Title:
Semantic representation learning for discourse processing

dc.contributor.advisor Eisenstein, Jacob
dc.contributor.author Ji, Yangfeng
dc.contributor.committeeMember Boots, Byron
dc.contributor.committeeMember Dyer, Chris
dc.contributor.committeeMember Riedl, Mark
dc.contributor.committeeMember Smith, Noah
dc.contributor.department Computer Science
dc.date.accessioned 2016-08-22T12:23:43Z
dc.date.available 2016-08-22T12:23:43Z
dc.date.created 2016-08
dc.date.issued 2016-07-21
dc.date.submitted August 2016
dc.date.updated 2016-08-22T12:23:43Z
dc.description.abstract Discourse processing is to identify coherent relations, such as contrast and causal relation, from well-organized texts. The outcomes from discourse processing can benefit both research and applications in natural language processing, such as recognizing the major opinion from a product review, or evaluating the coherence of student writings. Identifying discourse relations from texts is an essential task of discourse processing. Relation identification requires intensive semantic understanding of texts, especially when no word (e.g., but) can signal the relations. Most prior work relies on sparse representation constructed from surface-form features (including, word pairs, POS tags, etc.), which fails to encode enough semantic information. As an alternative, I propose to use distributed representations of texts, which are dense vectors and flexible enough to share information efficiently. The goal of my work is to develop new models with representation learning for discourse processing. Specifically, I present a unified framework in this thesis to be able to learn both distributed representation and discourse models jointly.The joint training not only learns the discourse models, but also helps to shape the distributed representation for the discourse models. Such that, the learned representation could encode necessary semantic information to facilitate the processing tasks. The evaluation shows that our systems outperform prior work with only surface-form representations. In this thesis, I also discuss the possibility of extending the representation learning framework into some other problems in discourse processing. The problems studied include (1) How to use representation learning to build a discourse model with only distant supervision? The investigation of this problem will help to reduce the dependency of discourse processing on the annotated data; (2) How to combine discourse processing with other NLP tasks, such as language modeling? The exploration of this problem is expected to show the value of discourse information, and draw more attention to the research of discourse processing. As the end of this thesis, it also demonstrates the benefit of using discourse information for document-level machine translation and sentiment analysis.
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/55636
dc.language.iso en_US
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject Semantics
dc.subject Representation learning
dc.subject Deep learning
dc.subject Discourse
dc.subject Discourse processing
dc.subject Sentiment analysis
dc.title Semantic representation learning for discourse processing
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.advisor Eisenstein, Jacob
local.contributor.corporatename College of Computing
local.contributor.corporatename School of Computer Science
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication d2334908-9b54-40ce-9a5b-26987819dd65
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication c8892b3c-8db6-4b7b-a33a-1b67f7db2021
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 6b42174a-e0e1-40e3-a581-47bed0470a1e
thesis.degree.level Doctoral
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