Deep linguistic lensing

Language models and semantic word embeddings have become ubiquitous as sources for machine learning features in a wide range of predictive tasks and real-world applications. We argue that language models trained on a corpus of text can learn the linguistic biases implicit in that corpus. We discuss linguistic biases, or differences in identity and perspective that account for the variation in language use from one speaker to another. We then describe methods to intentionally capture "linguistic lenses": computational representations of these perspectives. We show how the captured lenses can be used to guide machine learning models during training. We define a number of lenses for author-to-author similarity and word-to-word interchangeability. We demonstrate how lenses can be used during training time to imbue language models with perspectives about writing style, or to create lensed language models that learn less linguistic gender bias than their un-lensed counterparts.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Manna, Amin(Amin A.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karthik Dinakar and Roger Levy.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121630

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121630