Spain

Neural controllable text generation is an important area gaining attention due to its plethora of applications. Although there is a large body of prior work in controllable text generation, there is no unifying theme. In this work, we provide a new schema of the pipeline of the generation process by classifying it into five modules. The control of attributes in the generation process requires modification of these modules. We present an overview of different techniques used to perform the modulation of
these modules. We also provide an analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques. We further pave ways to develop new architectures based on the combination of the modules described in this paper.

COLING 2020

Exploring Controllable Text Generation Techniques

neural text generation

controllable text generation

natural language generation

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), aiming to embed entities and relations into low-dimensional vectors, has attracted wide attention recently. However, the existing research is mainly based on the black-box neural models, which makes it difficult to interpret the learned representation. In this paper, we introduce DisenE, an end-to-end framework to learn disentangled knowledge graph embeddings. Specially, we introduce an attention-based mechanism that enables the model to explicitly focus on relevant components of entity embeddings according to a given relation. Furthermore, we introduce two novel regularizers to encourage each component of the entity representation to independently reflect an isolated semantic aspect. 
Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DisenE investigates a perspective to address the interpretability of KGE and is proved to be an effective way to improve the performance of link prediction tasks.

DisenE: Disentangling Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Hoping for a large number of clicks and potentially high social shares, journalists of various news media outlets publish sensationalist headlines on social media. These headlines lure the readers to click on them and satisfy the curiosity gap in their mind. Low quality material pointed to by clickbaits leads to time wastage and annoyance for users. Even for enterprises publishing clickbaits, it hurts more than it helps as it erodes user trust, attracts wrong visitors, and produces negative signals for ranking algorithms. Hence, identifying and flagging clickbait titles is very essential. Previous work on clickbaits has majorly focused on binary classification of clickbait titles. However not all clickbaits are equally clickbaity. It is not only essential to identify a clickbait, but also to identify the intensity of the clickbait based on the strength of the clickbait. In this work, we model clickbait strength prediction as a regression problem. While previous methods have relied on traditional machine learning or vanilla recurrent neural networks, we rigorously investigate the use of transformers for clickbait strength prediction. On a benchmark dataset with ∼39K posts, our methods outperform all the existing methods in the Clickbait Challenge.

Predicting Clickbait Strength in Online Social Media

Text discourse parsing plays an important role in understanding information flow and argumentative structure in natural language. Previous research under the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has mostly focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English treebank. However, the parsing tasks for other languages such as German, Dutch, and Portuguese are still challenging due to the shortage of annotated data. In this work, we investigate two approaches to establish a neural, cross-lingual discourse parser via: (1) utilizing multilingual vector representations; and (2) adopting segment-level translation of the source content. Experiment results show that both methods are effective even with limited training data, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on cross-lingual, document-level discourse parsing on all sub-tasks.

Multilingual Neural RST Discourse Parsing

Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to cross-domain NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, due to the variety of users’ emotional expressions across domains, fine-tuning the pre-trained models on the source domain tends to overfit, leading to inferior results on the target domain. In this paper, we pre-train a sentiment aware language model (SENTIX) via domain-invariant sentiment knowledge from large-scale review datasets, and utilize it for cross-domain sentiment analysis task without fine-tuning. We propose several pre-training tasks based on existing lexicons and annotations at both token and sentence levels, such as emoticons, sentiment words, and ratings, without human interference. A series of experiments are conducted and the results indicate the great advantages of our model. We obtain new state-of-the-art results in all the cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks, and our proposed SENTIX can be trained with only 1% samples (18 samples) and it achieves better performance than BERT with 90% samples. Code is available at https://github.com/12190143/SentiX.

SentiX: A Sentiment-Aware Pre-Trained Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown state-of-the-art accuracies in text matching. When being applied to IR (or QA), the BERT-based matching models need to online calculate the representations and interactions for all query-candidate pairs. The high inference cost has prohibited the deployments of BERT-based matching models in many practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel BERT-based text matching model, in which the representations and the interactions are decoupled. Then, the representations of the candidates can be calculated and stored offline, and directly retrieved during the online matching phase. To conduct the interactions and generate final matching scores, a lightweight attention network is designed. Experiments based on several large scale text matching datasets show that the proposed model, called FASTMATCH, can achieve up to 100X speed-up to BERT and RoBERTa at the online matching phase, while keeping more up to 98.7% of the performance.

