Generative feature matching network (GFMN) is an approach for training implicit generative models for images by performing moment matching on features from pre-trained neural networks. In this paper, we present new GFMN formulations that are effective for sequential data. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, SeqGFMN, for three distinct generation tasks in English: unconditional text generation, class-conditional text generation, and unsupervised text style transfer. SeqGFMN is stable to train and outperforms various adversarial approaches for text generation and text style transfer.
So far and trying to reach human capabilities, research in automatic summarization has been based on hypothesis that are both enabling and limiting. Some of these limitations are: how to take into account and reflect (in the generated summary) the implicit information conveyed in the text, the author intention, the reader intention, the context influence, the general world knowledge. Thus, if we want machines to mimic human abilities, then they will need access to this same large variety of knowledge. The implicit is affecting the orientation and the argumentation of the text and consequently …
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Deep latent variable models (LVM) such as variational auto-encoder (VAE) have recently played an important role in text generation. One key factor is the exploitation of smooth latent structures to guide the generation. However, the representation power of VAEs is limited due to two reasons: (1) the Gaussian assumption is often made on the variational posteriors; and meanwhile (2) a notorious "posterior collapse" issue occurs. In this paper, we advocate sample-based representations of variational distributions for natural language, leading to implicit latent features, which can provide flexibl…
VK Lab（VK实验室）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Tinkoff（Tinkoff公司）
Likelihood training and maximization-based decoding result in dull and repetitive generated texts even when using powerful language models (Holtzman et al., 2019). Adding a loss function for regularization was shown to improve text generation output by helping avoid unwanted properties, such as contradiction or repetition (Li at al., 2020). In this work, we propose fine-tuning a language model by using policy gradient reinforcement learning, directly optimizing for better generation. We apply this approach to minimizing repetition in generated text, and show that, when combined with unlikeliho…
This paper creates a paradigm shift with regard to the way we build neural extractive summarization systems. Instead of following the commonly used framework of extracting sentences individually and modeling the relationship between sentences, we formulate the extractive summarization task as a semantic text matching problem, in which a source document and candidate summaries will be (extracted from the original text) matched in a semantic space. Notably, this paradigm shift to semantic matching framework is well-grounded in our comprehensive analysis of the inherent gap between sentence-level…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；TAL Education Group（好未来教育集团）
It is evident that deep text classification models trained on human data could be biased. In particular, they produce biased outcomes for texts that explicitly include identity terms of certain demographic groups. We refer to this type of bias as explicit bias, which has been extensively studied. However, deep text classification models can also produce biased outcomes for texts written by authors of certain demographic groups. We refer to such bias as implicit bias of which we still have a rather limited understanding. In this paper, we first demonstrate that implicit bias exists in different…
In this paper, we present a fast and strong neural approach for general purpose text matching applications. We explore what is sufficient to build a fast and well-performed text matching model and propose to keep three key features available for inter-sequence alignment: original point-wise features, previous aligned features, and contextual features while simplifying all the remaining components. We conduct experiments on four well-studied benchmark datasets across tasks of natural language inference, paraphrase identification and answer selection. The performance of our model is on par with …
Explicit vs. Implicit Biographies: Evaluating and Adapting LLM Information Extraction on Wikidata-Derived Texts
DISI Departement of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学计算机科学与工程系）；Automobili Lamborghini SpA（法拉利公司）；Digital Humanities Advanced Research Center（数字人文高级研究中心）；KNAW Humanities Cluster, DHLab（KNAW 人文集群，DHLab）；ETH Zurich, Collegium Helveticum（苏黎世联邦理工学院，瑞士学院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of California, Davis（加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校）
Text matching is a core natural language processing research problem. How to retain sufficient information on both content and structure information is one important challenge. In this paper, we present a neural approach for general-purpose text matching with deep mutual information estimation incorporated. Our approach, Text matching with Deep Info Max (TIM), is integrated with a procedure of unsupervised learning of representations by maximizing the mutual information between text matching neural network's input and output. We use both global and local mutual information to learn text repres…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）
The short text matching task employs a model to determine whether two short texts have the same semantic meaning or intent. Existing short text matching models usually rely on the content of short texts which are lack information or missing some key clues. Therefore, the short texts need external knowledge to complete their semantic meaning. To address this issue, we propose a new short text matching framework for introducing external knowledge to enhance the short text contextual representation. In detail, we apply a self-attention mechanism to enrich short text representation with external c…
In this work we leverage commonsense knowledge in form of knowledge paths to establish connections between sentences, as a form of explicitation of implicit knowledge. Such connections can be direct (singlehop paths) or require intermediate concepts (multihop paths). To construct such paths we combine two model types in a joint framework we call Co-nnect: a relation classifier that predicts direct connections between concepts; and a target prediction model that generates target or intermediate concepts given a source concept and a relation, which we use to construct multihop paths. Unlike prio…
When speaking or writing, people omit information that seems clear and evident, such that only part of the message is expressed in words. Especially in argumentative texts it is very common that (important) parts of the argument are implied and omitted. We hypothesize that for argument analysis it will be beneficial to reconstruct this implied information. As a starting point for filling such knowledge gaps, we build a corpus consisting of high-quality human annotations of missing and implied information in argumentative texts. To learn more about the characteristics of both the argumentative …
