Argument structure learning (ASL) entails predicting relations between arguments. Because it can structure a document to facilitate its understanding, it has been widely applied in many fields (medical, commercial, and scientific domains). Despite its broad utilization, ASL remains a challenging task because it involves examining the complex relationships between the sentences in a potentially unstructured discourse. To resolve this problem, we have developed a simple yet effective approach called Dual-tower Multi-scale cOnvolution neural Network (DMON) for the ASL task. Specifically, we organize arguments into a relationship matrix that together with the argument embeddings forms a relationship tensor and design a mechanism to capture relations with contextual arguments. Experimental results on three different-domain argument mining datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art models. We will release the code after paper acceptance.

Decoding continuous language from brain activity is a formidable yet promising field of research. It is particularly significant for aiding people with speech disabilities to communicate through brain signals. This field addresses the complex task of mapping brain signals to text. The previous best attempt reverse-engineered this process in an indirect way: it began by learning to encode brain activity from text and then guided text generation by aligning with predicted brain responses. In contrast, we propose a simple yet effective method that guides text reconstruction by directly comparing them with the predicted text embeddings mapped from brain activities. Comprehensive experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art model, showing average improvements of 77% and 54% on BLEU and METEOR scores. We further validate the proposed modules through detailed ablation studies and case analyses and highlight a critical correlation: the more precisely we map brain activities to text embeddings, the better the text reconstruction results. Such insight can simplify the task of reconstructing language from brain activities for future work, emphasizing the importance of improving brain-to-text-embedding mapping techniques.

Accumulating knowledge to tackle new tasks without necessarily forgetting the old ones is a hallmark of human-like intelligence. But the current dominant paradigm of machine learning is still to train a model that works well on static datasets. When learning tasks in a stream where data distribution may fluctuate, fitting on new tasks often leads to forgetting on the previous ones. We propose a simple yet effective framework that continually learns natural language understanding tasks with one model. Our framework distills knowledge and replays experience from previous tasks when fitting on a new task, thus named DnR (distill and replay). The framework is based on language models and can be smoothly built with different language model architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that DnR outperfoms previous state-of-the-art models in continually learning tasks of the same type but from different domains, as well as tasks of different types. With the distillation method, we further show that it’s possible for DnR to incrementally compress the model size while still outperforming most of the baselines. We hope that DnR could promote the empirical application of continual language learning, and contribute to building human-level language intelligence minimally bothered by catastrophic forgetting.

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) generally require sufficient examples for a word to learn a high quality representation. This is in stark contrast with human who can guess the meaning of a word from one or a few referents only. In this paper, we propose Mem2Vec, a memory based embedding learning method capable of acquiring high quality word representations from fairly limited context. Our method directly adapts the representations produced by a DSM with a longterm memory to guide its guess of a novel word. Based on a pre-trained embedding space, the proposed method delivers impressive performance on two challenging few-shot word similarity tasks. Embeddings learned with our method also lead to considerable improvements over strong baselines on NER and sentiment classification.