systems fall short of implementing incrementality. Concretely, we incorporate informativeness in a previously proposed model of nonce learning, using it for context selection and learning rate modulation. We test our system on the task of learning new words from definitions, as well as on the task of learning new words from potentially uninformative contexts. We demonstrate that informativeness is crucial to obtaining state-of-the-art performance in a truly incremental setup.

Knowing the state-of-the-art for a particular task is an essential component of any computational linguistics investigation. But can we be truly confident that the current state-of-the-art is indeed the best performing model? In this paper, we study the case of frame semantic parsing, a well-established task with multiple shared datasets. We show that in spite of all the care taken to provide a standard evaluation resource, small variations in data processing can have dramatic consequences for ranking parser performance. This leads us to propose an open-source standardized processing pipeline, which can be shared and reused for robust model comparison.

This paper introduces Valencer: a RESTful API to search for annotated sentences matching a given combination of syntactic realizations of the arguments of a predicate – also called ‘valence pattern’ – in the FrameNet database. The API takes as input an HTTP GET request specifying a valence pattern and outputs a list of exemplifying annotated sentences in JSON format. The API is designed to be modular and language-independent, and can therefore be easily integrated to other (NLP) server-side or client-side applications, as well as non-English FrameNet projects. Valencer is free, open-source, and licensed under the MIT license.