Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning


Last Words

Computational Linguistics and
Deep Learning

Christopher D. Manning∗
Stanford University

1. The Deep Learning Tsunami

Deep Learning waves have lapped at the shores of computational linguistics for several
years now, but 2015 seems like the year when the full force of the tsunami hit the
major Natural Language Processing (NLP) conferences. However, some pundits are
predicting that the final damage will be even worse. Accompanying ICML 2015 in Lille,
France, there was another, almost as big, event: the 2015 Deep Learning Workshop.
The workshop ended with a panel discussion, and at it, Neil Lawrence said, “NLP is
kind of like a rabbit in the headlights of the Deep Learning machine, waiting to be
flattened.” Now that is a remark that the computational linguistics community has to
take seriously! Is it the end of the road for us? Where are these predictions of steam-
rollering coming from?

At the June 2015 opening of the Facebook AI Research Lab in Paris, its director
Yann LeCun said: “The next big step for Deep Learning is natural language under-
standing, which aims to give machines the power to understand not just individual
words but entire sentences and paragraphs.”1 In a November 2014 Reddit AMA (Ask
Me Anything), Geoff Hinton said, “I think that the most exciting areas over the next
five years will be really understanding text and videos. I will be disappointed if in
five years’ time we do not have something that can watch a YouTube video and tell
a story about what happened. In a few years time we will put [Deep Learning] on a
chip that fits into someone’s ear and have an English-decoding chip that’s just like a
real Babel fish.”2 And Yoshua Bengio, the third giant of modern Deep Learning, has
also increasingly oriented his group’s research toward language, including recent excit-
ing new developments in neural machine translation systems. It’s not just Deep Learn-
ing researchers. When leading machine learning researcher Michael Jordan was asked at
a September 2014 AMA, “If you got a billion dollars to spend on a huge research project
that you get to lead, what would you like to do?”, he answered: “I’d use the billion
dollars to build a NASA-size program focusing on natural language processing, in all
of its glory (semantics, pragmatics, etc.).” He went on: “Intellectually I think that NLP is
fascinating, allowing us to focus on highly structured inference problems, on issues that
go to the core of ‘what is thought’ but remain eminently practical, and on a technology

∗ Departments of Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-9020, U.S.A.
E-mail: manning@cs.stanford.edu.

1 http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fb/.
2 https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2lmo0l/ama_geoffrey_hinton.

doi:10.1162/COLI a 00239

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that surely would make the world a better place.” Well, that sounds very nice! So,
should computational linguistics researchers be afraid? I’d argue, no. To return to the
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy theme that Geoff Hinton introduced, we need to turn the
book over and look at the back cover, which says in large, friendly letters: “Don’t panic.”

2. The Success of Deep Learning

There is no doubt that Deep Learning has ushered in amazing technological advances
in the last few years. I won’t give an extensive rundown of successes, but here is one
example. A recent Google blog post told about Neon, the new transcription system for
Google Voice.3 After admitting that in the past Google Voice voicemail transcriptions
often weren’t fully intelligible, the post explained the development of Neon, an im-
proved voicemail system that delivers more accurate transcriptions, like this: “Using a
(deep breath) long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network (whew!), we cut our
transcription errors by 49%.” Do we not all dream of developing a new approach to a
problem which halves the error rate of the previously state-of-the-art system?

3. Why Computational Linguists Need Not Worry

Michael Jordan, in his AMA, gave two reasons why he wasn’t convinced that Deep
Learning would solve NLP: “Although current deep learning research tends to claim to
encompass NLP, I’m (1) much less convinced about the strength of the results, compared
to the results in, say, vision; (2) much less convinced in the case of NLP than, say, vision,
the way to go is to couple huge amounts of data with black-box learning architectures.”4

Jordan is certainly right about his first point: So far, problems in higher-level language
processing have not seen the dramatic error rate reductions from deep learning that
have been seen in speech recognition and in object recognition in vision. Although
there have been gains from deep learning approaches, they have been more modest
than sudden 25% or 50% error reductions. It could easily turn out that this remains the
case. The really dramatic gains may only have been possible on true signal processing
tasks. On the other hand, I’m much less convinced by his second argument. However,
I do have my own two reasons why NLP need not worry about deep learning: (1) It
just has to be wonderful for our field for the smartest and most influential people in
machine learning to be saying that NLP is the problem area to focus on; and (2) Our field
is the domain science of language technology; it’s not about the best method of machine
learning—the central issue remains the domain problems. The domain problems will
not go away. Joseph Reisinger wrote on his blog: “I get pitched regularly by startups
doing ‘generic machine learning’ which is, in all honesty, a pretty ridiculous idea.
Machine learning is not undifferentiated heavy lifting, it’s not commoditizable like EC2,
and closer to design than coding.”5 From this perspective, it is people in linguistics,
people in NLP, who are the designers. Recently at ACL conferences, there has been
an over-focus on numbers, on beating the state of the art. Call it playing the Kaggle
game. More of the field’s effort should go into problems, approaches, and architectures.
Recently, one thing that I’ve been devoting a lot of time to—together with many other

3 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/neon-prescription-or-rather-new.html.
4 http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2fxi6v/ama_michael_i_jordan.
5 http://thedatamines.com/post/13177389506/why-generic-machine-learning-fails.

