To Attend or not to Attend: A Case Study on Syntactic Structures for Semantic Relatedness

AbstractWith the recent success of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in Machine Translation (MT), attention mechanisms have become increasingly popular. The purpose of this paper is two-fold; firstly, we propose a novel attention model on Tree Long Short-Term Memory Networks (Tree-LSTMs), a tree-structured generalization of standard LSTM. Secondly, we study the interaction between attention and syntactic structures, by experimenting with three LSTM variants: bidirectional-LSTMs, Constituency Tree-LSTMs, and Dependency Tree-LSTMs. Our models are evaluated on two semantic relatedness tasks: semantic relatedness scoring for sentence pairs (SemEval 2012, Task 6 and SemEval 2014, Task 1) and paraphrase detection for question pairs (Quora, 2017).