  The ability to accurately model a sentence at varying stages (e.g.,
word-phrase-sentence) plays a central role in natural language processing. As
an effort towards this goal we propose a self-adaptive hierarchical sentence
model (AdaSent). AdaSent effectively forms a hierarchy of representations from
words to phrases and then to sentences through recursive gated local
composition of adjacent segments. We design a competitive mechanism (through
gating networks) to allow the representations of the same sentence to be
engaged in a particular learning task (e.g., classification), therefore
effectively mitigating the gradient vanishing problem persistent in other
recursive models. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that AdaSent
can automatically form and select the representations suitable for the task at
hand during training, yielding superior classification performance over
competitor models on 5 benchmark data sets.
