Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction

Wenhu Chen, Guanlin Li, Shuo Ren, Shujie Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Mu Li, Ming Zhou


Abstract
In order to alleviate data sparsity and overfitting problems in maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for sequence prediction tasks, we propose the Generative Bridging Network (GBN), in which a novel bridge module is introduced to assist the training of the sequence prediction model (the generator network). Unlike MLE directly maximizing the conditional likelihood, the bridge extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it, and the generator is optimized to minimize their KL-divergence. Three different GBNs, namely uniform GBN, language-model GBN and coaching GBN, are proposed to penalize confidence, enhance language smoothness and relieve learning burden. Experiments conducted on two recognized sequence prediction tasks (machine translation and abstractive text summarization) show that our proposed GBNs can yield significant improvements over strong baselines. Furthermore, by analyzing samples drawn from different bridges, expected influences on the generator are verified.
Anthology ID:
N18-1154
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1706–1715
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1154
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1154
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenhu Chen, Guanlin Li, Shuo Ren, Shujie Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Mu Li, and Ming Zhou. 2018. Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1706–1715, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (Chen et al., NAACL 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/N18-1154.pdf
Note:
 N18-1154.Notes.pdf