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collaborators—is the development of Universal Dependencies.6 The goal is to develop
a common syntactic dependency representation and POS and feature label sets that
can be used with reasonable linguistic fidelity and human usability across all human
languages. That’s just one example; there are many other design efforts underway in
our field. One other current example is the idea of Abstract Meaning Representation.7

4. Deep Learning of Language

Where has Deep Learning helped NLP? The gains so far have not so much been from
true Deep Learning (use of a hierarchy of more abstract representations to promote
generalization) as from the use of distributed word representations—through the use
of real-valued vector representations of words and concepts. Having a dense, multi-
dimensional representation of similarity between all words is incredibly useful in NLP,
but not only in NLP. Indeed, the importance of distributed representations evokes
the “Parallel Distributed Processing” mantra of the earlier surge of neural network
methods, which had a much more cognitive-science directed focus (Rumelhart and
McClelland 1986). It can better explain human-like generalization, but also, from an
engineering perspective, the use of small dimensionality and dense vectors for words
allows us to model large contexts, leading to greatly improved language models. Espe-
cially seen from this new perspective, the exponentially greater sparsity that comes from
increasing the order of traditional word n-gram models seems conceptually bankrupt.

I do believe that the idea of deep models will also prove useful. The sharing that oc-
curs within deep representations can theoretically give an exponential representational
advantage, and, in practice, offers improved learning systems. The general approach to
building Deep Learning systems is compelling and powerful: The researcher defines a
model architecture and a top-level loss function and then both the parameters and the
representations of the model self-organize so as to minimize this loss, in an end-to-end
learning framework. We are starting to see the power of such deep systems in recent
work in neural machine translation (Sutskever, Vinyals, and Le 2014; Luong et al. 2015).

Finally, I have been an advocate for focusing more on compositionality in models,
for language in particular, and for artificial intelligence in general. Intelligence requires
being able to understand bigger things from knowing about smaller parts. In particular
for language, understanding novel and complex sentences crucially depends on being
able to construct their meaning compositionally from smaller parts—words and multi-
word expressions—of which they are constituted. Recently, there have been many, many
papers showing how systems can be improved by using distributed word represen-
tations from “deep learning” approaches, such as word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013) or
GloVe (Pennington, Socher, and Manning 2014). However, this is not actually building
Deep Learning models, and I hope in the future that more people focus on the strongly
linguistic question of whether we can build meaning composition functions in Deep
Learning systems.

5. Scientific Questions That Connect Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning

I encourage people to not get into the rut of doing no more than using word vectors
to make performance go up a couple of percent. Even more strongly, I would like to

6 http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/.
7 http://amr.isi.edu.

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suggest that we might return instead to some of the interesting linguistic and cognitive
issues that motivated noncategorical representations and neural network approaches.

One example of noncategorical phenomena in language is the POS of words in the
gerund V-ing form, such as driving. This form is classically described as ambiguous
between a verbal form and a nominal gerund. In fact, however, the situation is more
complex, as V-ing forms can appear in any of the four core categories of Chomsky (1970):

V
+ −

N + Adjective: an unassuming man Noun: the opening of the store
− Verb: she is eating dinner Preposition: concerning your point

What is even more interesting is that there is evidence that there is not just an
ambiguity but mixed noun–verb status. For example, a classic linguistic text for being
a noun is appearing with a determiner, while a classic linguistic test for being a verb is
taking a direct object. However, it is well known that the gerund nominalization can do
both of these things at once:

(1) The not observing this rule is that which the world has blamed in our
satorist. (Dryden, Essay Dramatick Poesy, 1684, page 310)

(2) The only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the
collecting and transcribing all the riddles of every sort that she could meet
with. (Jane Austen, Emma, 1816)

(3) The difficulty is in the getting the gold into Erewhon. (Sam Butler, Erewhon
Revisited, 1902)

This is oftentimes analyzed by some sort of category-change operation within the levels
of a phrase-structure tree, but there is good evidence that this is in fact a case of
noncategorical behavior in language.

Indeed, this construction was used early on as an example of a “squish” by Ross
(1972). Diachronically, the V-ing form shows a history of increasing verbalization, but
in many periods it shows a notably non-discrete status. For example, we find clearly
graded judgments in this domain:

(4) Tom’s winning the election was a big upset.

(5) ?This teasing John all the time has got to stop.

(6) ?There is no marking exams on Fridays.

(7) *The cessation hostilities was unexpected.

Various combinations of determiner and verb object do not sound so good, but still
much better than trying to put a direct object after a nominalization via a derivational
morpheme such as -ation. Houston (1985, page 320) shows that assignment of V-ing
forms to a discrete part-of-speech classification is less successful (in a predictive sense)
than a continuum in explaining the spoken alternation between -ing vs. -in’, suggesting
that “grammatical categories exist along a continuum which does not exhibit sharp
boundaries between the categories.”

