Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In order to produce a coherent flow of text, we explore two forms of intersentential relations in a paragraph: one is a human-created linguistical relation that forms a structure (e.g., discourse tree) and the other is a relation from latent representation learned from the sentences themselves. Our two proposed models incorporate each form of relations into document-level language models: the former is a supervised model that jointly learns a language model as well as discourse relation prediction, and the latter is an unsupervised model that is hierarchically conditioned by a recurrent neural network (RNN) over the latent information. Our proposed models with both forms of relations outperform the baselines in partially conditioned paragraph generation task. Our codes and data are publicly available.
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Azure Speech（微软Azure语音）
Recent advancements in neural end-to-end TTS models have shown high-quality, natural synthesized speech in a conventional sentence-based TTS. However, it is still challenging to reproduce similar high quality when a whole paragraph is considered in TTS, where a large amount of contextual information needs to be considered in building a paragraph-based TTS model. To alleviate the difficulty in training, we propose to model linguistic and prosodic information by considering cross-sentence, embedded structure in training. Three sub-modules, including linguistics-aware, prosody-aware and sentence-…
University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Temple University（天普大学）
Satirical news is considered to be entertainment, but it is potentially deceptive and harmful. Despite the embedded genre in the article, not everyone can recognize the satirical cues and therefore believe the news as true news. We observe that satirical cues are often reflected in certain paragraphs rather than the whole document. Existing works only consider document-level features to detect the satire, which could be limited. We consider paragraph-level linguistic features to unveil the satire by incorporating neural network and attention mechanism. We investigate the difference between par…
College of Information and Computer Sciences（信息与计算机科学学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
While paragraph embedding models are remarkably effective for downstream classification tasks, what they learn and encode into a single vector remains opaque. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art paragraph embedding method proposed by Zhang et al. (2017) and discover that it cannot reliably tell whether a given sentence occurs in the input paragraph or not. We formulate a sentence content task to probe for this basic linguistic property and find that even a much simpler bag-of-words method has no trouble solving it. This result motivates us to replace the reconstruction-based objec…
Recent progress on image captioning has made it possible to generate novel sentences describing images in natural language, but compressing an image into a single sentence can describe visual content in only coarse detail. While one new captioning approach, dense captioning, can potentially describe images in finer levels of detail by captioning many regions within an image, it in turn is unable to produce a coherent story for an image. In this paper we overcome these limitations by generating entire paragraphs for describing images, which can tell detailed, unified stories. We develop a model…
We study the task of generating from Wikipedia articles question-answer pairs that cover content beyond a single sentence. We propose a neural network approach that incorporates coreference knowledge via a novel gating mechanism. Compared to models that only take into account sentence-level information (Heilman and Smith, 2010; Du et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2017), we find that the linguistic knowledge introduced by the coreference representation aids question generation significantly, producing models that outperform the current state-of-the-art. We apply our system (composed of an answer span…
This dissertation explores the linguistic and computational aspects of the meaning relations that can hold between two or more complex linguistic expressions (phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs). In particular, it focuses on Paraphrasing, Textual Entailment, Contradiction, and Semantic Similarity. In Part I: "Similarity at the Level of Words and Phrases", I study the Distributional Hypothesis (DH) and explore several different methodologies for quantifying semantic similarity at the levels of words and short phrases. In Part II: "Paraphrase Typology and Paraphrase Identification", I focus…
AdVerifai；The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；Amazon AWS AI（亚马逊AWS人工智能）
The blurry line between nefarious fake news and protected-speech satire has been a notorious struggle for social media platforms. Further to the efforts of reducing exposure to misinformation on social media, purveyors of fake news have begun to masquerade as satire sites to avoid being demoted. In this work, we address the challenge of automatically classifying fake news versus satire. Previous work have studied whether fake news and satire can be distinguished based on language differences. Contrary to fake news, satire stories are usually humorous and carry some political or social message.…
Multiple studies have probed representations emerging in neural networks trained for end-to-end NLP tasks and examined what word-level linguistic information may be encoded in the representations. In classical probing, a classifier is trained on the representations to extract the target linguistic information. However, there is a threat of the classifier simply memorizing the linguistic labels for individual words, instead of extracting the linguistic abstractions from the representations, thus reporting false positive results. While considerable efforts have been made to minimize the memoriza…
Wav2Gloss: Generating Interlinear Glossed Text from Speech
Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学语言技术研究所）；Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学语言与语音处理中心）
A standard approach to evaluating language models analyzes how models assign probabilities to valid versus invalid syntactic constructions (i.e. is a grammatical sentence more probable than an ungrammatical sentence). Our work uses ambiguous relative clause attachment to extend such evaluations to cases of multiple simultaneous valid interpretations, where stark grammaticality differences are absent. We compare model performance in English and Spanish to show that non-linguistic biases in RNN LMs advantageously overlap with syntactic structure in English but not Spanish. Thus, English models m…
Grammar as a Behavioral Biometric: Using Cognitively Motivated Grammar Models for Authorship Verification
Linguistics and English Language University of Manchester（语言学与英语语言大学曼彻斯特大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology（安全信息技术弗劳恩霍夫研究所）；Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology University of Valencia（生物多样性与进化生物学卡瓦尼尔斯研究所瓦伦西亚大学）；Speech and Language Laboratory ANU College of Asia and the Pacific（语言实验室ANU亚太学院）
Traditional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models and other variations of the attention-mechanism such as hierarchical attention have been applied to the text summarization problem. Though there is a hierarchy in the way humans use language by forming paragraphs from sentences and sentences from words, hierarchical models have usually not worked that much better than their traditional seq2seq counterparts. This effect is mainly because either the hierarchical attention mechanisms are too sparse using hard attention or noisy using soft attention. In this paper, we propose a method based on extr…
Recent work in spoken language modeling shows the possibility of learning a language unsupervisedly from raw audio without any text labels. The approach relies first on transforming the audio into a sequence of discrete units (or pseudo-text) and then training a language model directly on such pseudo-text. Is such a discrete bottleneck necessary, potentially introducing irreversible errors in the encoding of the speech signal, or could we learn a language model without discrete units at all? In this work, we study the role of discrete versus continuous representations in spoken language modeli…
