Erhardt Barth


2017

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A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text Generation
Stanislau Semeniuta | Aliaksei Severyn | Erhardt Barth
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper we explore the effect of architectural choices on learning a variational autoencoder (VAE) for text generation. In contrast to the previously introduced VAE model for text where both the encoder and decoder are RNNs, we propose a novel hybrid architecture that blends fully feed-forward convolutional and deconvolutional components with a recurrent language model. Our architecture exhibits several attractive properties such as faster run time and convergence, ability to better handle long sequences and, more importantly, it helps to avoid the issue of the VAE collapsing to a deterministic model.

2016

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Recurrent Dropout without Memory Loss
Stanislau Semeniuta | Aliaksei Severyn | Erhardt Barth
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

This paper presents a novel approach to recurrent neural network (RNN) regularization. Differently from the widely adopted dropout method, which is applied to forward connections of feedforward architectures or RNNs, we propose to drop neurons directly in recurrent connections in a way that does not cause loss of long-term memory. Our approach is as easy to implement and apply as the regular feed-forward dropout and we demonstrate its effectiveness for the most effective modern recurrent network – Long Short-Term Memory network. Our experiments on three NLP benchmarks show consistent improvements even when combined with conventional feed-forward dropout.