Zheng Wen


2020

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Improving Adversarial Text Generation by Modeling the Distant Future
Ruiyi Zhang | Changyou Chen | Zhe Gan | Wenlin Wang | Dinghan Shen | Guoyin Wang | Zheng Wen | Lawrence Carin
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Auto-regressive text generation models usually focus on local fluency, and may cause inconsistent semantic meaning in long text generation. Further, automatically generating words with similar semantics is challenging, and hand-crafted linguistic rules are difficult to apply. We consider a text planning scheme and present a model-based imitation-learning approach to alleviate the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we propose a novel guider network to focus on the generative process over a longer horizon, which can assist next-word prediction and provide intermediate rewards for generator optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method leads to improved performance.