Gavriel Habib


2019

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Evaluating Text GANs as Language Models
Guy Tevet | Gavriel Habib | Vered Shwartz | Jonathan Berant
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a promising approach for text generation that, unlike traditional language models (LM), does not suffer from the problem of “exposure bias”. However, A major hurdle for understanding the potential of GANs for text generation is the lack of a clear evaluation metric. In this work, we propose to approximate the distribution of text generated by a GAN, which permits evaluating them with traditional probability-based LM metrics. We apply our approximation procedure on several GAN-based models and show that they currently perform substantially worse than state-of-the-art LMs. Our evaluation procedure promotes better understanding of the relation between GANs and LMs, and can accelerate progress in GAN-based text generation.