Victoria Lin (林曦)

Even if a competent programmer knows what she wants to do and can describe it in English, it can still be difficult to write code to achieve the goal. Existing resources, such as question-and-answer websites, tabulate specific operations that someone has wanted to perform in the past, but they are not effective in generalizing to new tasks, to compound tasks that require combining previous questions, or sometimes even to variations of listed tasks.

Our goal is to make programming easier and more productive by letting programmers use their own words and concepts to express the intended operation, rather than forcing them to accommodate the machine by memorizing its grammar. We have built a system that lets a programmer describe a desired operation in natural language, then automatically translates it to a programming language for review and approval by the programmer. Our system, Tellina, does the translation using recurrent neural networks (RNNs), a state-of-the-art natural language processing technique that we augmented with slot (argument) filling and other enhancements.

We evaluated Tellina in the context of shell scripting. We trained Tellina's RNNs on textual descriptions of file system operations and bash one-liners, scraped from the web. Although recovering completely correct commands is challenging, Tellina achieves top-3 accuracy of 80% for producing the correct command structure. In a controlled study, programmers who had access to Tellina outperformed those who did not, even when Tellina's predictions were not completely correct, to a statistically significant degree.

Modeling relation paths has offered significant gains in embedding models for knowledge base (KB) completion. However, enumerating paths between two entities is very expensive, and existing approaches typically resort to approximation with a sampled subset. This problem is particularly acute when text is jointly modeled with KB relations and used to provide direct evidence for facts mentioned in it. In this paper, we propose the first exact dynamic programming algorithm which enables efficient incorporation of all relation paths of bounded length, while modeling both relation types and intermediate nodes in the compositional path representations. We conduct a theoretical analysis of the efficiency gain from the approach. Experiments on two datasets show that it addresses representational limitations in prior approaches and improves accuracy in KB completion.

In many multi-label learning problems, especially as the number of labels grow, it is challenging to gather completely annotated data. This work presents a new approach for multi-label learning from incomplete annotations. The main assumption is that because of label correlation, the true label matrix as well as the soft predictions of classifiers shall be approximately low rank. We introduce a posterior regularization technique which enforces soft constraints on the classifiers, regularizing them to prefer sparse and low-rank predictions. Avoiding strict low-rank constraints results in classifiers which better fit the real data. The model can be trained efficiently using EM and stochastic gradient descent. Experiments in both the image and text domains demonstrate the contributions of each modeling assumption and show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging datasets..