A latent-variable model is introduced for text matching, inferring sentence representations by jointly optimizing generative and discriminative objectives. To alleviate typical optimization challenges in latent-variable models for text, we employ deconvolutional networks as the sequence decoder (generator), providing learned latent codes with more semantic information and better generalization. Our model, trained in an unsupervised manner, yields stronger empirical predictive performance than a decoder based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), with less parameters and considerably faster trainin…
Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task as the relation prediction without explicit connectives in discourse parsing needs understanding of text spans and cannot be easily derived from surface features from the input sentence pairs. Thus, properly representing the text is very crucial to this task. In this paper, we propose a model augmented with different grained text representations, including character, subword, word, sentence, and sentence pair levels. The proposed deeper model is evaluated on the benchmark treebank and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with greater …
In the process of online storytelling, individual users create and consume highly diverse content that contains a great deal of implicit beliefs and not plainly expressed narrative. It is hard to manually detect these implicit beliefs, intentions and moral foundations of the writers. We study and investigate two different tasks, each of which reflect the difficulty of detecting an implicit user's knowledge, intent or belief that may be based on writer's moral foundation: 1) political perspective detection in news articles 2) identification of informational vs. conversational questions in commu…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司诺亚方舟实验室）；Centre for Next Generation Localisation, Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学下一代本地化中心）
Many tasks in natural language processing, ranging from machine translation to question answering, can be reduced to the problem of matching two sentences or more generally two short texts. We propose a new approach to the problem, called Deep Match Tree (DeepMatch$_{tree}$), under a general setting. The approach consists of two components, 1) a mining algorithm to discover patterns for matching two short-texts, defined in the product space of dependency trees, and 2) a deep neural network for matching short texts using the mined patterns, as well as a learning algorithm to build the network h…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
A discourse containing one or more sentences describes daily issues and events for people to communicate their thoughts and opinions. As sentences are normally consist of multiple text segments, correct understanding of the theme of a discourse should take into consideration of the relations in between text segments. Although sometimes a connective exists in raw texts for conveying relations, it is more often the cases that no connective exists in between two text segments but some implicit relation does exist in between them. The task of implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) is to de…
Long text brings a big challenge to semantic matching due to their complicated semantic and syntactic structures. To tackle the challenge, we consider using prior knowledge to help identify useful information and filter out noise to matching in long text. To this end, we propose a knowledge enhanced hybrid neural network (KEHNN). The model fuses prior knowledge into word representations by knowledge gates and establishes three matching channels with words, sequential structures of sentences given by Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and knowledge enhanced representations. The three channels are pro…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
We review the current schemes of text-image matching models and propose improvements for both training and inference. First, we empirically show limitations of two popular loss (sum and max-margin loss) widely used in training text-image embeddings and propose a trade-off: a kNN-margin loss which 1) utilizes information from hard negatives and 2) is robust to noise as all $K$-most hardest samples are taken into account, tolerating \emph{pseudo} negatives and outliers. Second, we advocate the use of Inverted Softmax (\textsc{Is}) and Cross-modal Local Scaling (\textsc{Csls}) during inference to…
École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）
In text classification, the problem of overfitting arises due to the high dimensionality, making regularization essential. Although classic regularizers provide sparsity, they fail to return highly accurate models. On the contrary, state-of-the-art group-lasso regularizers provide better results at the expense of low sparsity. In this paper, we apply a greedy variable selection algorithm, called Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, for the text classification task. We also extend standard group OMP by introducing overlapping Group OMP to handle overlapping groups of features. Empirical analysis verifi…
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Text matching is a fundamental technique in both information retrieval and natural language processing. Text matching tasks share the same paradigm that determines the relationship between two given texts. The relationships vary from task to task, e.g.~relevance in document retrieval, semantic alignment in paraphrase identification and answerable judgment in question answering. However, the essential signals for text matching remain in a finite scope, i.e.~exact matching, semantic matching, and inference matching. Ideally, a good text matching model can learn to capture and aggregate these sig…
Text normalization is an essential task in the processing and analysis of social media that is dominated with informal writing. It aims to map informal words to their intended standard forms. Previously proposed text normalization approaches typically require manual selection of parameters for improved performance. In this paper, we present an automatic optimizationbased nearest neighbor matching approach for text normalization. This approach is motivated by the observation that text normalization is essentially a matching problem and nearest neighbor matching with an adaptive similarity funct…
CAS Key Lab of Network Data Science and Technology, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所网络数据科学与技术重点实验室）
In recent years, deep neural models have been widely adopted for text matching tasks, such as question answering and information retrieval, showing improved performance as compared with previous methods. In this paper, we introduce the MatchZoo toolkit that aims to facilitate the designing, comparing and sharing of deep text matching models. Specifically, the toolkit provides a unified data preparation module for different text matching problems, a flexible layer-based model construction process, and a variety of training objectives and evaluation metrics. In addition, the toolkit has implemen…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）
