PeTra: A Sparsely Supervised Memory Model for People Tracking

Shubham Toshniwal, Allyson Ettinger, Kevin Gimpel, Karen Livescu


Abstract
We propose PeTra, a memory-augmented neural network designed to track entities in its memory slots. PeTra is trained using sparse annotation from the GAP pronoun resolution dataset and outperforms a prior memory model on the task while using a simpler architecture. We empirically compare key modeling choices, finding that we can simplify several aspects of the design of the memory module while retaining strong performance. To measure the people tracking capability of memory models, we (a) propose a new diagnostic evaluation based on counting the number of unique entities in text, and (b) conduct a small scale human evaluation to compare evidence of people tracking in the memory logs of PeTra relative to a previous approach. PeTra is highly effective in both evaluations, demonstrating its ability to track people in its memory despite being trained with limited annotation.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.481
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5415–5428
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.481
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.481
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shubham Toshniwal, Allyson Ettinger, Kevin Gimpel, and Karen Livescu. 2020. PeTra: A Sparsely Supervised Memory Model for People Tracking. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5415–5428, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PeTra: A Sparsely Supervised Memory Model for People Tracking (Toshniwal et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.481.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929426
Code
 shtoshni92/petra
Data
GAPGAP Coreference Dataset