A Deep Network Model for Paraphrase Detection in Short Text Messages

This paper is concerned with paraphrase detection. The ability to detect similar sentences written in natural language is crucial for several applications, such as text mining, text summarization, plagiarism detection, authorship authentication and question answering. Given two sentences, the objective is to detect whether they are semantically identical. An important insight from this work is that existing paraphrase systems perform well when applied on clean texts, but they do not necessarily deliver good performance against noisy texts. Challenges with paraphrase detection on user generated short texts, such as Twitter, include language irregularity and noise. To cope with these challenges, we propose a novel deep neural network-based approach that relies on coarse-grained sentence modeling using a convolutional neural network and a long short-term memory model, combined with a specific fine-grained word-level similarity matching model. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on user-generated noisy social media data, such as Twitter texts, and achieves highly competitive performance on a cleaner corpus

Modular Networks: Learning to Decompose Neural Computation

Scaling model capacity has been vital in the success of deep learning. For a typical network, necessary compute resources and training time grow dramatically with model size. Conditional computation is a promising way to increase the number of parameters with a relatively small increase in resources. We propose a training algorithm that flexibly chooses neural modules based on the data to be processed. Both the decomposition and modules are learned end-to-end. In contrast to existing approaches, training does not rely on regularization to enforce diversity in module use. We apply modular networks both to image recognition and language modeling tasks, where we achieve superior performance compared to several baselines. Introspection reveals that modules specialize in interpretable contexts.Comment: NIPS 201

Advances in All-Neural Speech Recognition

This paper advances the design of CTC-based all-neural (or end-to-end) speech recognizers. We propose a novel symbol inventory, and a novel iterated-CTC method in which a second system is used to transform a noisy initial output into a cleaner version. We present a number of stabilization and initialization methods we have found useful in training these networks. We evaluate our system on the commonly used NIST 2000 conversational telephony test set, and significantly exceed the previously published performance of similar systems, both with and without the use of an external language model and decoding technology