arXiv subjects

Lili Mou

Publications and source records attributed to Lili Mou.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

A Character-Level Length-Control Algorithm for Non-Autoregressive Sentence Summarization

Sentence summarization aims at compressing a long sentence into a short one that keeps the main gist, and has extensive real-world applications such as headline generation. In previous work, researchers have developed various approaches to improve the ROUGE score, which is the main evaluation metric for summarization, whereas controlling the summary length has not drawn much attention. In our work, we address a new problem of explicit character-level length control for summarization, and propose a dynamic programming algorithm based on the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) model. Results show that our approach not only achieves higher ROUGE scores but also yields more complete sentences.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Controlling Perceived Emotion in Symbolic Music Generation with Monte Carlo Tree Search

This paper presents a new approach for controlling emotion in symbolic music generation with Monte Carlo Tree Search. We use Monte Carlo Tree Search as a decoding mechanism to steer the probability distribution learned by a language model towards a given emotion. At every step of the decoding process, we use Predictor Upper Confidence for Trees (PUCT) to search for sequences that maximize the average values of emotion and quality as given by an emotion classifier and a discriminator, respectively. We use a language model as PUCT's policy and a combination of the emotion classifier and the discriminator as its value function. To decode the next token in a piece of music, we sample from the distribution of node visits created during the search. We evaluate the quality of the generated samples with respect to human-composed pieces using a set of objective metrics computed directly from the generated samples. We also perform a user study to evaluate how human subjects perceive the generated samples' quality and emotion. We compare PUCT against Stochastic Bi-Objective Beam Search (SBBS) and Conditional Sampling (CS). Results suggest that PUCT outperforms SBBS and CS in almost all metrics of music quality and emotion.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

Learning Non-Autoregressive Models from Search for Unsupervised Sentence Summarization

Text summarization aims to generate a short summary for an input text. In this work, we propose a Non-Autoregressive Unsupervised Summarization (NAUS) approach, which does not require parallel data for training. Our NAUS first performs edit-based search towards a heuristically defined score, and generates a summary as pseudo-groundtruth. Then, we train an encoder-only non-autoregressive Transformer based on the search result. We also propose a dynamic programming approach for length-control decoding, which is important for the summarization task. Experiments on two datasets show that NAUS achieves state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised summarization, yet largely improving inference efficiency. Further, our algorithm is able to perform explicit length-transfer summary generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

An Empirical Study on the Overlapping Problem of Open-Domain Dialogue Datasets

Open-domain dialogue systems aim to converse with humans through text, and dialogue research has heavily relied on benchmark datasets. In this work, we observe the overlapping problem in DailyDialog and OpenSubtitles, two popular open-domain dialogue benchmark datasets. Our systematic analysis then shows that such overlapping can be exploited to obtain fake state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we address this issue by cleaning these datasets and setting up a proper data processing procedure for future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Document-Level Relation Extraction with Sentences Importance Estimation and Focusing

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine the relation between two entities from a document of multiple sentences. Recent studies typically represent the entire document by sequence- or graph-based models to predict the relations of all entity pairs. However, we find that such a model is not robust and exhibits bizarre behaviors: it predicts correctly when an entire test document is fed as input, but errs when non-evidence sentences are removed. To this end, we propose a Sentence Importance Estimation and Focusing (SIEF) framework for DocRE, where we design a sentence importance score and a sentence focusing loss, encouraging DocRE models to focus on evidence sentences. Experimental results on two domains show that our SIEF not only improves overall performance, but also makes DocRE models more robust. Moreover, SIEF is a general framework, shown to be effective when combined with a variety of base DocRE models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Generalized Equivariance and Preferential Labeling for GNN Node Classification

Existing graph neural networks (GNNs) largely rely on node embeddings, which represent a node as a vector by its identity, type, or content. However, graphs with unattributed nodes widely exist in real-world applications (e.g., anonymized social networks). Previous GNNs either assign random labels to nodes (which introduces artefacts to the GNN) or assign one embedding to all nodes (which fails to explicitly distinguish one node from another). Further, when these GNNs are applied to unattributed node classification problems, they have an undesired equivariance property, which are fundamentally unable to address the data with multiple possible outputs. In this paper, we analyze the limitation of existing approaches to node classification problems. Inspired by our analysis, we propose a generalized equivariance property and a Preferential Labeling technique that satisfies the desired property asymptotically. Experimental results show that we achieve high performance in several unattributed node classification tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Search and Learn: Improving Semantic Coverage for Data-to-Text Generation