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A different, interesting example was explored by one of my graduate school class-
mates, Whitney Tabor. Tabor (1994) looked at the use of kind of and sort of, an example
that I then used in the introductory chapter of my 1999 textbook (Manning and Schütze
1999). The nouns kind or sort can head an NP or be used as a hedging adverbial modifier:

(8) [That kind [of knife]] isn’t used much.

(9) We are [kind of] hungry.

The interesting thing is that there is a path of reanalysis through ambiguous forms,
such as the following pair, which suggests how one form emerged from the other.

(10) [a [kind [of dense rock]]]

(11) [a [[kind of] dense] rock]

Tabor (1994) discusses how Old English has kind but few or no uses of kind of.
Beginning in Middle English, ambiguous contexts, which provide a breeding ground
for the reanalysis, start to appear (the 1570 example in Example (13)), and then, later,
examples that are unambiguously the hedging modifier appear (the 1830 example in
Example (14)):

(12) A nette sent in to the see, and of alle kind of fishis gedrynge (Wyclif, 1382)

(13) Their finest and best, is a kind of course red cloth (True Report, 1570)

(14) I was kind of provoked at the way you came up (Mass. Spy, 1830)

This is history not synchrony. Presumably kids today learn the softener use of kind/sort
of first. Did the reader notice an example of it in the quote in my first paragraph?

(15) NLP is kind of like a rabbit in the headlights of the deep learning machine
(Neil Lawrence, DL workshop panel, 2015)

Whitney Tabor modeled this evolution with a small, but already deep, recurrent neural
network—one with two hidden layers. He did that in 1994, taking advantage of the
opportunity to work with Dave Rumelhart at Stanford.

Just recently, there has started to be some new work harnessing the power of dis-
tributed representations for modeling and explaining linguistic variation and change.
Sagi, Kaufmann, and Clark (2011)—actually using the more traditional method of La-
tent Semantic Analysis to generate distributed word representations—show how dis-
tributed representations can capture a semantic change: the broadening and narrowing
of reference over time. They look at examples such as how in Old English deer was any
animal, whereas in Middle and Modern English it applies to one clear animal family.
The words dog and hound have swapped: In Middle English, hound was used for any
kind of canine, while now it is used for a particular sub-kind, whereas the reverse is
true for dog.

Kulkarni et al. (2015) use neural word embeddings to model the shift in meaning
of words such as gay over the last century (exploiting the online Google Books Ngrams
corpus). At a recent ACL workshop, Kim et al. (2014) use a similar approach—using
word2vec—to look at recent changes in the meaning of words. For example, in Figure 1,
they show how around 2000, the meaning of the word cell changed rapidly from being

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Figure 1
Trend in the meaning of cell, represented by showing its cosine similarity to four other words
over time (where 1.0 represents maximal similarity, and 0.0 represents no similarity).

close in meaning to closet and dungeon to being close in meaning to phone and cordless.
The meaning of a word in this context is the average over the meanings of all senses of
a word, weighted by their frequency of use.

These more scientific uses of distributed representations and Deep Learning for
modeling phenomena characterize the previous boom in neural networks. There has
been a bit of a kerfuffle online lately about citing and crediting work in Deep Learning,
and from that perspective, it seems to me that the two people who scarcely get men-
tioned any more are Dave Rumelhart and Jay McClelland. Starting from the Parallel
Distributed Processing Research Group in San Diego, their research program was aimed
at a clearly more scientific and cognitive study of neural networks.

Now, there are indeed some good questions about the adequacy of neural network
approaches for rule-governed linguistic behavior. Old timers in our community should
remember that arguing against the adequacy of neural networks for rule-governed
linguistic behavior was the foundation for the rise to fame of Steve Pinker—and the
foundation of the career of about six of his graduate students. It would take too much
space to go through the issues here, but in the end, I think it was a productive debate. It
led to a vast amount of work by Paul Smolensky on how basically categorical systems
can emerge and be represented in a neural substrate (Smolensky and Legendre 2006).
Indeed, Paul Smolensky arguably went too far down the rabbit hole, devoting a large
part of his career to developing a new categorical model of phonology, Optimality
Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004). There is a rich body of earlier scientific work
that has been neglected. It would be good to return some emphasis within NLP to
cognitive and scientific investigation of language rather than almost exclusively using
an engineering model of research.

Overall, I think we should feel excited and glad to live in a time when Natural
Language Processing is seen as so central to both the further development of machine
learning and industry application problems. The future is bright. However, I would
encourage everyone to think about problems, architectures, cognitive science, and the
details of human language, how it is learned, processed, and how it changes, rather than
just chasing state-of-the-art numbers on a benchmark task.

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Acknowledgments
This Last Words contribution covers part of
my 2015 ACL Presidential Address. Thanks
to Paola Merlo for suggesting writing it up
for publication.

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