While natural language understanding of long-form documents remains an open challenge, such documents often contain structural information that can inform the design of models encoding them. Movie scripts are an example of such richly structured text – scripts are segmented into scenes, which decompose into dialogue and descriptive components. In this work, we propose a neural architecture to encode this structure, which performs robustly on two multi-label tag classification tasks without using handcrafted features. We add a layer of insight by augmenting the encoder with an unsupervised ‘interpretability’ module, which can be used to extract and visualize narrative trajectories. Though this work specifically tackles screenplays, we discuss how the underlying approach can be generalized to a range of structured documents.

Reviews of products or services on Internet marketplace websites contain a rich amount of information. Users often wish to survey reviews or review snippets from the perspective of a certain aspect, which has resulted in a large body of work on aspect identification and extraction from such corpora. In this work, we evaluate a newly-proposed neural model for aspect extraction on two practical tasks. The first is to extract canonical sentences of various aspects from reviews, and is judged by human evaluators against alternatives. A k-means baseline does remarkably well in this setting. The second experiment focuses on the suitability of the recovered aspect distributions to represent users by the reviews they have written. Through a set of review reranking experiments, we find that aspect-based profiles can largely capture notions of user preferences, by showing that divergent users generate markedly different review rankings.

Viewing machine translation as a structured classification problem has provided a gateway for a host of structured prediction techniques to enter the field. In particular, large-margin structured prediction methods for discriminative training of feature weights, such as the structured perceptron or MIRA, have started to match or exceed the performance of existing methods such as MERT. One issue with structured problems in general is the difficulty in obtaining fully structured labels, e.g., in machine translation, obtaining reference translations or parallel sentence corpora for arbitrary language pairs. Another issue, more specific to the translation domain, is the difficulty in online training of machine translation systems, since existing methods often require bilingual knowledge to correct translation output online. We propose a solution to these two problems, by demonstrating a way to incorporate binary-labeled feedback (i.e., feedback on whether a translation hypothesis is a “good” or understandable one or not), a form of supervision that can be easily integrated in an online manner, into a machine translation framework. Experimental results show marked improvement by incorporating binary feedback on unseen test data, with gains exceeding 5.5 BLEU points.