Data-to-text generation systems aim to generate text descriptions based on input data (often represented in the tabular form). A typical system uses huge training samples for learning the correspondence between tables and texts. However, large training sets are expensive to obtain, limiting the applicability of these approaches in real-world scenarios. In this work, we focus on few-shot data-to-text generation. We observe that, while fine-tuned pretrained language models may generate plausible sentences, they suffer from the low semantic coverage problem in the few-shot setting. In other words, important input slots tend to be missing in the generated text. To this end, we propose a search-and-learning approach that leverages pretrained language models but inserts the missing slots to improve the semantic coverage. We further fine-tune our system based on the search results to smooth out the search noise, yielding better-quality text and improving inference efficiency to a large extent. Experiments show that our model achieves high performance on E2E and WikiBio datasets. Especially, we cover 98.35% of input slots on E2E, largely alleviating the low coverage problem.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Non-Autoregressive Translation with Layer-Wise Prediction and Deep Supervision

How do we perform efficient inference while retaining high translation quality? Existing neural machine translation models, such as Transformer, achieve high performance, but they decode words one by one, which is inefficient. Recent non-autoregressive translation models speed up the inference, but their quality is still inferior. In this work, we propose DSLP, a highly efficient and high-performance model for machine translation. The key insight is to train a non-autoregressive Transformer with Deep Supervision and feed additional Layer-wise Predictions. We conducted extensive experiments on four translation tasks (both directions of WMT'14 EN-DE and WMT'16 EN-RO). Results show that our approach consistently improves the BLEU scores compared with respective base models. Specifically, our best variant outperforms the autoregressive model on three translation tasks, while being 14.8 times more efficient in inference.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Simulated annealing for optimization of graphs and sequences

Optimization of discrete structures aims at generating a new structure with the better property given an existing one, which is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Different from the continuous optimization, the realistic applications of discrete optimization (e.g., text generation) are very challenging due to the complex and long-range constraints, including both syntax and semantics, in discrete structures. In this work, we present SAGS, a novel Simulated Annealing framework for Graph and Sequence optimization. The key idea is to integrate powerful neural networks into metaheuristics (e.g., simulated annealing, SA) to restrict the search space in discrete optimization. We start by defining a sophisticated objective function, involving the property of interest and pre-defined constraints (e.g., grammar validity). SAGS searches from the discrete space towards this objective by performing a sequence of local edits, where deep generative neural networks propose the editing content and thus can control the quality of editing. We evaluate SAGS on paraphrase generation and molecule generation for sequence optimization and graph optimization, respectively. Extensive results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing paraphrase generation methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluations. Further, SAGS also significantly outperforms all the previous methods in molecule generation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Simulated Annealing for Emotional Dialogue Systems

Explicitly modeling emotions in dialogue generation has important applications, such as building empathetic personal companions. In this study, we consider the task of expressing a specific emotion for dialogue generation. Previous approaches take the emotion as an input signal, which may be ignored during inference. We instead propose a search-based emotional dialogue system by simulated annealing (SA). Specifically, we first define a scoring function that combines contextual coherence and emotional correctness. Then, SA iteratively edits a general response and searches for a sentence with a higher score, enforcing the presence of the desired emotion. We evaluate our system on the NLPCC2017 dataset. Our proposed method shows 12% improvements in emotion accuracy compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, without hurting the generation quality (measured by BLEU).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Sense Annotation via Translations

Acquisition of multilingual training data continues to be a challenge in word sense disambiguation (WSD). To address this problem, unsupervised approaches have been proposed to automatically generate sense annotations for training supervised WSD systems. We present three new methods for creating sense-annotated corpora which leverage translations, parallel bitexts, lexical resources, as well as contextual and synset embeddings. Our semi-supervised method applies machine translation to transfer existing sense annotations to other languages. Our two unsupervised methods refine sense annotations produced by a knowledge-based WSD system via lexical translations in a parallel corpus. We obtain state-of-the-art results on standard WSD benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

