Pre-trained self-supervised models such as BERT have achieved striking success in learning sequence representations, especially for natural language processing. These models typically corrupt the given sequences with certain types of noise, such as masking, shuffling, or substitution, and then try to recover the original input. However, such pre-training approaches are prone to learning representations that are covariant with the noise, leading to the discrepancy between the pre-training and fine-tuning stage. To remedy this, we present ContrAstive Pre-Training (CAPT) to learn noise invariant sequence representations. The proposed CAPT encourages the consistency between representations of the original sequence and its corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. In this way, it not only alleviates the pretrain-finetune discrepancy induced by the noise of pre-training, but also aids the pre-trained model in better capturing global semantics of the input via more effective sentence-level supervision. Different from most prior work that focuses on a particular modality, comprehensive empirical evidence on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks illustrates that CAPT is applicable for both language and vision-language tasks, and obtains surprisingly consistent improvement, including 0.6% absolute gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% absolute increment on NLVR2.

Conventional Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) assumes that all test entities appear during training. However, in real-world scenarios, Knowledge Graphs (KG) evolve fast with out-of-knowledge-graph (OOKG) entities added frequently, and we need to efficiently represent these entities. Most existing Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods cannot represent OOKG entities without costly retraining on the whole KG. To enhance efficiency, we propose a simple and effective method that inductively represents OOKG entities by their optimal estimation under translational assumptions. Moreover, given pretrained embeddings of the in-knowledge-graph (IKG) entities, our method even needs no additional learning. Experimental results on two KGC tasks with OOKG entities show that our method outperforms the previous methods by a large margin with higher efficiency.

Document machine translation aims to translate the source sentence into the target language in the presence of additional contextual information. However, it typically suffers from a lack of doc-level bilingual data. To remedy this, here we propose a simple yet effective context-interactive pre-training approach, which targets benefiting from external large-scale corpora. The proposed model performs inter sentence generation to capture the cross-sentence dependency within the target document, and cross sentence translation to make better use of valuable contextual information. Comprehensive experiments illustrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, which significantly outperforms a variety of baselines.

Automatic topic-to-essay generation is a challenging task since it requires generating novel, diverse, and topic-consistent paragraph-level text with a set of topics as input. Previous work tends to perform essay generation based solely on the given topics while ignoring massive commonsense knowledge. However, this commonsense knowledge provides additional background information, which can help to generate essays that are more novel and diverse. Towards filling this gap, we propose to integrate commonsense from the external knowledge base into the generator through dynamic memory mechanism. Besides, the adversarial training based on a multi-label discriminator is employed to further improve topic-consistency. We also develop a series of automatic evaluation metrics to comprehensively assess the quality of the generated essay. Experiments show that with external commonsense knowledge and adversarial training, the generated essays are more novel, diverse, and topic-consistent than existing methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluation.

In this paper, we focus on the task of fine-grained text sentiment transfer (FGST). This task aims to revise an input sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity, while preserving the original semantic content. Different from the conventional sentiment transfer task that only reverses the sentiment polarity (positive/negative) of text, the FTST task requires more nuanced and fine-grained control of sentiment. To remedy this, we propose a novel Seq2SentiSeq model. Specifically, the numeric sentiment intensity value is incorporated into the decoder via a Gaussian kernel layer to finely control the sentiment intensity of the output. Moreover, to tackle the problem of lacking parallel data, we propose a cycle reinforcement learning algorithm to guide the model training. In this framework, the elaborately designed rewards can balance both sentiment transformation and content preservation, while not requiring any ground truth output. Experimental results show that our approach can outperform existing methods by a large margin in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

Table-to-text generation aims to translate the structured data into the unstructured text. Most existing methods adopt the encoder-decoder framework to learn the transformation, which requires large-scale training samples. However, the lack of large parallel data is a major practical problem for many domains. In this work, we consider the scenario of low resource table-to-text generation, where only limited parallel data is available. We propose a novel model to separate the generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. It first predicts the key facts from the tables, and then generates the text with the key facts. The training of key fact prediction needs much fewer annotated data, while surface realization can be trained with pseudo parallel corpus. We evaluate our model on a biography generation dataset. Our model can achieve 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only obtain the performance of 9.71 BLEU score.

