Controlled Evaluation of Grammatical Knowledge in Mandarin Chinese Language Models

Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. However, it remains unclear if such an inductive bias would also improve language models' ability to learn grammatical dependencies in typologically different languages. Here we investigate this question in Mandarin Chinese, which has a logographic, largely syllable-based writing system; different word order; and sparser morphology than English. We train LSTMs, Recurrent Neural Network Grammars, Transformer language models, and Transformer-parameterized generative parsing models on two Mandarin Chinese datasets of different sizes. We evaluate the models' ability to learn different aspects of Mandarin grammar that assess syntactic and semantic relationships. We find suggestive evidence that structural supervision helps with representing syntactic state across intervening content and improves performance in low-data settings, suggesting that the benefits of hierarchical inductive biases in acquiring dependency relationships may extend beyond English.

Plan-then-Generate: Controlled Data-to-Text Generation via Planning

Recent developments in neural networks have led to the advance in data-to-text generation. However, the lack of ability of neural models to control the structure of generated output can be limiting in certain real-world applications. In this study, we propose a novel Plan-then-Generate (PlanGen) framework to improve the controllability of neural data-to-text models. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on two benchmark datasets, ToTTo and WebNLG. The results show that our model is able to control both the intra-sentence and inter-sentence structure of the generated output. Furthermore, empirical comparisons against previous state-of-the-art methods show that our model improves the generation quality as well as the output diversity as judged by human and automatic evaluations.

Syntactically-Informed Unsupervised Paraphrasing with Non-Parallel Data

Previous works on syntactically controlled paraphrase generation heavily rely on large-scale parallel paraphrase data that is not easily available for many languages and domains. In this paper, we take this research direction to the extreme and investigate whether it is possible to learn syntactically controlled paraphrase generation with nonparallel data. We propose a syntactically-informed unsupervised paraphrasing model based on conditional variational auto-encoder (VAE) which can generate texts in a specified syntactic structure. Particularly, we design a two-stage learning method to effectively train the model using non-parallel data. The conditional VAE is trained to reconstruct the input sentence according to the given input and its syntactic structure. Furthermore, to improve the syntactic controllability and semantic consistency of the pre-trained conditional VAE, we fine-tune it using syntax controlling and cycle reconstruction learning objectives, and employ Gumbel-Softmax to combine these new learning objectives. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model trained only on non-parallel data is capable of generating diverse paraphrases with specified syntactic structure. Additionally, we validate the effectiveness of our method for generating syntactically adversarial examples on the sentiment analysis task.

Controlled Neural Sentence-Level Reframing of News Articles

Framing a news article means to portray the reported event from a specific perspective, e.g., from an economic or a health perspective. Reframing means to change this perspective. Depending on the audience or the submessage, reframing can become necessary to achieve the desired effect on the readers. Reframing is related to adapting style and sentiment, which can be tackled with neural text generation techniques. However, it is more challenging since changing a frame requires rewriting entire sentences rather than single phrases. In this paper, we study how to computationally reframe sentences in news articles while maintaining their coherence to the context. We treat reframing as a sentence-level fill-in-the-blank task for which we train neural models on an existing media frame corpus. To guide the training, we propose three strategies: framed-language pretraining, named-entity preservation, and adversarial learning. We evaluate respective models automatically and manually for topic consistency, coherence, and successful reframing. Our results indicate that generating properly-framed text works well but with tradeoffs.

SideControl: Controlled Open-domain Dialogue Generation via Additive Side Networks

Transformer-based pre-trained language models boost the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior works leverage Transformer-based pre-trained language models to generate texts with desired attributes in two general approaches: (1) gradient-based methods: updating all latent representations of pre-trained models with gradients from attribute models; (2) weighted-decoding methods: re-ranking beam candidates from pre-trained models with attribute functions. However, gradient-based methods lead to high computation cost and can easily get overfitted on small training sets, while weighted-decoding methods are inherently constrained by the low-variance high-bias pre-trained model. In this work, we propose a novel approach to control the generation of Transformer-based pre-trained language models: the SideControl framework, which leverages a novel control attributes loss to incorporate useful control signals, and is shown to perform well with very limited training samples. We evaluate our proposed method on two benchmark open-domain dialogue datasets, and results show that the SideControl framework has better controllability, higher generation quality and better sample-efficiency than existing gradient-based and weighted-decoding baselines.

