Sentence Embedding Approach using LSTM Auto-encoder for Discussion Threads Summarization

Online discussion forums are repositories of valuable information where users interact and articulate their ideas and opinions, and share experiences about numerous topics. These online discussion forums are internet-based online communities where users can ask for help and find the solution to a problem. A new user of online discussion forums becomes exhausted from reading the significant number of irrelevant replies in a discussion. An automated discussion thread summarizing system (DTS) is necessary to create a candid view of the entire discussion of a query. Most of the previous approaches for automated DTS use the continuous bag of words (CBOW) model as a sentence embedding tool, which is poor at capturing the overall meaning of the sentence and is unable to grasp word dependency. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the LSTM Auto-encoder as a sentence embedding technique to improve the performance of DTS. The empirical result in the context of the proposed approach’s average precision, recall, and F-measure with respect to ROGUE-1 and ROUGE-2 of two standard experimental datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach and outperforms the state-of-the-art CBOW model in sentence embedding tasks and boost the performance of the automated DTS model

Transfer learning and subword sampling for asymmetric-resource one-to-many neural translation

There are several approaches for improving neural machine translation for low-resource languages: monolingual data can be exploited via pretraining or data augmentation; parallel corpora on related language pairs can be used via parameter sharing or transfer learning in multilingual models; subword segmentation and regularization techniques can be applied to ensure high coverage of the vocabulary. We review these approaches in the context of an asymmetric-resource one-to-many translation task, in which the pair of target languages are related, with one being a very low-resource and the other a higher-resource language. We test various methods on three artificially restricted translation tasks—English to Estonian (low-resource) and Finnish (high-resource), English to Slovak and Czech, English to Danish and Swedish—and one real-world task, Norwegian to North Sámi and Finnish. The experiments show positive effects especially for scheduled multi-task learning, denoising autoencoder, and subword sampling.There are several approaches for improving neural machine translation for low-resource languages: monolingual data can be exploited via pretraining or data augmentation; parallel corpora on related language pairs can be used via parameter sharing or transfer learning in multilingual models; subword segmentation and regularization techniques can be applied to ensure high coverage of the vocabulary. We review these approaches in the context of an asymmetric-resource one-to-many translation task, in which the pair of target languages are related, with one being a very low-resource and the other a higher-resource language. We test various methods on three artificially restricted translation tasks-English to Estonian (low-resource) and Finnish (high-resource), English to Slovak and Czech, English to Danish and Swedish-and one real-world task, Norwegian to North Sami and Finnish. The experiments show positive effects especially for scheduled multi-task learning, denoising autoencoder, and subword sampling.Peer reviewe

DiffuSIA: A Spiral Interaction Architecture for Encoder-Decoder Text Diffusion

Diffusion models have emerged as the new state-of-the-art family of deep generative models, and their promising potentials for text generation have recently attracted increasing attention. Existing studies mostly adopt a single encoder architecture with partially noising processes for conditional text generation, but its degree of flexibility for conditional modeling is limited. In fact, the encoder-decoder architecture is naturally more flexible for its detachable encoder and decoder modules, which is extensible to multilingual and multimodal generation tasks for conditions and target texts. However, the encoding process of conditional texts lacks the understanding of target texts. To this end, a spiral interaction architecture for encoder-decoder text diffusion (DiffuSIA) is proposed. Concretely, the conditional information from encoder is designed to be captured by the diffusion decoder, while the target information from decoder is designed to be captured by the conditional encoder. These two types of information flow run through multilayer interaction spirally for deep fusion and understanding. DiffuSIA is evaluated on four text generation tasks, including paraphrase, text simplification, question generation, and open-domain dialogue generation. Experimental results show that DiffuSIA achieves competitive performance among previous methods on all four tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method.Comment: Work in Progres

EmbedDistill: A Geometric Knowledge Distillation for Information Retrieval

Large neural models (such as Transformers) achieve state-of-the-art performance for information retrieval (IR). In this paper, we aim to improve distillation methods that pave the way for the resource-efficient deployment of such models in practice. Inspired by our theoretical analysis of the teacher-student generalization gap for IR models, we propose a novel distillation approach that leverages the relative geometry among queries and documents learned by the large teacher model. Unlike existing teacher score-based distillation methods, our proposed approach employs embedding matching tasks to provide a stronger signal to align the representations of the teacher and student models. In addition, it utilizes query generation to explore the data manifold to reduce the discrepancies between the student and the teacher where training data is sparse. Furthermore, our analysis also motivates novel asymmetric architectures for student models which realizes better embedding alignment without increasing online inference cost. On standard benchmarks like MSMARCO, we show that our approach successfully distills from both dual-encoder (DE) and cross-encoder (CE) teacher models to 1/10th size asymmetric students that can retain 95-97% of the teacher performance

Deep Neural Networks for Visual Reasoning, Program Induction, and Text-to-Image Synthesis.

Deep neural networks excel at pattern recognition, especially in the setting of large scale supervised learning. A combination of better hardware, more data, and algorithmic improvements have yielded breakthroughs in image classification, speech recognition and other perception problems. The research frontier has shifted towards the weak side of neural networks: reasoning, planning, and (like all machine learning algorithms) creativity. How can we advance along this frontier using the same generic techniques so effective in pattern recognition; i.e. gradient descent with backpropagation? In this thesis I develop neural architectures with new capabilities in visual reasoning, program induction and text-to-image synthesis. I propose two models that disentangle the latent visual factors of variation that give rise to images, and enable analogical reasoning in the latent space. I show how to augment a recurrent network with a memory of programs that enables the learning of compositional structure for more data-efficient and generalizable program induction. Finally, I develop a generative neural network that translates descriptions of birds, flowers and other categories into compelling natural images.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135763/1/reedscot_1.pd

A Neural Multi-sequence Alignment TeCHnique (NeuMATCH)

The alignment of heterogeneous sequential data (video to text) is an important and challenging problem. Standard techniques for this task, including Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), suffer from inherent drawbacks. Mainly, the Markov assumption implies that, given the immediate past, future alignment decisions are independent of further history. The separation between similarity computation and alignment decision also prevents end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural architecture where alignment actions are implemented as moving data between stacks of Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) blocks. This flexible architecture supports a large variety of alignment tasks, including one-to-one, one-to-many, skipping unmatched elements, and (with extensions) non-monotonic alignment. Extensive experiments on semi-synthetic and real datasets show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2018 (Spotlight). arXiv file includes the paper and the supplemental materia