No Arabic abstract
We review the task of Sentence Pair Scoring, popular in the literature in various forms - viewed as Answer Sentence Selection, Semantic Text Scoring, Next Utterance Ranking, Recognizing Textual Entailment, Paraphrasing or e.g. a component of Memory Networks. We argue that all such tasks are similar from the model perspective and propose new baselines by comparing the performance of common IR metrics and popular convolutional, recurrent and attention-based neural models across many Sentence Pair Scoring tasks and datasets. We discuss the problem of evaluating randomized models, propose a statistically grounded methodology, and attempt to improve comparisons by releasing new datasets that are much harder than some of the currently used well explored benchmarks. We introduce a unified open source software framework with easily pluggable models and tasks, which enables us to experiment with multi-task reusability of trained sentence model. We set a new state-of-art in performance on the Ubuntu Dialogue dataset.
In this work we propose a simple and efficient framework for learning sentence representations from unlabelled data. Drawing inspiration from the distributional hypothesis and recent work on learning sentence representations, we reformulate the problem of predicting the context in which a sentence appears as a classification problem. Given a sentence and its context, a classifier distinguishes context sentences from other contrastive sentences based on their vector representations. This allows us to efficiently learn different types of encoding functions, and we show that the model learns high-quality sentence representations. We demonstrate that our sentence representations outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised representation learning methods on several downstream NLP tasks that involve understanding sentence semantics while achieving an order of magnitude speedup in training time.
Style transfer deals with the algorithms to transfer the stylistic properties of a piece of text into that of another while ensuring that the core content is preserved. There has been a lot of interest in the field of text style transfer due to its wide application to tailored text generation. Existing works evaluate the style transfer models based on content preservation and transfer strength. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based framework that directly rewards the framework on these target metrics yielding a better transfer of the target style. We show the improved performance of our proposed framework based on automatic and human evaluation on three independent tasks: wherein we transfer the style of text from formal to informal, high excitement to low excitement, modern English to Shakespearean English, and vice-versa in all the three cases. Improved performance of the proposed framework over existing state-of-the-art frameworks indicates the viability of the approach.
This paper introduces a sentence to vector encoding framework suitable for advanced natural language processing. Our latent representation is shown to encode sentences with common semantic information with similar vector representations. The vector representation is extracted from an encoder-decoder model which is trained on sentence paraphrase pairs. We demonstrate the application of the sentence representations for two different tasks -- sentence paraphrasing and paragraph summarization, making it attractive for commonly used recurrent frameworks that process text. Experimental results help gain insight how vector representations are suitable for advanced language embedding.
Text normalization (TN) and inverse text normalization (ITN) are essential preprocessing and postprocessing steps for text-to-speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition, respectively. Many methods have been proposed for either TN or ITN, ranging from weighted finite-state transducers to neural networks. Despite their impressive performance, these methods aim to tackle only one of the two tasks but not both. As a result, in a complete spoken dialog system, two separate models for TN and ITN need to be built. This heterogeneity increases the technical complexity of the system, which in turn increases the cost of maintenance in a production setting. Motivated by this observation, we propose a unified framework for building a single neural duplex system that can simultaneously handle TN and ITN. Combined with a simple but effective data augmentation method, our systems achieve state-of-the-art results on the Google TN dataset for English and Russian. They can also reach over 95% sentence-level accuracy on an internal English TN dataset without any additional fine-tuning. In addition, we also create a cleaned dataset from the Spoken Wikipedia Corpora for German and report the performance of our systems on the dataset. Overall, experimental results demonstrate the proposed duplex text normalization framework is highly effective and applicable to a range of domains and languages
Remarkable success has been achieved in the last few years on some limited machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. However, it is still difficult to interpret the predictions of existing MRC models. In this paper, we focus on extracting evidence sentences that can explain or support the answers of multiple-choice MRC tasks, where the majority of answer options cannot be directly extracted from reference documents. Due to the lack of ground truth evidence sentence labels in most cases, we apply distant supervision to generate imperfect labels and then use them to train an evidence sentence extractor. To denoise the noisy labels, we apply a recently proposed deep probabilistic logic learning framework to incorporate both sentence-level and cross-sentence linguistic indicators for indirect supervision. We feed the extracted evidence sentences into existing MRC models and evaluate the end-to-end performance on three challenging multiple-choice MRC datasets: MultiRC, RACE, and DREAM, achieving comparable or better performance than the same models that take as input the full reference document. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work extracting evidence sentences for multiple-choice MRC.