Papers › On Tree-Based Neural Sentence Modeling

On Tree-Based Neural Sentence Modeling

29 Aug 2018EMNLP 2018 10arXiv:1808.09644archive 2025-07-28

Haoyue Shi, Hao Zhou, Jiaze Chen, Lei LI

Neural networks with tree-based sentence encoders have shown better results on many downstream tasks. Most of existing tree-based encoders adopt syntactic parsing trees as the explicit structure prior. To study the effectiveness of different tree structures, we replace the parsing trees with trivial trees (i.e., binary balanced tree, left-branching tree and right-branching tree) in the encoders. Though trivial trees contain no syntactic information, those encoders get competitive or even better results on all of the ten downstream tasks we investigated. This surprising result indicates that explicit syntax guidance may not be the main contributor to the superior performances of tree-based neural sentence modeling. Further analysis show that tree modeling gives better results when crucial words are closer to the final representation. Additional experiments give more clues on how to design an effective tree-based encoder. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/ExplorerFreda/TreeEnc.

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affine_nd ExplorerFreda/TreeEnc/src/basic.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 294b6bf4f0eed877 · report
apply_nd ExplorerFreda/TreeEnc/src/basic.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 34ea2dd604f6413f · report
bleu ExplorerFreda/TreeEnc/src/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 678e6d5f0dc54710 · report
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Tasks

SentenceSentiment AnalysisText Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sentiment Analysis Amazon Review Full Gumbel+bi-leaf-RNN Accuracy 49.7 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis Amazon Review Polarity Gumbel+bi-leaf-RNN Accuracy 88.1 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification AG News Balanced+bi-leaf-RNN Error 7.9 #16 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification DBpedia Balanced+bi-leaf-RNN Error 1.2 #15 of 21 Archive leaderboard report

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