Wentao Wang


2020

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Data-to-Text Generation with Style Imitation
Shuai Lin | Wentao Wang | Zichao Yang | Xiaodan Liang | Frank F. Xu | Eric Xing | Zhiting Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Recent neural approaches to data-to-text generation have mostly focused on improving content fidelity while lacking explicit control over writing styles (e.g., sentence structures, word choices). More traditional systems use templates to determine the realization of text. Yet manual or automatic construction of high-quality templates is difficult, and a template acting as hard constraints could harm content fidelity when it does not match the record perfectly. We study a new way of stylistic control by using existing sentences as “soft” templates. That is, a model learns to imitate the writing style of any given exemplar sentence, with automatic adaptions to faithfully describe the record. The problem is challenging due to the lack of parallel data. We develop a neural approach that includes a hybrid attention-copy mechanism, learns with weak supervisions, and is enhanced with a new content coverage constraint. We conduct experiments in restaurants and sports domains. Results show our approach achieves stronger performance than a range of comparison methods. Our approach balances well between content fidelity and style control given exemplars that match the records to varying degrees.

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Mitigating Gender Bias for Neural Dialogue Generation with Adversarial Learning
Haochen Liu | Wentao Wang | Yiqi Wang | Hui Liu | Zitao Liu | Jiliang Tang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Dialogue systems play an increasingly important role in various aspects of our daily life. It is evident from recent research that dialogue systems trained on human conversation data are biased. In particular, they can produce responses that reflect people’s gender prejudice. Many debiasing methods have been developed for various NLP tasks, such as word embedding. However, they are not directly applicable to dialogue systems because they are likely to force dialogue models to generate similar responses for different genders. This greatly degrades the diversity of the generated responses and immensely hurts the performance of the dialogue models. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial learning framework Debiased-Chat to train dialogue models free from gender bias while keeping their performance. Extensive experiments on two real-world conversation datasets show that our framework significantly reduces gender bias in dialogue models while maintaining the response quality.

2019

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Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation
Zhiting Hu | Haoran Shi | Bowen Tan | Wentao Wang | Zichao Yang | Tiancheng Zhao | Junxian He | Lianhui Qin | Di Wang | Xuezhe Ma | Zhengzhong Liu | Xiaodan Liang | Wanrong Zhu | Devendra Sachan | Eric Xing
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We introduce Texar, an open-source toolkit aiming to support the broad set of text generation tasks that transform any inputs into natural language, such as machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and so forth. With the design goals of modularity, versatility, and extensibility in mind, Texar extracts common patterns underlying the diverse tasks and methodologies, creates a library of highly reusable modules and functionalities, and allows arbitrary model architectures and algorithmic paradigms. In Texar, model architecture, inference, and learning processes are properly decomposed. Modules at a high concept level can be freely assembled or plugged in/swapped out. Texar is thus particularly suitable for researchers and practitioners to do fast prototyping and experimentation. The versatile toolkit also fosters technique sharing across different text generation tasks. Texar supports both TensorFlow and PyTorch, and is released under Apache License 2.0 at https://www.texar.io.