Matching for causal inference is a well-studied problem, but standard methods fail when the units to match are text documents: the high-dimensional and rich nature of the data renders exact matching infeasible, causes propensity scores to produce incomparable matches, and makes assessing match quality difficult. In this paper, we characterize a framework for matching text documents that decomposes existing methods into: (1) the choice of text representation, and (2) the choice of distance metric. We investigate how different choices within this framework affect both the quantity and quality of…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Intelligent Visual Computing（上海智能视觉计算协同创新中心）；Tencent（腾讯）
Text semantic matching is a fundamental task that has been widely used in various scenarios, such as community question answering, information retrieval, and recommendation. Most state-of-the-art matching models, e.g., BERT, directly perform text comparison by processing each word uniformly. However, a query sentence generally comprises content that calls for different levels of matching granularity. Specifically, keywords represent factual information such as action, entity, and event that should be strictly matched, while intents convey abstract concepts and ideas that can be paraphrased int…
Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Institute of Computing Technology（计算技术研究所）
Matching two texts is a fundamental problem in many natural language processing tasks. An effective way is to extract meaningful matching patterns from words, phrases, and sentences to produce the matching score. Inspired by the success of convolutional neural network in image recognition, where neurons can capture many complicated patterns based on the extracted elementary visual patterns such as oriented edges and corners, we propose to model text matching as the problem of image recognition. Firstly, a matching matrix whose entries represent the similarities between words is constructed and…
Predicate-argument structure analysis is a central component in meaning representations of text. The fact that some arguments are not explicitly mentioned in a sentence gives rise to ambiguity in language understanding, and renders it difficult for machines to interpret text correctly. However, only few resources represent implicit roles for NLU, and existing studies in NLP only make coarse distinctions between categories of arguments omitted from linguistic form. This paper proposes a typology for fine-grained implicit argument annotation on top of Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation's …
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Mobile Internet Group, Tencent（腾讯移动互联网事业群）
A large number of deep learning models have been proposed for the text matching problem, which is at the core of various typical natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, existing deep models are mainly designed for the semantic matching between a pair of short texts, such as paraphrase identification and question answering, and do not perform well on the task of relevance matching between short-long text pairs. This is partially due to the fact that the essential characteristics of short-long text matching have not been well considered in these deep models. More specifically, these me…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Beijing Institute of Technology University（北京理工大学）
Text matching is the core problem in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, question answering, and conversation. Recently, deep leaning technology has been widely adopted for text matching, making neural text matching a new and active research domain. With a large number of neural matching models emerging rapidly, it becomes more and more difficult for researchers, especially those newcomers, to learn and understand these new models. Moreover, it is usually difficult to try these models due to the tedious data pre-processing, complicated parameter configu…
Data Intelligence System Research Center, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所数据智能系统研究中心）；Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；CAS Key Lab of Network Data Science and Technology, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所网络数据科学与技术重点实验室）
Neural text matching models have been widely used in community question answering, information retrieval, and dialogue. However, these models designed for short texts cannot well address the long-form text matching problem, because there are many contexts in long-form texts can not be directly aligned with each other, and it is difficult for existing models to capture the key matching signals from such noisy data. Besides, these models are computationally expensive for simply use all textual data indiscriminately. To tackle the effectiveness and efficiency problem, we propose a novel hierarchi…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Big Data Management and Analysis Methods（北京市大数据管理与分析方法重点实验室）
One approach to matching texts from asymmetrical domains is projecting the input sequences into a common semantic space as feature vectors upon which the matching function can be readily defined and learned. In real-world matching practices, it is often observed that with the training goes on, the feature vectors projected from different domains tend to be indistinguishable. The phenomenon, however, is often overlooked in existing matching models. As a result, the feature vectors are constructed without any regularization, which inevitably increases the difficulty of learning the downstream ma…
Many NLP tasks including machine comprehension, answer selection and text entailment require the comparison between sequences. Matching the important units between sequences is a key to solve these problems. In this paper, we present a general "compare-aggregate" framework that performs word-level matching followed by aggregation using Convolutional Neural Networks. We particularly focus on the different comparison functions we can use to match two vectors. We use four different datasets to evaluate the model. We find that some simple comparison functions based on element-wise operations can w…
Text matching is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. Neural models using bidirectional LSTMs for sentence encoding and inter-sentence attention mechanisms perform remarkably well on several benchmark datasets. We propose REGMAPR - a simple and general architecture for text matching that does not use inter-sentence attention. Starting from a Siamese architecture, we augment the embeddings of the words with two features based on exact and para- phrase match between words in the two sentences. We train the model using three types of regularization on datasets for textual entailm…
State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence Production Technology and Systems（媒体融合生产技术与系统国家重点实验室）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能研究院教育部人工智能重点实验室）
Chinese short text matching is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Existing approaches usually take Chinese characters or words as input tokens. They have two limitations: 1) Some Chinese words are polysemous, and semantic information is not fully utilized. 2) Some models suffer potential issues caused by word segmentation. Here we introduce HowNet as an external knowledge base and propose a Linguistic knowledge Enhanced graph Transformer (LET) to deal with word ambiguity. Additionally, we adopt the word lattice graph as input to maintain multi-granularity information. Our model…
