In this paper, we define an abstract task called structural realization that generates words given a prefix of words and a partial representation of a parse tree. We also present a method for solving instances of this task using a Gated Graph Neural Network (GGNN). We evaluate it with standard accuracy measures, as well as with respect to perplexity, in which its comparison to previous work on language modelling serves to quantify the information added to a lexical selection task by the presence of syntactic knowledge. That the addition of parse-tree-internal nodes to this neural model should improve the model, with respect both to accuracy and to more conventional measures such as perplexity, may seem unsurprising, but previous attempts have not met with nearly as much success. We have also learned that transverse links through the parse tree compromise the model’s accuracy at generating adjectival and nominal parts of speech.

Learning by contrasting positive and negative samples is a general strategy adopted by many methods. Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) for word embeddings and translating embeddings for knowledge graphs are examples in NLP employing this approach. In this work, we view contrastive learning as an abstraction of all such methods and augment the negative sampler into a mixture distribution containing an adversarially learned sampler. The resulting adaptive sampler finds harder negative examples, which forces the main model to learn a better representation of the data. We evaluate our proposal on learning word embeddings, order embeddings and knowledge graph embeddings and observe both faster convergence and improved results on multiple metrics.