Pascal Poupart


2018

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Variational Attention for Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Hareesh Bahuleyan | Lili Mou | Olga Vechtomova | Pascal Poupart
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The variational encoder-decoder (VED) encodes source information as a set of random variables using a neural network, which in turn is decoded into target data using another neural network. In natural language processing, sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models typically serve as encoder-decoder networks. When combined with a traditional (deterministic) attention mechanism, the variational latent space may be bypassed by the attention model, and thus becomes ineffective. In this paper, we propose a variational attention mechanism for VED, where the attention vector is also modeled as Gaussian distributed random variables. Results on two experiments show that, without loss of quality, our proposed method alleviates the bypassing phenomenon as it increases the diversity of generated sentences.

2017

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Deep Active Learning for Dialogue Generation
Nabiha Asghar | Pascal Poupart | Xin Jiang | Hang Li
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017)

We propose an online, end-to-end, neural generative conversational model for open-domain dialogue. It is trained using a unique combination of offline two-phase supervised learning and online human-in-the-loop active learning. While most existing research proposes offline supervision or hand-crafted reward functions for online reinforcement, we devise a novel interactive learning mechanism based on hamming-diverse beam search for response generation and one-character user-feedback at each step. Experiments show that our model inherently promotes the generation of semantically relevant and interesting responses, and can be used to train agents with customized personas, moods and conversational styles.

2016

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Overfitting at SemEval-2016 Task 3: Detecting Semantically Similar Questions in Community Question Answering Forums with Word Embeddings
Hujie Wang | Pascal Poupart
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2007

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Generating Lexical Analogies Using Dependency Relations
Andy Chiu | Pascal Poupart | Chrysanne DiMarco
Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL)

2005

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Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Observations for Dialogue Management
Jason D. Williams | Pascal Poupart | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue