abstract: Reasoning with commonsense knowledge is an integral component of human behavior. It is due to this capability that people know that a weak person may not be able to lift someone. It has been a long standing goal of the Artificial Intelligence community to simulate such commonsense reasoning abilities in machines. Over the years, many advances have been made and various challenges have been proposed to test their abilities. The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) is one such Natural Language Understanding (NLU) task which was also proposed as an alternative to the Turing Test. It is made up of textual question answering problems which require resolution of a pronoun to its correct antecedent. In this thesis, two approaches of developing NLU systems to solve the Winograd Schema Challenge are demonstrated. To this end, a semantic parser is presented, various kinds of commonsense knowledge are identified, techniques to extract commonsense knowledge are developed and two commonsense reasoning algorithms are presented. The usefulness of the developed tools and techniques is shown by applying them to solve the challenge. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2019

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Semantic parsing is the process of mapping a natural-language sentence into a machine-readable, formal representation of its meaning. The LSTM Encoder-Decoder is a neural architecture with the ability to map a source language into a target one. We are interested in the problem of mapping natural language into SPARQL queries, and we seek to contribute with strategies that do not rely on handcrafted rules, high-quality lexicons, manually-built templates or other handmade complex structures. In this context, we present two contributions to the problem of semantic parsing departing from the LSTM encoder-decoder. While natural language has well defined vector representation methods that use a very large volume of texts, formal languages, like SPARQL queries, suffer from lack of suitable methods for vector representation. In the first contribution we improve the representation of SPARQL vectors. We start by obtaining an alignment matrix between the two vocabularies, natural language and SPARQL terms, which allows us to refine a vectorial representation of SPARQL items. With this refinement we obtained better results in the posterior training for the semantic parsing model. In the second contribution we propose a neural architecture, that we call Encoder CFG-Decoder, whose output conforms to a given context-free grammar. Unlike the traditional LSTM encoder-decoder, our model provides a grammatical guarantee for the mapping process, which is particularly important for practical cases where grammatical errors can cause critical failures. Results confirm that any output generated by our model obeys the given CFG, and we observe a translation accuracy improvement when compared with other results from the literature. / A análise semântica é o processo de mapear uma sentença em linguagem natural para uma representação formal, interpretável por máquina, do seu significado. O LSTM Encoder-Decoder é uma arquitetura de rede neural com a capacidade de mapear uma sequência de origem para uma sequência de destino. Estamos interessados no problema de mapear a linguagem natural em consultas SPARQL e procuramos contribuir com estratégias que não dependam de regras artesanais, léxico de alta qualidade, modelos construídos manualmente ou outras estruturas complexas feitas à mão. Neste contexto, apresentamos duas contribuições para o problema de análise semântica partindo da arquitetura LSTM Encoder-Decoder. Enquanto para a linguagem natural existem métodos de representação vetorial bem definidos que usam um volume muito grande de textos, as linguagens formais, como as consultas SPARQL, sofrem com a falta de métodos adequados para representação vetorial. Na primeira contribuição, melhoramos a representação dos vetores SPARQL. Começamos obtendo uma matriz de alinhamento entre os dois vocabulários, linguagem natural e termos SPARQL, o que nos permite refinar uma representação vetorial dos termos SPARQL. Com esse refinamento, obtivemos melhores resultados no treinamento posterior para o modelo de análise semântica. Na segunda contribuição, propomos uma arquitetura neural, que chamamos de Encoder CFG-Decoder, cuja saída está de acordo com uma determinada gramática livre de contexto. Ao contrário do modelo tradicional LSTM Encoder-Decoder, nosso modelo fornece uma garantia gramatical para o processo de mapeamento, o que é particularmente importante para casos práticos nos quais erros gramaticais podem causar falhas críticas em um compilador ou interpretador. Os resultados confirmam que qualquer resultado gerado pelo nosso modelo obedece à CFG dada, e observamos uma melhora na precisão da tradução quando comparada com outros resultados da literatura.

