Wenlin Wang


2020

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Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport
Jianqiao Li | Chunyuan Li | Guoyin Wang | Hao Fu | Yuhchen Lin | Liqun Chen | Yizhe Zhang | Chenyang Tao | Ruiyi Zhang | Wenlin Wang | Dinghan Shen | Qian Yang | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Neural language models are often trained with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), where the next word is generated conditioned on the ground-truth word tokens. During testing, however, the model is instead conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in what is termed exposure bias. To reduce this gap between training and testing, we propose using optimal transport (OT) to match the sequences generated in these two modes. We examine the necessity of adding Student-Forcing scheme during training with an imitation learning interpretation. An extension is further proposed to improve the OT learning for long sequences, based on the structural and contextual information of the text sequences. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks.

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Improving Adversarial Text Generation by Modeling the Distant Future
Ruiyi Zhang | Changyou Chen | Zhe Gan | Wenlin Wang | Dinghan Shen | Guoyin Wang | Zheng Wen | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Auto-regressive text generation models usually focus on local fluency, and may cause inconsistent semantic meaning in long text generation. Further, automatically generating words with similar semantics is challenging, and hand-crafted linguistic rules are difficult to apply. We consider a text planning scheme and present a model-based imitation-learning approach to alleviate the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we propose a novel guider network to focus on the generative process over a longer horizon, which can assist next-word prediction and provide intermediate rewards for generator optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method leads to improved performance.

2019

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Improving Textual Network Embedding with Global Attention via Optimal Transport
Liqun Chen | Guoyin Wang | Chenyang Tao | Dinghan Shen | Pengyu Cheng | Xinyuan Zhang | Wenlin Wang | Yizhe Zhang | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Constituting highly informative network embeddings is an essential tool for network analysis. It encodes network topology, along with other useful side information, into low dimensional node-based feature representations that can be exploited by statistical modeling. This work focuses on learning context-aware network embeddings augmented with text data. We reformulate the network embedding problem, and present two novel strategies to improve over traditional attention mechanisms: (i) a content-aware sparse attention module based on optimal transport; and (ii) a high-level attention parsing module. Our approach yields naturally sparse and self-normalized relational inference. It can capture long-term interactions between sequences, thus addressing the challenges faced by existing textual network embedding schemes. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate our model can consistently outperform alternative state-of-the-art methods.

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Topic-Guided Variational Auto-Encoder for Text Generation
Wenlin Wang | Zhe Gan | Hongteng Xu | Ruiyi Zhang | Guoyin Wang | Dinghan Shen | Changyou Chen | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

We propose a topic-guided variational auto-encoder (TGVAE) model for text generation. Distinct from existing variational auto-encoder (VAE) based approaches, which assume a simple Gaussian prior for latent code, our model specifies the prior as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) parametrized by a neural topic module. Each mixture component corresponds to a latent topic, which provides a guidance to generate sentences under the topic. The neural topic module and the VAE-based neural sequence module in our model are learned jointly. In particular, a sequence of invertible Householder transformations is applied to endow the approximate posterior of the latent code with high flexibility during the model inference. Experimental results show that our TGVAE outperforms its competitors on both unconditional and conditional text generation, which can also generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics.

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An End-to-End Generative Architecture for Paraphrase Generation
Qian Yang | Zhouyuan Huo | Dinghan Shen | Yong Cheng | Wenlin Wang | Guoyin Wang | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Generating high-quality paraphrases is a fundamental yet challenging natural language processing task. Despite the effectiveness of previous work based on generative models, there remain problems with exposure bias in recurrent neural networks, and often a failure to generate realistic sentences. To overcome these challenges, we propose the first end-to-end conditional generative architecture for generating paraphrases via adversarial training, which does not depend on extra linguistic information. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming previous generative architectures on both automatic metrics (BLEU, METEOR, and TER) and human evaluations.

2018

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Baseline Needs More Love: On Simple Word-Embedding-Based Models and Associated Pooling Mechanisms
Dinghan Shen | Guoyin Wang | Wenlin Wang | Martin Renqiang Min | Qinliang Su | Yizhe Zhang | Chunyuan Li | Ricardo Henao | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Many deep learning architectures have been proposed to model the compositionality in text sequences, requiring substantial number of parameters and expensive computations. However, there has not been a rigorous evaluation regarding the added value of sophisticated compositional functions. In this paper, we conduct a point-by-point comparative study between Simple Word-Embedding-based Models (SWEMs), consisting of parameter-free pooling operations, relative to word-embedding-based RNN/CNN models. Surprisingly, SWEMs exhibit comparable or even superior performance in the majority of cases considered. Based upon this understanding, we propose two additional pooling strategies over learned word embeddings: (i) a max-pooling operation for improved interpretability; and (ii) a hierarchical pooling operation, which preserves spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. We present experiments on 17 datasets encompassing three tasks: (i) (long) document classification; (ii) text sequence matching; and (iii) short text tasks, including classification and tagging.

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NASH: Toward End-to-End Neural Architecture for Generative Semantic Hashing
Dinghan Shen | Qinliang Su | Paidamoyo Chapfuwa | Wenlin Wang | Guoyin Wang | Ricardo Henao | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Semantic hashing has become a powerful paradigm for fast similarity search in many information retrieval systems. While fairly successful, previous techniques generally require two-stage training, and the binary constraints are handled ad-hoc. In this paper, we present an end-to-end Neural Architecture for Semantic Hashing (NASH), where the binary hashing codes are treated as Bernoulli latent variables. A neural variational inference framework is proposed for training, where gradients are directly backpropagated through the discrete latent variable to optimize the hash function. We also draw the connections between proposed method and rate-distortion theory, which provides a theoretical foundation for the effectiveness of our framework. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art models on both unsupervised and supervised scenarios.

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Joint Embedding of Words and Labels for Text Classification
Guoyin Wang | Chunyuan Li | Wenlin Wang | Yizhe Zhang | Dinghan Shen | Xinyuan Zhang | Ricardo Henao | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Word embeddings are effective intermediate representations for capturing semantic regularities between words, when learning the representations of text sequences. We propose to view text classification as a label-word joint embedding problem: each label is embedded in the same space with the word vectors. We introduce an attention framework that measures the compatibility of embeddings between text sequences and labels. The attention is learned on a training set of labeled samples to ensure that, given a text sequence, the relevant words are weighted higher than the irrelevant ones. Our method maintains the interpretability of word embeddings, and enjoys a built-in ability to leverage alternative sources of information, in addition to input text sequences. Extensive results on the several large text datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, in terms of both accuracy and speed.