A Hierarchical Neural Autoencoder for Paragraphs and Documents

Natural language generation of coherent long texts like paragraphs or longer documents is a challenging problem for recurrent networks models. In this paper, we explore an important step toward this generation task: training an LSTM (Long-short term memory) auto-encoder to preserve and reconstruct multi-sentence paragraphs. We introduce an LSTM model that hierarchically builds an embedding for a paragraph from embeddings for sentences and words, then decodes this embedding to reconstruct the original paragraph. We evaluate the reconstructed paragraph using standard metrics like ROUGE and Entity Grid, showing that neural models are able to encode texts in a way that preserve syntactic, semantic, and discourse coherence. While only a first step toward generating coherent text units from neural models, our work has the potential to significantly impact natural language generation and summarization\footnote{Code for the three models described in this paper can be found at www.stanford.edu/~jiweil/

Clue: Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation

We use coherence relations inspired by computational models of discourse to study the information needs and goals of image captioning. Using an annotation protocol specifically devised for capturing image--caption coherence relations, we annotate 10,000 instances from publicly-available image--caption pairs. We introduce a new task for learning inferences in imagery and text, coherence relation prediction, and show that these coherence annotations can be exploited to learn relation classifiers as an intermediary step, and also train coherence-aware, controllable image captioning models. The results show a dramatic improvement in the consistency and quality of the generated captions with respect to information needs specified via coherence relations.Comment: Accepted as a long paper to ACL 202

Text Coherence Analysis Based on Deep Neural Network

In this paper, we propose a novel deep coherence model (DCM) using a convolutional neural network architecture to capture the text coherence. The text coherence problem is investigated with a new perspective of learning sentence distributional representation and text coherence modeling simultaneously. In particular, the model captures the interactions between sentences by computing the similarities of their distributional representations. Further, it can be easily trained in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed model is evaluated on a standard Sentence Ordering task. The experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness and promise in coherence assessment showing a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, CIKM 201