SEPRG: Sentiment aware Emotion controlled Personalized Response Generation

Social chatbots have gained immense popularity, and their appeal lies not just in their capacity to respond to the diverse requests from users, but also in the ability to develop an emotional connection with users. To further develop and promote social chatbots, we need to concentrate on increasing user interaction and take into account both the intellectual and emotional quotient in the conversational agents. Therefore, in this work, we propose the task of sentiment aware emotion controlled personalized dialogue generation giving the machine the capability to respond emotionally and in accordance with the persona of the user. As sentiment and emotions are highly co-related, we use the sentiment knowledge of the previous utterance to generate the correct emotional response in accordance with the user persona. We design a Transformer based Dialogue Generation framework, that generates responses that are sensitive to the emotion of the user and corresponds to the persona and sentiment as well. Moreover, the persona information is encoded by a different Transformer encoder, along with the dialogue history, is fed to the decoder for generating responses. We annotate the PersonaChat dataset with sentiment information to improve the response quality. Experimental results on the PersonaChat dataset show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the existing baselines, thereby generating personalized emotional responses in accordance with the sentiment that provides better emotional connection and user satisfaction as desired in a social chatbot.

FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminators

We propose Future Discriminators for Generation (FUDGE), a flexible and modular method for controlled text generation. Given a pre-existing model G for generating text from a distribution of interest, FUDGE enables conditioning on a desired attribute a (for example, formality) while requiring access only to G's output logits. FUDGE learns an attribute predictor operating on a partial sequence, and uses this predictor's outputs to adjust G's original probabilities. We show that FUDGE models terms corresponding to a Bayesian decomposition of the conditional distribution of G given attribute a. Moreover, FUDGE can easily compose predictors for multiple desired attributes. We evaluate FUDGE on three tasks --- couplet completion in poetry, topic control in language generation, and formality change in machine translation --- and observe gains in all three tasks.

Aspect-Controlled Neural Argument Generation

We rely on arguments in our daily lives to deliver our opinions and base them on evidence, making them more convincing in turn. However, finding and formulating arguments can be challenging. In this work, we present the Arg-CTRL - a language model for argument generation that can be controlled to generate sentence-level arguments for a given topic, stance, and aspect. We define argument aspect detection as a necessary method to allow this fine-granular control and crowdsource a dataset with 5,032 arguments annotated with aspects. Our evaluation shows that the Arg-CTRL is able to generate high-quality, aspect-specific arguments, applicable to automatic counter-argument generation. We publish the model weights and all datasets and code to train the Arg-CTRL.

Impact of Reactive Compensators on Performance of Distance Protective Relays

This paper tries to clarify the impact of parallel and serial compensation of power transmission lines on the performance of distance relays which protect these lines. To this end, power system analysis software (NEPLAN) will be used for explaining distance relay behavior in the presence of different parallel or serial reactive power compensators, with main types of faults that may occur in different locations on the protected line. In this paper, Syrian power transmission network is simulated using (NEPLAN) software, and three reactive power compensators: parallel (STATCOM), serial (TCSC), and unified (UPFC), are used to compensate reactive power on transmission line. Several simulations, in many cases are carried out to illustrate the impact of fault type and location on the measured impedance seen by the distance relay. The objective of identifying the impact of reactive compensators on fault impedance seen by distance relay (i.e. fault location), is to determine the possible ways to resolve the problem and improve the performance of transmission line protection.

Evaluation the Influence of HPMC Combination With Polymethacrylates in Ketoprofen Controlled Release Matrix Tablets

For controlling the release of Ketoprofen from matrix tablets, combinations between different polymers in different ratio were formulated. Aim: The aim of this study is to investigate the applicability of HPMC combination with Polymethacrylates (Eُudragit RS, RL & L100) for controlling the release of ketoprofen from matrix tablets. Four types of HPMC with different viscosities were tested in the study.