Bhargav Mangipudi


2016

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Better call Saul: Flexible Programming for Learning and Inference in NLP
Parisa Kordjamshidi | Daniel Khashabi | Christos Christodoulopoulos | Bhargav Mangipudi | Sameer Singh | Dan Roth
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We present a novel way for designing complex joint inference and learning models using Saul (Kordjamshidi et al., 2015), a recently-introduced declarative learning-based programming language (DeLBP). We enrich Saul with components that are necessary for a broad range of learning based Natural Language Processing tasks at various levels of granularity. We illustrate these advances using three different, well-known NLP problems, and show how these generic learning and inference modules can directly exploit Saul’s graph-based data representation. These properties allow the programmer to easily switch between different model formulations and configurations, and consider various kinds of dependencies and correlations among variables of interest with minimal programming effort. We argue that Saul provides an extremely useful paradigm both for the design of advanced NLP systems and for supporting advanced research in NLP.