A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization

Summarization based on text extraction is inherently limited, but generation-style abstractive methods have proven challenging to build. In this work, we propose a fully data-driven approach to abstractive sentence summarization. Our method utilizes a local attention-based model that generates each word of the summary conditioned on the input sentence. While the model is structurally simple, it can easily be trained end-to-end and scales to a large amount of training data. The model shows significant performance gains on the DUC-2004 shared task compared with several strong baselines.Comment: Proceedings of EMNLP 201

Adapting Sequence Models for Sentence Correction

In a controlled experiment of sequence-to-sequence approaches for the task of sentence correction, we find that character-based models are generally more effective than word-based models and models that encode subword information via convolutions, and that modeling the output data as a series of diffs improves effectiveness over standard approaches. Our strongest sequence-to-sequence model improves over our strongest phrase-based statistical machine translation model, with access to the same data, by 6 M2 (0.5 GLEU) points. Additionally, in the data environment of the standard CoNLL-2014 setup, we demonstrate that modeling (and tuning against) diffs yields similar or better M2 scores with simpler models and/or significantly less data than previous sequence-to-sequence approaches.Comment: EMNLP 201

Character-Aware Neural Language Models

We describe a simple neural language model that relies only on character-level inputs. Predictions are still made at the word-level. Our model employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a highway network over characters, whose output is given to a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network language model (RNN-LM). On the English Penn Treebank the model is on par with the existing state-of-the-art despite having 60% fewer parameters. On languages with rich morphology (Arabic, Czech, French, German, Spanish, Russian), the model outperforms word-level/morpheme-level LSTM baselines, again with fewer parameters. The results suggest that on many languages, character inputs are sufficient for language modeling. Analysis of word representations obtained from the character composition part of the model reveals that the model is able to encode, from characters only, both semantic and orthographic information.Comment: AAAI 201