A Deep Decomposable Model for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representation

Dingcheng Li, Hongliang Fei, Shaogang Ren, Ping Li

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Recently, disentanglement based on a generative adversarial network or a variational autoencoder has significantly advanced the performance of diverse applications in CV and NLP domains. Nevertheless, those models still work on coarse levels in the disentanglement of closely related properties, such as syntax and semantics in human languages. This paper introduces a deep decomposable model based on VAE to disentangle syntax and semantics by using total correlation penalties on KL divergences. Notably, we decompose the KL divergence term of the original VAE so that the generated latent variables can be separated in a more clear-cut and interpretable way. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed model can significantly improve the disentanglement quality between syntactic and semantic representations for semantic similarity tasks and syntactic similarity tasks.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of ACL
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2021
EditorsMarie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-Tau Yih
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages4300-4310
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917100
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2021 - Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Duration: Nov 7 2021Nov 11 2021

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2021

Conference

Conference2021 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2021
Country/TerritoryDominican Republic
CityPunta Cana
Period11/7/2111/11/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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