DAG-structured long short-term memory for semantic compositionality

Abstract

Recurrent neural networks, particularly long short-term memory (LSTM), have recently shown to be very effective in a wide range of sequence modeling problems, core to which is effective learning of distributed representation for subsequences as well as the sequences they form. An assumption in almost all the previous models, however, posits that the learned representation (e.g., a distributed representation for a sentence), is fully compositional from the atomic components (e.g., representations for words), while non-compositionality is a basic phenomenon in human languages. In this paper, we relieve the assumption by extending the chain-structured LSTM to directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), with the aim to endow linear-chain LSTMs with the capability of considering compositionality together with non-compositionality in the same semantic composition framework. From a more general viewpoint, the proposed models incorporate additional prior knowledge into recurrent neural networks, which is interesting to us, considering most NLP tasks have relatively small training data and appropriate prior knowledge could be beneficial to help cover missing semantics. Our experiments on sentiment composition demonstrate that the proposed models achieve the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming models that lack this ability.