Automatic commenting of online articles can provide additional opinions and facts to the reader, which improves user experience and engagement on social media platforms. Previous work focuses on automatic commenting based solely on textual content. However, in real-scenarios, online articles usually contain multiple modal contents. For instance, graphic news contains plenty of images in addition to text. Contents other than text are also vital because they are not only more attractive to the reader but also may provide critical information. To remedy this, we propose a new task: cross-model automatic commenting (CMAC), which aims to make comments by integrating multiple modal contents. We construct a large-scale dataset for this task and explore several representative methods. Going a step further, an effective co-attention model is presented to capture the dependency between textual and visual information. Evaluation results show that our proposed model can achieve better performance than competitive baselines.

The task of unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (UBLI) aims to induce word translations from monolingual corpora in two languages. Previous work has shown that morphological variation is an intractable challenge for the UBLI task, where the induced translation in failure case is usually morphologically related to the correct translation. To tackle this challenge, we propose a morphology-aware alignment model for the UBLI task. The proposed model aims to alleviate the adverse effect of morphological variation by introducing grammatical information learned by the pre-trained denoising language model. Results show that our approach can substantially outperform several state-of-the-art unsupervised systems, and even achieves competitive performance compared to supervised methods.

Multi-label classification (MLC) aims to predict a set of labels for a given instance. Based on a pre-defined label order, the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model trained via maximum likelihood estimation method has been successfully applied to the MLC task and shows powerful ability to capture high-order correlations between labels. However, the output labels are essentially an unordered set rather than an ordered sequence. This inconsistency tends to result in some intractable problems, e.g., sensitivity to the label order. To remedy this, we propose a simple but effective sequence-to-set model. The proposed model is trained via reinforcement learning, where reward feedback is designed to be independent of the label order. In this way, we can reduce the dependence of the model on the label order, as well as capture high-order correlations between labels. Extensive experiments show that our approach can substantially outperform competitive baselines, as well as effectively reduce the sensitivity to the label order.

The comprehensive descriptions for factual attribute-value tables, which should be accurate, informative and loyal, can be very helpful for end users to understand the structured data in this form. However previous neural generators might suffer from key attributes missing, less informative and groundless information problems, which impede the generation of high-quality comprehensive descriptions for tables. To relieve these problems, we first propose force attention (FA) method to encourage the generator to pay more attention to the uncovered attributes to avoid potential key attributes missing. Furthermore, we propose reinforcement learning for information richness to generate more informative as well as more loyal descriptions for tables. In our experiments, we utilize the widely used WIKIBIO dataset as a benchmark. Besides, we create WB-filter based on WIKIBIO to test our model in the simulated user-oriented scenarios, in which the generated descriptions should accord with particular user interests. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on both automatic and human evaluation.

Automatic story ending generation is an interesting and challenging task in natural language generation. Previous studies are mainly limited to generate coherent, reasonable and diversified story endings, and few works focus on controlling the sentiment of story endings. This paper focuses on generating a story ending which meets the given fine-grained sentiment intensity. There are two major challenges to this task. First is the lack of story corpus which has fine-grained sentiment labels. Second is the difficulty of explicitly controlling sentiment intensity when generating endings. Therefore, we propose a generic and novel framework which consists of a sentiment analyzer and a sentimental generator, respectively addressing the two challenges. The sentiment analyzer adopts a series of methods to acquire sentiment intensities of the story dataset. The sentimental generator introduces the sentiment intensity into decoder via a Gaussian Kernel Layer to control the sentiment of the output. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first endeavor to control the fine-grained sentiment for story ending generation without manually annotating sentiment labels. Experiments show that our proposed framework can generate story endings which are not only more coherent and fluent but also able to meet the given sentiment intensity better.

Comments on social media are very diverse, in terms of content, style and vocabulary, which make generating comments much more challenging than other existing natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Besides, since different user has different expression habits, it is necessary to take the user’s profile into consideration when generating comments. In this paper, we introduce the task of automatic generation of personalized comment (AGPC) for social media. Based on tens of thousands of users’ real comments and corresponding user profiles on weibo, we propose Personalized Comment Generation Network (PCGN) for AGPC. The model utilizes user feature embedding with a gated memory and attends to user description to model personality of users. In addition, external user representation is taken into consideration during the decoding to enhance the comments generation. Experimental results show that our model can generate natural, human-like and personalized comments.

