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 inves
tigate 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.
We present a novel technique for zero-shot paraphrase generation. The key contribution is an end-to-end multilingual paraphrasing model that is trained using translated parallel corpora to generate paraphrases into meaning spaces'' -- replacing the f
inal softmax layer with word embeddings. This architectural modification, plus a training procedure that incorporates an autoencoding objective, enables effective parameter sharing across languages for more fluent monolingual rewriting, and facilitates fluency and diversity in the generated outputs. Our continuous-output paraphrase generation models outperform zero-shot paraphrasing baselines when evaluated on two languages using a battery of computational metrics as well as in human assessment.