A Globally Normalized Neural Model for Semantic Parsing

In this paper, we propose a globally normalized model for context-free grammar (CFG)-based semantic parsing. Instead of predicting a probability, our model predicts a real-valued score at each step and does not suffer from the label bias problem. Experiments show that our approach outperforms locally normalized models on small datasets, but it does not yield improvement on a large dataset.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Adversarial Learning on the Latent Space for Diverse Dialog Generation

Generating relevant responses in a dialog is challenging, and requires not only proper modeling of context in the conversation but also being able to generate fluent sentences during inference. In this paper, we propose a two-step framework based on generative adversarial nets for generating conditioned responses. Our model first learns a meaningful representation of sentences by autoencoding and then learns to map an input query to the response representation, which is in turn decoded as a response sentence. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our model generates more fluent, relevant, and diverse responses than existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search

In this work, we present TGLS, a novel framework to unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search. We start by applying a strong search algorithm (in particular, simulated annealing) towards a heuristically defined objective that (roughly) estimates the quality of sentences. Then, a conditional generative model learns from the search results, and meanwhile smooth out the noise of search. The alternation between search and learning can be repeated for performance bootstrapping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TGLS on two real-world natural language generation tasks, paraphrase generation and text formalization. Our model significantly outperforms unsupervised baseline methods in both tasks. Especially, it achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art supervised methods in paraphrase generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Iterative Edit-Based Unsupervised Sentence Simplification

We present a novel iterative, edit-based approach to unsupervised sentence simplification. Our model is guided by a scoring function involving fluency, simplicity, and meaning preservation. Then, we iteratively perform word and phrase-level edits on the complex sentence. Compared with previous approaches, our model does not require a parallel training set, but is more controllable and interpretable. Experiments on Newsela and WikiLarge datasets show that our approach is nearly as effective as state-of-the-art supervised approaches.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Discrete Optimization for Unsupervised Sentence Summarization with Word-Level Extraction

Automatic sentence summarization produces a shorter version of a sentence, while preserving its most important information. A good summary is characterized by language fluency and high information overlap with the source sentence. We model these two aspects in an unsupervised objective function, consisting of language modeling and semantic similarity metrics. We search for a high-scoring summary by discrete optimization. Our proposed method achieves a new state-of-the art for unsupervised sentence summarization according to ROUGE scores. Additionally, we demonstrate that the commonly reported ROUGE F1 metric is sensitive to summary length. Since this is unwillingly exploited in recent work, we emphasize that future evaluation should explicitly group summarization systems by output length brackets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

How Chaotic Are Recurrent Neural Networks?

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are non-linear dynamic systems. Previous work believes that RNN may suffer from the phenomenon of chaos, where the system is sensitive to initial states and unpredictable in the long run. In this paper, however, we perform a systematic empirical analysis, showing that a vanilla or long short term memory (LSTM) RNN does not exhibit chaotic behavior along the training process in real applications such as text generation. Our findings suggest that future work in this direction should address the other side of non-linear dynamics for RNN.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Progressive Memory Banks for Incremental Domain Adaptation

This paper addresses the problem of incremental domain adaptation (IDA) in natural language processing (NLP). We assume each domain comes one after another, and that we could only access data in the current domain. The goal of IDA is to build a unified model performing well on all the domains that we have encountered. We adopt the recurrent neural network (RNN) widely used in NLP, but augment it with a directly parameterized memory bank, which is retrieved by an attention mechanism at each step of RNN transition. The memory bank provides a natural way of IDA: when adapting our model to a new domain, we progressively add new slots to the memory bank, which increases the number of parameters, and thus the model capacity. We learn the new memory slots and fine-tune existing parameters by back-propagation. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significantly better performance than fine-tuning alone. Compared with expanding hidden states, our approach is more robust for old domains, shown by both empirical and theoretical results. Our model also outperforms previous work of IDA including elastic weight consolidation and progressive neural networks in the experiments.

cs.CL↗