Maximilian Nickel


2019

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Inferring Concept Hierarchies from Text Corpora via Hyperbolic Embeddings
Matthew Le | Stephen Roller | Laetitia Papaxanthos | Douwe Kiela | Maximilian Nickel
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We consider the task of inferring “is-a” relationships from large text corpora. For this purpose, we propose a new method combining hyperbolic embeddings and Hearst patterns. This approach allows us to set appropriate constraints for inferring concept hierarchies from distributional contexts while also being able to predict missing “is-a”-relationships and to correct wrong extractions. Moreover – and in contrast with other methods – the hierarchical nature of hyperbolic space allows us to learn highly efficient representations and to improve the taxonomic consistency of the inferred hierarchies. Experimentally, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several commonly-used benchmarks.

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Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering
Matthew Le | Y-Lan Boureau | Maximilian Nickel
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Theory of mind, i.e., the ability to reason about intents and beliefs of agents is an important task in artificial intelligence and central to resolving ambiguous references in natural language dialogue. In this work, we revisit the evaluation of theory of mind through question answering. We show that current evaluation methods are flawed and that existing benchmark tasks can be solved without theory of mind due to dataset biases. Based on prior work, we propose an improved evaluation protocol and dataset in which we explicitly control for data regularities via a careful examination of the answer space. We show that state-of-the-art methods which are successful on existing benchmarks fail to solve theory-of-mind tasks in our proposed approach.

2018

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Learning Visually Grounded Sentence Representations
Douwe Kiela | Alexis Conneau | Allan Jabri | Maximilian Nickel
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

We investigate grounded sentence representations, where we train a sentence encoder to predict the image features of a given caption—i.e., we try to “imagine” how a sentence would be depicted visually—and use the resultant features as sentence representations. We examine the quality of the learned representations on a variety of standard sentence representation quality benchmarks, showing improved performance for grounded models over non-grounded ones. In addition, we thoroughly analyze the extent to which grounding contributes to improved performance, and show that the system also learns improved word embeddings.

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Hearst Patterns Revisited: Automatic Hypernym Detection from Large Text Corpora
Stephen Roller | Douwe Kiela | Maximilian Nickel
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Methods for unsupervised hypernym detection may broadly be categorized according to two paradigms: pattern-based and distributional methods. In this paper, we study the performance of both approaches on several hypernymy tasks and find that simple pattern-based methods consistently outperform distributional methods on common benchmark datasets. Our results show that pattern-based models provide important contextual constraints which are not yet captured in distributional methods.