Statistical language models conventionally implement representation learning based on the contextual distribution of words or other formal units, whereas any information related to the logographic features of written text are often ignored, assuming they should be retrieved relying on the cooccurence statistics. On the other hand, as language models become larger and require more data to learn reliable representations, such assumptions may start to fall back, especially under conditions of data sparsity. Many languages, including Chinese and Vietnamese, use logographic writing systems where surface forms are represented as a visual organization of smaller graphemic units, which often contain many semantic cues. In this paper, we present a novel study which explores the benefits of providing language models with logographic information in learning better semantic representations. We test our hypothesis in the natural language inference (NLI) task by evaluating the benefit of computing multi-modal representations that combine contextual information with glyph information. Our evaluation results in six languages with different typology and writing systems suggest significant benefits of using multi-modal embeddings in languages with logograhic systems, especially for words with less occurence statistics.

Neural models and symbolic rules such as regular expressions have their respective merits and weaknesses. In this paper, we study the integration of the two approaches for the slot filling task by converting regular expressions into neural networks. Specifically, we first convert regular expressions into a special form of finite-state transducers, then unfold its approximate inference algorithm as a bidirectional recurrent neural model that performs slot filling via sequence labeling. Experimental results show that our model has superior zero-shot and few-shot performance and stays competitive when there are sufficient training data.