FASTMATCH: Accelerating the Inference of BERT-based Text Matching

Several quality dimensions of natural language arguments have been investigated. Some are likely to be reflected in linguistic features (e.g., an argument's arrangement), whereas others depend on context (e.g., relevance) or topic knowledge (e.g., acceptability). In this paper, we study the intrinsic computational assessment of 15 dimensions, i.e., only learning from an argument's text. In systematic experiments with eight feature types on an existing corpus, we observe moderate but significant learning success for most dimensions. Rhetorical quality seems hardest to assess, and subjectivity features turn out strong, although length bias in the corpus impedes full validity. We also find that human assessors differ more clearly to each other than to our approach.

Intrinsic Quality Assessment of Arguments

Existing metonymy resolution approaches rely on features extracted from external resources like dictionaries and hand-crafted lexical resources. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end word-level classification approach based only on BERT, without dependencies on taggers, parsers, curated dictionaries of place names, or other external resources. We show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art on 5 datasets, surpassing conventional BERT models and benchmarks by a large margin. We also show that our approach generalises well to unseen data.

Target Word Masking for Location Metonymy Resolution

Non-autoregressive models generate target words in a parallel way, which achieve a faster decoding speed but at the sacrifice of translation accuracy. To remedy a flawed translation by non-autoregressive models, a promising approach is to train a conditional masked translation model (CMTM), and refine the generated results within several iterations. Unfortunately, such approach hardly considers the \textit{sequential dependency} among target words, which inevitably results in a translation degradation. Hence, instead of solely training a Transformer-based CMTM, we propose a Self-Review Mechanism to infuse sequential information into it. Concretely, we insert a left-to-right mask to the same decoder of CMTM, and then induce it to autoregressively review whether each generated word from CMTM is supposed to be replaced or kept. The experimental results (WMT14 En↔De and WMT16 En↔Ro) demonstrate that our model uses dramatically less training computations than the typical CMTM, as well as outperforms several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models by over 1 BLEU. Through knowledge distillation, our model even surpasses a typical left-to-right Transformer model, while significantly speeding up decoding.

Infusing Sequential Information into Conditional Masked Translation Model with Self-Review Mechanism

We propose to learn distributed sentence representation using the text's visual features as input. Different from the existing methods that render the words (or characters) of a sentence into images separately, we fold these images into a 3-dimensional sentence tensor. Then, multiple 3-dimensional convolutions with different lengths (the third dimension) are applied to the sentence tensor, which would act as bi-gram, tri-gram, quad-gram, and even five-gram detectors jointly. Similar to the Bi-LSTMs, these n-gram detectors learn both forward and backward distributional semantic knowledge from the sentence tensor. The proposed model uses bi-directional convolutions to learn text embedding according to the semantic order of words. The feature maps from the two directions are concatenated for final sentence embedding learning. Our model involves only a single layer of convolution which makes it easy and fast to train. We evaluate the sentence embeddings on several downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which demonstrate surprisingly excellent performance of the proposed model.

Learning distributed sentence vectors with bi-directional 3D convolutions

Question generation (QG) attempts to solve the inverse of question answering (QA) problem by generating a natural language question given a document and an answer. While sequence to sequence neural models surpass rule-based systems for QG, they are limited in their capacity to focus on more than one supporting fact. For QG, we often require multiple supporting facts to generate high-quality questions. Inspired by recent works on multi-hop reasoning in QA, we take up Multi-hop question generation, which aims at generating relevant questions based on supporting facts in the context. We employ multitask learning with the auxiliary task of answer aware supporting fact prediction to guide the question generator. In addition, we also proposed a question-aware reward function in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to maximize the utilization of the supporting facts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on the multi-hop question answering dataset, HotPotQA. Empirical evaluation shows our model to outperform the single-hop neural question generation models on both automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE and human evaluation metrics for
quality and coverage of the generated questions.

Exploring Controllable Text Generation Techniques

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