This thesis investigates the role of linguistically-motivated generative models of syntax and semantic structure in natural language processing (NLP). Syntactic well-formedness is crucial in language generation, but most statistical models do not account for the hierarchical structure of sentences. Many applications exhibiting natural language understanding rely on structured semantic representations to enable querying, inference and reasoning. Yet most semantic parsers produce domain-specific or inadequately expressive representations. We propose a series of generative transition-based models for dependency syntax which can be applied as both parsers and language models while being amenable to supervised or unsupervised learning. Two models are based on Markov assumptions commonly made in NLP: The first is a Bayesian model with hierarchical smoothing, the second is parameterised by feed-forward neural networks. The Bayesian model enables careful analysis of the structure of the conditioning contexts required for generative parsers, but the neural network is more accurate. As a language model the syntactic neural model outperforms both the Bayesian model and n-gram neural networks, pointing to the complementary nature of distributed and structured representations for syntactic prediction. We propose approximate inference methods based on particle filtering. The third model is parameterised by recurrent neural networks (RNNs), dropping the Markov assumptions. Exact inference with dynamic programming is made tractable here by simplifying the structure of the conditioning contexts. We then shift the focus to semantics and propose models for parsing sentences to labelled semantic graphs. We introduce a transition-based parser which incrementally predicts graph nodes (predicates) and edges (arguments). This approach is contrasted against predicting top-down graph traversals. RNNs and pointer networks are key components in approaching graph parsing as an incremental prediction problem. The RNN architecture is augmented to condition the model explicitly on the transition system configuration. We develop a robust parser for Minimal Recursion Semantics, a linguistically-expressive framework for compositional semantics which has previously been parsed only with grammar-based approaches. Our parser is much faster than the grammar-based model, while the same approach improves the accuracy of neural Abstract Meaning Representation parsing.

Les recherches en Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) ont identifié différents niveaux d'analyse lexicale, syntaxique et sémantique. Il en découle un découpage hiérarchique des différentes tâches à réaliser afin d'analyser un énoncé. Les systèmes classiques du TAL reposent sur des analyseurs indépendants disposés en cascade au sein de chaînes de traitement (pipelines). Cette approche présente un certain nombre de limitations : la dépendance des modèles à la sélection empirique des traits, le cumul des erreurs dans le pipeline et la sensibilité au changement de domaine. Ces limitations peuvent conduire à des pertes de performances particulièrement importantes lorsqu'il existe un décalage entre les conditions d'apprentissage des modèles et celles d'utilisation. Un tel décalage existe lors de l'analyse de transcriptions automatiques de parole spontanée comme par exemple les conversations téléphoniques enregistrées dans des centres d'appels. En effet l'analyse d'une langue non-canonique pour laquelle il existe peu de données d'apprentissage, la présence de disfluences et de constructions syntaxiques spécifiques à l'oral ainsi que la présence d'erreurs de reconnaissance dans les transcriptions automatiques mènent à une détérioration importante des performances des systèmes d'analyse. C'est dans ce cadre que se déroule cette thèse, en visant à mettre au point des systèmes d'analyse à la fois robustes et flexibles permettant de dépasser les limitations des systèmes actuels à l'aide de modèles issus de l'apprentissage par réseaux de neurones profonds. / NLP researchers has identified different levels of linguistic analysis. This lead to a hierarchical division of the various tasks performed in order to analyze a text statement. The traditional approach considers task-specific models which are subsequently arranged in cascade within processing chains (pipelines). This approach has a number of limitations: the empirical selection of models features, the errors accumulation in the pipeline and the lack of robusteness to domain changes. These limitations lead to particularly high performance losses in the case of non-canonical language with limited data available such as transcriptions of conversations over phone. Disfluencies and speech-specific syntactic schemes, as well as transcription errors in automatic speech recognition systems, lead to a significant drop of performances. It is therefore necessary to develop robust and flexible systems. We intend to perform a syntactic and semantic analysis using a deep neural network multitask model while taking into account the variations of domain and/or language registers within the data.