The ability to ask clarification questions is essential for knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) systems, especially for handling ambiguous phenomena. Despite its importance, clarification has not been well explored in current KBQA systems. Further progress requires supervised resources for training and evaluation, and powerful models for clarification-related text understanding and generation. In this paper, we construct a new clarification dataset, CLAQUA, with nearly 40K open-domain examples. The dataset supports three serial tasks: given a question, identify whether clarification is needed; if yes, generate a clarification question; then predict answers base on external user feedback. We provide representative baselines for these tasks and further introduce a coarse-to-fine model for clarification question generation. Experiments show that the proposed model achieves better performance than strong baselines. The further analysis demonstrates that our dataset brings new challenges and there still remain several unsolved problems, like reasonable automatic evaluation metrics for clarification question generation and powerful models for handling entity sparsity.

In this paper, we focus on the task of generating a pun sentence given a pair of word senses. A major challenge for pun generation is the lack of large-scale pun corpus to guide supervised learning. To remedy this, we propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation (Pun-GAN). It consists of a generator to produce pun sentences, and a discriminator to distinguish between the generated pun sentences and the real sentences with specific word senses. The output of the discriminator is then used as a reward to train the generator via reinforcement learning, encouraging it to produce pun sentences which can support two word senses simultaneously. Experiments show that the proposed Pun-GAN can generate sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation.

The task of unsupervised sentiment modification aims to reverse the sentiment polarity of the input text while preserving its semantic content without any parallel data. Most previous work follows a two-step process. They first separate the content from the original sentiment, and then directly generate text with the target sentiment only based on the content produced by the first step. However, the second step bears both the target sentiment addition and content reconstruction, thus resulting in a lack of specific information like proper nouns in the generated text. To remedy this, we propose a specificity-driven cascading approach in this work, which can effectively increase the specificity of the generated text and further improve content preservation. In addition, we propose a more reasonable metric to evaluate sentiment modification. The experiments show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin, which achieves 11% and 38% relative improvements of the overall metric on the Yelp and Amazon datasets, respectively.

Multi-label classification is an important yet challenging task in natural language processing. It is more complex than single-label classification in that the labels tend to be correlated. Existing methods tend to ignore the correlations between labels. Besides, different parts of the text can contribute differently for predicting different labels, which is not considered by existing models. In this paper, we propose to view the multi-label classification task as a sequence generation problem, and apply a sequence generation model with a novel decoder structure to solve it. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed methods outperform previous work by a substantial margin. Further analysis of experimental results demonstrates that the proposed methods not only capture the correlations between labels, but also select the most informative words automatically when predicting different labels.

The task of sentiment modification requires reversing the sentiment of the input and preserving the sentiment-independent content. However, aligned sentences with the same content but different sentiments are usually unavailable. Due to the lack of such parallel data, it is hard to extract sentiment independent content and reverse the sentiment in an unsupervised way. Previous work usually can not reconcile sentiment transformation and content preservation. In this paper, motivated by the fact the non-emotional context (e.g., “staff”) provides strong cues for the occurrence of emotional words (e.g., “friendly”), we propose a novel method that automatically extracts appropriate sentiment information from learned sentiment memories according to the specific context. Experiments show that our method substantially improves the content preservation degree and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

We propose a novel model for multi-label text classification, which is based on sequence-to-sequence learning. The model generates higher-level semantic unit representations with multi-level dilated convolution as well as a corresponding hybrid attention mechanism that extracts both the information at the word-level and the level of the semantic unit. Our designed dilated convolution effectively reduces dimension and supports an exponential expansion of receptive fields without loss of local information, and the attention-over-attention mechanism is able to capture more summary relevant information from the source context. Results of our experiments show that the proposed model has significant advantages over the baseline models on the dataset RCV1-V2 and Ren-CECps, and our analysis demonstrates that our model is competitive to the deterministic hierarchical models and it is more robust to classifying low-frequency labels

As more and more academic papers are being submitted to conferences and journals, evaluating all these papers by professionals is time-consuming and can cause inequality due to the personal factors of the reviewers. In this paper, in order to assist professionals in evaluating academic papers, we propose a novel task: automatic academic paper rating (AAPR), which automatically determine whether to accept academic papers. We build a new dataset for this task and propose a novel modularized hierarchical convolutional neural network to achieve automatic academic paper rating. Evaluation results show that the proposed model outperforms the baselines by a large margin. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lancopku/AAPR