Focused information criterion and model averaging for generalized additive partial linear models

We study model selection and model averaging in generalized additive partial linear models (GAPLMs). Polynomial spline is used to approximate nonparametric functions. The corresponding estimators of the linear parameters are shown to be asymptotically normal. We then develop a focused information criterion (FIC) and a frequentist model average (FMA) estimator on the basis of the quasi-likelihood principle and examine theoretical properties of the FIC and FMA. The major advantages of the proposed procedures over the existing ones are their computational expediency and theoretical reliability. Simulation experiments have provided evidence of the superiority of the proposed procedures. The approach is further applied to a real-world data example.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOS832 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Sentence-Level Content Planning and Style Specification for Neural Text Generation

Building effective text generation systems requires three critical components: content selection, text planning, and surface realization, and traditionally they are tackled as separate problems. Recent all-in-one style neural generation models have made impressive progress, yet they often produce outputs that are incoherent and unfaithful to the input. To address these issues, we present an end-to-end trained two-step generation model, where a sentence-level content planner first decides on the keyphrases to cover as well as a desired language style, followed by a surface realization decoder that generates relevant and coherent text. For experiments, we consider three tasks from domains with diverse topics and varying language styles: persuasive argument construction from Reddit, paragraph generation for normal and simple versions of Wikipedia, and abstract generation for scientific articles. Automatic evaluation shows that our system can significantly outperform competitive comparisons. Human judges further rate our system generated text as more fluent and correct, compared to the generations by its variants that do not consider language style.Comment: Accepted as a long paper to EMNLP 201