Text simplification is a task to reduce the complexity of a text while retain its original meaning. It can facilitate people with low-literacy skills or language impairments, such as children and individuals with dyslexia and aphasia, to read and understand complicated materials. Normally, substitution, deletion, reordering, and splitting are considered as four core operations for performing text simplification. Thus an ideal model should be capable of executing these operations appropriately to simplify a text. However, by examining the degree that each operation is exerted in different datasets, we observe that there is a salient discrepancy between the human annotation and existing training data that is widely used for training simplification models. To alleviate this discrepancy, we propose an unsupervised data construction method that distills each simplifying operation into data via different automatic data enhancement measures. The empirical results demonstrate that the resulting dataset SimSim can support models to achieve better performance by performing all operations properly.

Pretrained language models like BERT have achieved good results on NLP tasks, but are impractical on resource-limited devices due to memory footprint. A large fraction of this footprint comes from the input embeddings with large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Existing knowledge distillation methods used for model compression cannot be directly applied to train student models with reduced vocabulary sizes. To this end, we propose a distillation method to align the teacher and student embeddings via mixed-vocabulary training. Our method compresses BERT-LARGE to a task-agnostic model with smaller vocabulary and hidden dimensions, which is an order of magnitude smaller than other distilled BERT models and offers a better size-accuracy trade-off on language understanding benchmarks as well as a practical dialogue task.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of neural keyphrase generation (KPG) works, including the release of several large-scale datasets and a host of new models to tackle them. Model performance on KPG tasks has increased significantly with evolving deep learning research. However, there lacks a comprehensive comparison among different model designs, and a thorough investigation on related factors that may affect a KPG system’s generalization performance. In this empirical study, we aim to fill this gap by providing extensive experimental results and analyzing the most crucial factors impacting the generalizability of KPG models. We hope this study can help clarify some of the uncertainties surrounding the KPG task and facilitate future research on this topic.

Neural network-based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models strongly suffer from the low-diversity problem when it comes to open-domain dialogue generation. As bland and generic utterances usually dominate the frequency distribution in our daily chitchat, avoiding them to generate more interesting responses requires complex data filtering, sampling techniques or modifying the training objective. In this paper, we propose a new perspective to diversify dialogue generation by leveraging non-conversational text. Compared with bilateral conversations, non-conversational text are easier to obtain, more diverse and cover a much broader range of topics. We collect a large-scale non-conversational corpus from multi sources including forum comments, idioms and book snippets. We further present a training paradigm to effectively incorporate these text via iterative back translation. The resulting model is tested on two conversational datasets from different domains and is shown to produce significantly more diverse responses without sacrificing the relevance with context.

An image caption should fluently present the essential information in a given image, including informative, fine-grained entity mentions and the manner in which these entities interact. However, current captioning models are usually trained to generate captions that only contain common object names, thus falling short on an important “informativeness” dimension. We present a mechanism for integrating image information together with fine-grained labels (assumed to be generated by some upstream models) into a caption that describes the image in a fluent and informative manner. We introduce a multimodal, multi-encoder model based on Transformer that ingests both image features and multiple sources of entity labels. We demonstrate that we can learn to control the appearance of these entity labels in the output, resulting in captions that are both fluent and informative.

Sentence simplification aims to reduce the complexity of a sentence while retaining its original meaning. Current models for sentence simplification adopted ideas from machine translation studies and implicitly learned simplification mapping rules from normal-simple sentence pairs. In this paper, we explore a novel model based on a multi-layer and multi-head attention architecture and we propose two innovative approaches to integrate the Simple PPDB (A Paraphrase Database for Simplification), an external paraphrase knowledge base for simplification that covers a wide range of real-world simplification rules. The experiments show that the integration provides two major benefits: (1) the integrated model outperforms multiple state-of-the-art baseline models for sentence simplification in the literature (2) through analysis of the rule utilization, the model seeks to select more accurate simplification rules. The code and models used in the paper are available at https://github.com/Sanqiang/text_simplification.

Keyphrase provides highly-summative information that can be effectively used for understanding, organizing and retrieving text content. Though previous studies have provided many workable solutions for automated keyphrase extraction, they commonly divided the to-be-summarized content into multiple text chunks, then ranked and selected the most meaningful ones. These approaches could neither identify keyphrases that do not appear in the text, nor capture the real semantic meaning behind the text. We propose a generative model for keyphrase prediction with an encoder-decoder framework, which can effectively overcome the above drawbacks. We name it as deep keyphrase generation since it attempts to capture the deep semantic meaning of the content with a deep learning method. Empirical analysis on six datasets demonstrates that our proposed model not only achieves a significant performance boost on extracting keyphrases that appear in the source text, but also can generate absent keyphrases based on the semantic meaning of the text. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/memray/seq2seq-keyphrase.

Assigning a standard ICD-9-CM code to disease symptoms in medical texts is an important task in the medical domain. Automating this process could greatly reduce the costs. However, the effectiveness of an automatic ICD-9-CM code classifier faces a serious problem, which can be triggered by unbalanced training data. Frequent diseases often have more training data, which helps its classification to perform better than that of an infrequent disease. However, a disease’s frequency does not necessarily reflect its importance. To resolve this training data shortage problem, we propose to strategically draw data from PubMed to enrich the training data when there is such need. We validate our method on the CMC dataset, and the evaluation results indicate that our method can significantly improve the code assignment classifiers’ performance at the macro-averaging level.