Papers by Dinghan Shen
Learning Context-Sensitive Convolutional Filters for Text Processing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a popular building block for natural language processing . despite their success, most existing CNN models share the same learned set of filters for all input sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a meta network to learn context-sensitive convolutional filters for text processing by using a bidirectional filter generation mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard and attention-based CNN models on four different tasks. |
HiddenCut: Simple Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding with Better Generalizability (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using data augmentation to fine-tune pre-trained models with task-specific data has been shown to be ineffective and redundant during fine-timing. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation technique to regularize pre-trained models and encourage them to learn more generalizable features by dropping contiguous spans during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the GLUE benchmark and consistently exhibits superior generalization performances on out-of distribution and challenging counterexamples. |
Topic-Guided Variational Auto-Encoder for Text Generation (N19-1)
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Wenlin Wang, Zhe Gan, Hongteng Xu, Ruiyi Zhang, Guoyin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Changyou Chen, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms its competitors on both unconditional and conditional text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-guided variational auto-encoder model for text generation that specifies a Gaussian mixture model and a neural topic module to generate sentences under the topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing variational auto-encoders on unconditional and conditional text generation, and can generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics. |
Joint Embedding of Words and Labels for Text Classification (P18-1)
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Guoyin Wang, Chunyuan Li, Wenlin Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Dinghan Shen, Xinyuan Zhang, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text classification use word embeddings to capture semantic regularities between words. |
| Approach: | They propose to view text classification as a label-word joint embedding problem . they use a framework that measures compatibility between text sequences and labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on large text datasets. |
NASH: Toward End-to-End Neural Architecture for Generative Semantic Hashing (P18-1)
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Dinghan Shen, Qinliang Su, Paidamoyo Chapfuwa, Wenlin Wang, Guoyin Wang, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fast similarity search require two-stage training and the binary constraints are handled ad-hoc. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural architecture for semantic hashing where binary hash codes are treated as Bernoulli latent variables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on unsupervised and supervised scenarios on three public datasets. |
Improved Semantic-Aware Network Embedding with Fine-Grained Word Alignment (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to network embeddings focus on one-hot representations of vertices, which are not able to capture relationships between verti- ces. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate semantic features into network embeddings by matching important words between text sequences for all pairs of vertices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art embedding methods on three real-world benchmarks for downstream tasks including link prediction and multi-label vertex classification. |
Syntax-Infused Variational Autoencoder for Text Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the generative superiority of SIVAE on both reconstruction and targeted syntactic evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-infused variational autoencoder that integrates sentences with their syntactic trees to improve the grammar of generated sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the grammar of generated sentences by integrating sentences with syntactic trees. |
Improving Disentangled Text Representation Learning with Information-Theoretic Guidance (2020.acl-main)
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Pengyu Cheng, Martin Renqiang Min, Dinghan Shen, Christopher Malon, Yizhe Zhang, Yitong Li, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Disentangled representation learning (DRL) maps different aspects of data into distinct and independent low-dimensional latent vector spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that manifests disentangled representations of text without supervision on semantics by minimizing the upper bound between style and content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on conditional text generation and text-style transfer tasks and improves style preservation. |
Baseline Needs More Love: On Simple Word-Embedding-Based Models and Associated Pooling Mechanisms (P18-1)
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Dinghan Shen, Guoyin Wang, Wenlin Wang, Martin Renqiang Min, Qinliang Su, Yizhe Zhang, Chunyuan Li, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing deep learning architectures to model compositionality in text sequences require a large number of parameters and expensive computations. |
| Approach: | They propose two additional pooling strategies over word embeddings for improved interpretability and hierarchical pooling for spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pooling strategies improve interpretability and preserve spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. |
Generative Semantic Hashing Enhanced via Boltzmann Machines (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generative semantic hashing assume a factorized posterior distribution, enforcing independence among the bits of hash codes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Boltzmann machine distribution as the variational posterior to introduce correlations among the bits of hash codes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve significant performance gains by combining two hash codes. |
Learning Compressed Sentence Representations for On-Device Text Processing (P19-1)
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Dinghan Shen, Pengyu Cheng, Dhanasekar Sundararaman, Xinyuan Zhang, Qian Yang, Meng Tang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning sentence embeddings assume they are continuous and real-valued. |
| Approach: | They propose four different strategies to transform continuous and generic sentence embeddings into a binarized form while preserving their rich semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce storage requirements by over 98% and improve performance on downstream tasks. |
Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianqiao Li, Chunyuan Li, Guoyin Wang, Hao Fu, Yuhchen Lin, Liqun Chen, Yizhe Zhang, Chenyang Tao, Ruiyi Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Qian Yang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to train models, but during testing, the model is conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use optimal transport to match the sequences generated in MLE and test modes to reduce exposure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks. |
Document Hashing with Mixture-Prior Generative Models (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative hashing methods only consider the use of simple priors, which limits them to further improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Gaussian and Bernoulli priors to generate hashing codes . they propose to cast a Gausssian latent representation into binary code . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing methods on a benchmark dataset using Gaussian and Bernoulli priors. |
Improving Textual Network Embedding with Global Attention via Optimal Transport (P19-1)
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Liqun Chen, Guoyin Wang, Chenyang Tao, Dinghan Shen, Pengyu Cheng, Xinyuan Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning textual network embeddings are noisy and sparse. |
| Approach: | They propose to use text-based attention parsing to learn context-aware network embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in a number of domains. |
Improving Adversarial Text Generation by Modeling the Distant Future (2020.acl-main)
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Ruiyi Zhang, Changyou Chen, Zhe Gan, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Guoyin Wang, Zheng Wen, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown excellent performance on text generation tasks by combining reinforcement learning (RL) and generative models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based imitation-learning approach to improve text generation performance by focusing on a long horizon. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a number of text-generation tasks and provides intermediate rewards for generator optimization. |
Towards Generating Long and Coherent Text with Multi-Level Latent Variable Models (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have received much attention as an end-to-end architecture for text generation with latent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage several multi-level structures to learn a variational autoencoder model for generating long, and coherent text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces more coherent and less repetitive long text compared to baselines and mitigates posterior collapse issue. |
An End-to-End Generative Architecture for Paraphrase Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating paraphrases with linguistic knowledge are often domain specific and hard to scale, or yield inferior results. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end conditional generative architecture for generating paraphrases via adversarial training which does not depend on extra linguistic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on automatic metrics and human evaluations on four public datasets. |